I was fortunate enough to attend SXSW last week, and if you’ve never been, I highly recommend it. Not only is it one of the greatest annual gatherings of leading thinkers in digital, music, and film, it’s a concentrated learning experience at all levels. With so many intriguing individuals and genius ideas, I wanted to cram in as much as I could. Each second of my day was booked with sessions on a wide variety of topics, but here, in no particular order, are a few of my notes from areas that resonated with me. Some are reminders of the importance of things I’m doing now, and some are actionable notes for things I will be implementing into my personal and professional lifestyle this year.
Embrace creativity and let it out to play. Promote creative chaos in your workspace. Put stuff up on the wall. Get messy with your space. Keep your company or the area you own in a constant state of iteration. Solicit feedback constantly. Embrace failure and learn by failing. Think like a designer and solve problems with design thinking. Kill every meeting possible and replace it with a space, workflow, and team dynamic of fail and fix. Be wary of anyone who debates the importance of visual communication and true idea distillation within all facets of a particular deliverable.
It’s okay to fail. Be ok with failing on social. Many people over-curate their posts for fear of judgment. Screw it! We don’t curate our conversations when we talk with people, so try to lessen this by 60% online. It’s ok to mess up. Just get out there and be a human.
Be there for your customers. Rescue them. Brands must ensure they have multi-channel support—including social. Let your customers decide their channel of preference; it’s up to you to always be up on that channel. Immediacy and personalization, no matter the channel, is the key to customer loyalty. And, when things don’t go right, it’s time for you to step in and rescue your customer. That can be a powerful opportunity for you to turn a detractor into an advocate. Acknowledge, empathize, fix it for the next customer, and create a positive ‘wow’ moment for your current customer. It’s quite fun.
Views are good, but sharing is better. Real-time marketing is all about timing and relevance, but it’s still very hard to execute. For real time marketing and traditional, digital marketing, focus on a 10% increase in sharing and not views. You can buy views, but shares are the engagement metric to watch. Fail a lot. Form a team that can rapidly innovate, create, and deploy. Drop the word ‘viral’ from your vocabulary, focus on 10% more increments…..then 10% more. Keep on a consistent path of constant iteration. Understand the underlying psychology of why people talk and share in the first place. The metrics are the scores in your game. Play the game.
Keep it simple, stupid! Getting people’s attention may be as easy as a street chalk artist, 3d printers, or hitting the street for test-drives of your product. I cannot wait till I get my Boosted board! It even goes up hills….WHAT? QR codes are alive and kicking, especially with millennials; get creative with them though. Sometimes telling people that you are out of cards and asking them to shoot your card with their phone separates you from the stack. It causes them to see your card 20-40 more times during the day. The visual impressions will be immense as the individual parses through their photos from the day.
Connection can be contagious. Never underestimate the power of personal connection; private interaction with the right influencers is a good idea and a valuable spend of your time. Don’t always look for the 1 to many play. Be mindful of this and get more at a human level in the way you engage this year. Remember that only 7% of word of mouth is online, according to Wharton genius Jonah Berger. The rest is offline. Most interactions are face-to-face, and face-to-face is contagious. Most people and companies you know are focused on the digital sphere, but real word-of-mouth has not changed.
Here’s the thing: so many of the mundane tasks you deal with every day can be automated. By automating your life, personal and professional, you can eliminate a number of the little things that keep you busy, crazy, and generally stretched thin. Wake up to the fact that making decisions creates decision fatigue and carries decision costs throughout your day – even just thinking about it costs you. Try to reduce yourself to zero when it comes to basic decisions in the day. Outsource as much as you possibly can; seek help with oDesk, Elance, fiverr, Fancy Hands, zirtual, or TaskRabbit.
Know the power of ‘No.’ The art of the unplug is not actually unplugging, it’s just having an Essentialist mindset on what to give your willpower to. Learn the power of no. Use it well.
Just get it over with. Taking the things you’d rather not do, but have to do, and doing them first thing in the morning will help your productivity and your success.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg, but are the things that really stuck out to me, the ones I want to use myself! Did you go to SXSW? What ideas stuck with you? Please share!
