When you look at talk from interactive, you can’t help but be hit by the big “wow” from the year, whatever it might be. 2007 and 2008 were the years of Twitter. 2009 saw the beginning of location-based tools, and this year, it was the big explosion. The two top dogs in the category are Foursquare and Gowalla, but the success of these tools has driven companies like Yelp and Twitter to add location to their basic functionality. PepsiCo got its arms around location before the conference even began, partnering with Foursquare for a number of functions, including the amazing PepsiCo Zeitgeist. Social networking is still rolling strong, and the Twitter stream was so heavy that it was nearly impossible to keep up. And beyond that, there are social networking tools and services, like MyTown, Whrrl, Spotify, and MOG,  that got a lot of attention, both positive and negative.

But for Pepsi, there was other important buzz as well: The Pepsi Refresh Project. As a SXSW ambassador for Pepsi, I could rarely go anywhere without people commenting on or asking me about Refresh. For me, it felt great telling people about the project and getting their reactions, which were unanimously positive. Giving people the chance to engage in a live vote at SXSW for a big grant ($50k) really highlighted what Refresh has set out to accomplish, and garnered an immense amount of good will. Much as with our first year, Pepsi received a lot of positive press on the way they interact with the vibe at SXSW. People were excited about the way we were getting involved and giving back, by empowering real people instead of just generic charity donations, and by using social media to fuel the projects that people really care about. In reality, a lot of this mimics what we saw with the Geo-location tools: Make it local, and you make it matter.

But all social media tools and projects aside, the biggest win for Pepsi is being there in the first place. By sitting on the forefront of the social media conferences that are driving innovation, Pepsi is creating a public image of embracing the social experience. Being at SXSW puts them at the edge of the buzz, ready to capitalize on the newest trends and technology. Social media is the big risk, the big question mark of the moment, but it’s a question that companies cannot afford to get wrong. Both the sponsorship and the SXSW Experience, of which I was happy to be a part, are important parts of our goals for tackling the social tiger, and I can’t help but think it would only be better by expanding it, having more presence, more feet on the ground. I can attest that it’s often more difficult than you would initially imagine to experience the festival and find time to share it all, and there is so much to see, digest, and share that it could only be a net positive to see more people making the trip.

PepsiCo has begun the process of building itself as a strong social brand. There is more work to be done to show the world that we are here to stay, but the work is already going on. By continuing to create strong social partnerships and encouraging social network participation both among our peers and with our consumers, we can participate and share the passions that drive all of us, and make both Pepsi and the world a better place.

Unfortunately, despite the increasing flow of data, many companies are still processing and absorbing data in the same way, as a continuous stream of cells in an Excel, or a list of fields in a data report, or as a few slides in a PowerPoint presentation. While all of these have a solid place inside of business, the greater flow of data either washes over and away, or is consumed inefficiently and slowly, creating wasted time and opportunity.

At the panel “Interactive Infographics”, four companies demonstrated the way that infographics were being used today, from the New York Times, to CNN, to local and federal government, and even to business. Eric Rodenbock mentioned in the sessions that brands have yet to really harness the power of these. This sparked off a couple thoughts in my head regarding the two ways that I feel these tools can benefit not just the Pepsi business, but all businesses in general.

Branding

Pepsi is not unfamiliar with interactive infographics. In fact, SXSW showcases one of the most ambitious infographics that we do: the PepsiCo Zeitgeist. A twitter visualization on steroids, the Zeitgeist provides information about parties, lines, the SXSW buzz, where people are eating and drinking, etc. It is fast and informative. And while this is a great way to provide a subtle soapbox for all the work we do at the conference, it is important to see that we can extend these kind of tools beyond SXSW. Infographics that show Pepsi pour locations (these are restaurants and shops that serve Pepsi, for those not familiar), locations and tweets from events hosted or sponsored by Pepsi, tweets about our products, and feeds from our official tweeting outlets could all be streamed in unified places, allowing quick access to a snapshot of how our brand fits into culture at any given moment. These kind of showcases would also give us the ability to scrub this data on the backend, and create trends that allow us to target individual areas and events with promotions and brand-building activities. All of this information can really be pushed for any business to truly transform a brand.

