Seven Mandatory Things To Do At SXSWi

I recently saw an infographic about 10 "awesome" things you should do at SXSWi and felt it was lacking several key ingredients of not only the conference but the Austin experience (side note: celebrity stalking is done much easier in LA and NYC with actual celebrities). With that, I present to you the 7 mandatory things you must do at SXSWi. And yes, all of them are legitimately worth doing.

1. Learn from worthy sessions

I was a bit surprised to see that the first reason for going to SXSWi on the infographic wasn't about learning. Even those of us who troll the internet all day and are on top of the latest shiny object can't know everything, every start up and every technology that is coming down the pike. Even in the world of digital, while it's great to be a specialist, there are experts on subjects that you can learn from. Study the panels, presentations and sessions before going and pick those that are of interest to your company and/or clients. Pro tip: Some people re-hash the same presentations over and over again at conferences, so if you're conflicted between two sessions try searching the titles and speakers first; you may find that this is just repackaged material.

2. Network like crazy

There are roughly three thousand people descending onto Austin and needless to say this is the ultimate networking opportunity, whether it's to meet agency types, brands, recruiters, start ups, journalists and freelancers. There are a plethora of people so don't forget your business cards, because you're going to need them. And don't play the "I need to meet [insert popular Twitterer here]!" because chances are you're going to have a very meaningless exchange with them. Sure, it's nice to appear in the party Flickr albums with them, but realistically it's not going to help your career.

3. Talk to Saul Colt

Saul is throwing one of the biggest parties at SXSW, but that's not why you should meet him. "The Smartest Man in the World", aka the "Mayor of Twitter" and Graduate of the Handsome Boy Modeling School is one hell of a word of mouth marketer. Forget the loud duds, Saul's the real deal and should be someone you connect with. And unlike a lot of the big talkers and "celebrities" in the social media world, Saul actually gets his hands dirty and does the work (as him about his SXSW guerilla marketing stories and tips!).

4. Buy a Beer

There is a ton of free booze at SXSW. And that's great if you're in college, but the local bars that aren't giving away free stuff because they're sponsored by startups and agencies need your dollars too. This is the town's Superbowl, and ignoring them because you want to save two bucks (Yes, the beers in Austin aren't priced like they are in major markets) is insane. Go local and support these pubs.

5. Take a Walk Down SoCo

Speaking of going local, just up the road from the conference center and newer downtown area, across the river on South Congress (SoCo) is the "cooler" part of Austin. Take a walk down Congress and enjoy some vintage clothes shopping, food trucks, restaurants, artisan shops and a lot of what makes Austin weird (but cool). Also, if you're planning on getting a tattoo from Award-winning South Side Tattoo it's best to schedule in advance as they're usually booked.

6. Go To Bed Early

This isn't me being your Dad, it's you maximizing your time in Austin. Nothing good ever happens after midnight, especially after an afternoon, dinner, and evening of free booze. You'll regret that last drink or taco truck enchilada the next morning -- TRUST ME.

7. Tip Your PediCabs

Sure they might be sponsored, sure they might be hipsters, and sure they might not get you there as fast as a car ride, but the hard working women and men of the pedicab crew deserve a tip. They're a treasure trove of information about the area and can tell you where to check out to avoid the crowds and are part of what makes the town cool, so don't be cheap on 'em.

BONUS: If you're interested in making the  most of Austin, be sure to tweet at and meet Spike Jones. He might even give you a copy of his book about word of mouth marketing!

There you have it -- seven (ok, eight) solid things to do at SXSW that will leave you a more enriched person and your company better off having sent you. Any others to add that I missed? Leave 'em in the comments.

5 Tips for Running A Successful Agency

I was asked a great question by Lauren Wire on Twitter last night. She asked

What type of agency did you like working in most? You like running your one now?

And normally I would respond quickly but in this case it's a terrific opportunity to put more text than what fits into 140 characters to answer. Plus, I'm hoping others can relate or at least gain some knowledge from my experience.