Business
Every day, businesses throw or lock away valuable data. Financial spreadsheets are deleted, trending data for a year is flushed or pushed into a back file somewhere, and have to be dug up when they are attempting to reconcile or apply the data. It seems that there would be a great deal of value in creating infographic templates to allow this data to be broken into images that could be easily consumed and reused. Trending data, financial results, usage statistics, and even marketing campaign information would be prime targets for living on as a continuously evolving infographic. These sort of “dashboard” items, which obscure the data but still provide granular levels of detail, are perfect for interfacing with nearly all levels of audience, from high level executives to trenched analysts. Information waste is a significant issue for businesses, and there are few studies available yet to determine what the loss of access to data is really costing us. Obviously, we can all likely come up with anecdotal evidence regarding a time when missing or deprecated data cost us time or money in making a decision or moving forward with a winning idea. Creating and encouraging interactive infographics will help your business take your data to the next level, to spot trends quickly, to link data that might have previously seemed unrelated in new ways to create fresh perspectives on your markets. Businesses have an opportunity to create competitive advantage by exploring newer and faster ways to process the constant flow of data that is available to them.

I certainly encourage businesses to explore the possibility of interactive infographics both for their internal and external business. Thanks to all the panelists for really pinpointing the importance of how we interact with data in this day and age.

Ben Fry – http://www.benfry.com/

Casey Caplowe – http://www.good.is/community/casey

Eric Rodenbeck – http://stamen.com/studio/eric

Shan Carter – http://shancarter.com/

Dynamic speaking is not an easy task. It takes experience and time to learn how to engage and audience. It also takes the right environment. Being an authoritative expert in any given subject, or having written one or more books, does not automatically give you the ability to effectively share that knowledge in front of the audience. Believe me, it’s a mistake to think that the subject content alone will ever be enough to keep an audience interested. Here’s a rundown of the things that I think both SXSW and the presenters in general could have done better.

1. Setup Setup Setup

SXSW panels are set up much like news conference tables. A long table, featuring a number of panelists. The difference is, the folks in the audience are not journalists, they aren’t paid to listen to you or be interested. And in many of these formats the SXSW is emulating, the people behind the table have been exposed to a certain amount of public speaking and engagement. Or are mercifully short. I can honestly say that there is no personal bias in the fact that I preferred the setup used for interviews in the Pepsi Podcast Playground. High stools, no tables. A brief and prepared moderator. It created an open atmosphere, and felt more informal. The panelist felt like they could be free to express themselves with body language, which is an important part of speaking dynamically, but which tables largely made impossible.

Additionally, many workshops and talks had either a single presenter, or presenters who presented at a podium one at a time, with no interaction. There are a few formats that would have fit this better, from an empty stage with a single stool that allowed the presenter to walk and engage, to a series of stool chairs and notebook podiums connected to a KVM to allow them to present while maintaining the open feeling. I would recommend that SXSW rethink some of the ways it does panels, and perhaps realize that investment in some new formatting would be healthy for the festival in the long run.

2. Interactive Abhors An Informational Slide

And not just informational slides. But slides laden with text, or with Excel graphics, or with Microsoft standard clipart. And pretty much any slide that isn’t some combination of a monkey playing with a cat. In this day and age, there is almost nothing that needs to be said that can’t be said with either an infographic, or directly with your mouth. If you find that you’re reading a lot off the slides, you may either need significant more practice giving the speech to real friends and colleague or to significantly re-examine your level of expertise.

If you don’t feel as though you are an effective speaker, you can practice your speech with friends, family, or colleagues. The key to becoming an effective speaker is to learn the material cold, so you can focus on the presentation without thinking. Anecdotes are always wonderful, but avoid too many jokes unless you are confident of your humor. A bum joke can turn a room cold.

If you feel you are dynamic but simply a bit short on the useful parts of a topic, engage leaders and find out their opinion! Don’t let the chance to give an exciting presentation or panel go by the wayside. Get the facts you need to reach your goal. But make sure they are true, because people care about facts.

3. Nobody Cares About Facts

That is, if your job is to give an opinion. Your Panel, New VisualJava C+-Sharp Is The Best FrameWork In The Universe: A Truthiness Presentation, probably isn’t going to be received as well if the title isn’t actually being ironic. When you attempt to present your opinion as facts, you tend to create a situation where you simply accept what you are presenting as a foregone conclusion, rather than a persuasive argument. When you lose site of a the need for a persuasive argument, you lose sight of the need to engage your audience.

4. Your Body Is A Wonderland, and a Pretty Good Presentation Tool

While a fantastic slideshow and plentiful facts can be an excellent set of tools for a presentation, never underestimate the value of simple body language in the mix. Moving amongst the crowd, ranging the stage, using your body to interact with the presentation or equipment, all of these things can bring a presentation up to the next level. And while we’re on the subject, don’t be afraid to use your audiences bodies in your presentation as well. Make them stand up, give them the mic, ask them questions, and get asked in return. You are the conductor of your presentation, and psychology studies have shown that crowds tend to view good presenters as not only experts, but as authority figures. Use that to your advantage to create a presentation that is memorable.

5. Enjoy The Silence, but On Your Own Time

Things happen. Yes, you’ll have lapses in wi-fi coverage, and your computer will go down, or you’ll have disruptions from time to time. This is the nature of presentation. When it does occur, find something to fill the space, because silence is about as interesting as…well, silence. Inevitably, the worst case will happen, your presentation will crash, and you will be on your own. If you know your material cold, this should be no problem, but at the same time, it is important to deflect and minimize the importance of the problems you experience. Don’t wait silently while the wi-fi reconnects. Don’t fumble too long getting your presentation up and running again. Just pick it up and keep going. Make a joke, lighten the mood, given people a reason to stick with you.

Obviously, the art of becoming a dynamic speaker isn’t instantaneously acquired. It takes a lot of bad presentations, speeches, or panels to get to good, and a lot of good to get to great. Take local opportunities to deliver to whomever will listen. But remember, SXSW is not the right venue for your first time speaking gig, no matter your expertise. Delivering a disappointing presentation or panel locally, and it’s likely soon to be forgotten. But give a bad interview with a social media CEO, and it will live on the Twitterverse forever.

I’ve met a lot of interesting people at the parties and events that have gone on. If you’re new to SXSW, don’t neglect the social aspect, as it gives you the opportunity to create partnerships, make friends, find future employees, or even future employers. Ideas and deals are driving around the dinner table and over a pint, and SXSW offers some of the best opportunities to mingle with the best and brightest of Interactive/Social/Design in the industry.

Thanks to Sharp for the televisions, Cedar Street Courtyard for the amazing venue, and all the attendees for making it an amazing time.

This year, a lot of services are the flavor of the month. The big pushes seem to be applications and services that allow you to self-manage specialized niche markets (like band and financial self-management), services to help push your application into a cloud, services to take advantage of crowdsourcing, and helpers to assist in extending social media with scaling. This seems to be in line with a lot of the tools that are being developed in the community as well. While it would seem like it’s creating clutter, the fact that some of these apps were developed in blind parallel, it can also be a sign of a healthy market.

99designs (http://www.99designs.com) is a company that many folks are familiar with already. Graphic designers have a love/hate relationship with 99designs, mostly depending upon how long they have been in the industry. Much like code of the generation before,99designs is a sign of the commoditization of the common tasks of graphic design. The company allows individuals to describe nearly any kind of item that can be graphically designed, from a magazine add to a flyer, to icons and images for applications, and pushes the workload into the crowd, allowing the process to be crowd sourced. The various images are presented to clients, who can choose the best design, or refine it and submit it again. 99designs works as a middle man, collecting payment up front so that the entire client-designer relationship is set in stone before the process starts. The obvious negative is that this work drives down the overall value of repetitive graphic design work.

Some of the work being done is very good, from a graphic design skill side. Sites like this will draw in individuals and companies who might not have used graphic designers for their projects to begin with, and will surely cannibalize lower and mid-tier graphic design projects. However, most good freelance graphic designers are part artists, part brand management, part consulting firm. Beyond a pretty picture, they are able to get into the “brain of the brand”, and take time to figure out the product, the message, and the audience with an intimacy that a 99designs style site can’t match. There will always be call for good graphic designers who are interested in more than what’s in a Photoshop window, but designers are right to worry about the value of this part of the skill. It’s not a bad idea to brush up and push your branding and consultancy skills as your real value add.

SocialTalk (http://www.syncapse.com/#socialTALK)  is an application by Syncapse that helps brands to manage their social presence across multiple communities, including Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and other social platforms. As a large company trying to grasp the social tiger, the effort of keeping up with streams that can be significantly larger than your everyday blogger can be a challenge. As we attempt to address social on it’s own terms, it is important to us to maintain an authentic voice, to always leave our consumer with the sense that a real person is talking back at them, and not a placeholder. Tools that can help us to filter, manipulate, sort, and work with our stream in innovate and easy ways are attractive services. From the demos that I have seen, SocialTalk is a well developed product that, used correctly, could help make the process of managing and diving into social media an easier sell.

Hopefully, this sector will continue to grow and push innovation to allow these tools to grow dynamically with the needs of big business, so we can culivate and maintain that real voice in the way we communicate with our consumers and partners.

What was your favorite application, service, or gear from the SXSWi 2010 Interactive + Film Trade Show?

Mark and Paul are both very animated individuals, so it helped to really move the panel and make it exciting and dynamic. The pair used demonstration, interaction, and audience participation to introduce a series of mental techniques that we could take with us and start putting to use immediately. My co-blogger David Stein did a good job of describing the various techniques in his blog about this panel here, so I won’t go into them specifically, but I would like to talk about some of the basics and how they affected me.

I’m a very visual person. I am pretty effective at constructing an image in my head and holding it and rotating it and seeing it from all sides. I use this technique a lot with maps, because I have absolutely no sense of direction. So instead of knowing that I’m going north, I’m constantly rotating a map in my head to understand where I am and where I need to go. Suffice to say, this can be a bit amusing (I’m sure my wife would use “annoying”) when I get distracted and can’t get the image back.  I was delighted when most of the techniques Mark and Paul introduced incorporated heavy visualization elements, turning information into picture stories that could easily be recalled later.

The basics of a lot of the techniques were fairly simple. It involved a lot of creating pictures and assigning them to specific things, building a “picture vocabulary” in your mind. The trick to this, however, is that the pictures aren’t actually supposed to be random. Using these techniques is like learning a new language, but you’re making up the language as you go. That means that images you use in your memory language are supposed to be consistent, and then you build upon that consistent image to make each memory unique. When you look at any instance of a thing, a word, a number, or a person, the base image is supposed to be the same. Obviously, building this kind of vocabulary is time consuming, but like a language, you eventually establish a level of fluency that makes it instinctual and natural, but instead of a person, you’re communicating with your long-term memory.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you have some friends named Jessica. In your mind, you choose to associate the name “Jessica” with a porcelain doll. Every Jessica you meet, when they introduce themselves, will bring to mind that same porcelain doll image. However, one of your Jessica’s might be the party type, and so when you see that Jessica, you imagine that doll with a party hat, mardi gras beads, stiletto heels, or holding a whiskey sour. Your other friend Jessica might be more serious, so you imagine that doll in a business suit, or a nun’s habit, or anything else you associate with this Jessica. You might also exaggerate the dolls features to help remember faces, or change hair colors or styles on it, but the image of a doll would remain the same for every new Jessica you meet.

Putting it into practice after the panel, I have to say that I did see some immediate benefit, and have been able to remember more about the panel, names, and faces of individuals than I would have otherwise. Building the visual vocabulary is a long process, but in the end, the ability to absorb and recall more real data than I ever imagined will be worth the effort.

And for those of you who were there:

ball point pen, lightbulb, christmas tree, book, gorilla, beer, flux capacitor, trumpet, Tardis, and marbles…GOOD DAY SIR.

SXSW is something of a double homecoming for me. The last time I attended SXSW, it was as a volunteer, stage managing for music acts at a bar downtown. The experience of building relationships with bands and their managers all over the world was one that stuck with me, and gave me a new perspective on dealing with people from various cultures.

This time, I’m getting to experience the conference from end-to-end from an attendee standpoint, so I can share that experience with you. Understandably, it might be difficult on the surface to see the value of reading a bunch of Pepsi employees talking about panels and parties and movies and music. But the true value of the SXSW experience is that it takes place outside of the walls. It is a moment in which we can capture the ideas and passion that are driving the creative to transform markets and create new markets. In the end, these are the things that are going to allow Pepsi to move our business into the future, and hopefully more adeptly than our competitors. My hope is to help capture some of that, as well as the fun and excitement of the event itself, and share it.

Cheers from SXSW.