While I'm a marketer at heart, I've been dealing with immense change in the communications and marketing field for the past 15 years. My first full time job was as a Website Coordinator at a cancer hospital. At this in-house gig the rules for web marketing were still being written. And later, when W3C standards were being held back by noncompliant browsers, I lead the redesign of major corporate websites. I was working with online communities and running listening programs for clients long before it was cool. And I've been the part of several organizations, including agencies, that claimed to want to go through massive changes in order to adapt to the changing marketing landscape (yes, this is where Large Media got its tag line).

With this, I found it to be unfair to say which type of agency I liked working in the  most. They were both PR firms, both faced different but similar challenges and I've always wanted to have my own business. A large agency can give you opportunities to work on large brands with big budgets, and a smaller firm has more latitude but smaller budgets. Larger agencies tend to have more politics and bureaucracy but global opportunities, and small agencies force you to be ultra-scrappy. Depending on your personality and goals it's really a tough call. My goal was to start up. I was promised it as part of working at a large firm but they failed to fulfill that promise. And while I enjoyed working closely with all levels of staff and clients at a smaller shop, because in my heart I wanted to start up it became a business decision to start my own agency.

The second part of the question is a no-brainer. I abso-freaking-lutely love it. While I'm grateful for the opportunities I had - travel the world, work on the world's largest brands, speak in front of hundreds of marketing professionals regularly, etc - the reality is that sort of lifestyle takes its toll. You don't see a lot of older people working in agencies, and there's a reason for that -- burnout. When I started up I wanted to make sure that my agency would be based on some core principles and that I was creating an agency I would want to work at.

Given all of that, I always turn back to my college learnings so that I'm not leaving any bit of information I've learned out. This lesson was taught while listening to numerous CEOs during college talk about their business. One specifically said that, "if you want to start your own business someday, learn on someone else's dime". By doing so, you're getting paid while also learning their business. And while you're earning your keep, "remember what they did well and what you would never do if it was your business."

And with that, after having done a lot of learning and listening, I present to you 5 tips for running a successful agency:

1. Be Honest.

I put this one first because there's nothing worse than working for someone that isn't honest with employees and clients. It's difficult to maintain respect for your boss when you catch them in lies, and even worse it will cost you business if you lie to a client. Making grandiose statements like "We invented the category!" might sound great in a made for TV movie but in reality your clients will see right through it. I've seen it first hand what happens when you're honest about the state of the business, mistakes or otherwise and it's never a good idea to try and hide or cover up the truth. People talk, clients talk and eventually it will come back to bite you in the rear.

Also, being honest builds trust. When a client asks me what I think of the latest shiny object, I give an honest answer without cheerleading, jumping into jargon or reciting what another person wrote. Remember, a good client respects an agency partner that puts the client's needs first. This may also include turning down assignments or telling the client when you believe they're wrong. Please note this is different than just being a skeptic or cynical jerk.


2. Focus on your clients.

Thanks to social media, you're now able to broadcast like never before. Great, right? Wrong. Your clients should come first, not self promotion. Guess what your client sees when you're off jerking around at conferences? That you're out jerking around at conferences. Same with tweeting, Facebooking and blogging. Oh, and that awesome location based app or trip planning app that seamlessly posts your whereabouts to Facebook? Yeah, that too. There's more value in paying attention to your client's needs than that of the Twittersphere or Digerati.

3. Be smart but don't pretend to know it all.

Let's start with the notion that no one can know everything. Once we agree there it's downright impossible to know every startup, fact or answer all the time. Also, being smart and being savvy politically are two different things. Smart people can invent things; political people can create dependencies and leverage to get their way. It's important to understand that they are not the same thing, as many smart people become flustered by politics in the workplace. This is one of the biggest reasons why agencies have such high turnover -- they create infrastructures that don't reward intellect and ideas but do reward politicians and villainy.

4. Don't over promise.

We all want to please. Hell, we work in one of the highest-staked service industries. Being first, being the loudest and getting things done early is the hallmark of an overachiever; also on that list is failing to account for the amount of work that needs to be done and the dependencies required to make things happen. With that, unless you are the person doing all of the work with a cleared calendar, you should never promise immovable deadlines; those that work in the digital world know what I mean.

Think of it this way: While it's simple enough to race over to GoDaddy or Blogger or Wordpress and slap up a templated site, setting goals, creating a user experience, drafting content, installing plugins and, well, you get the idea, don't happen in a few hours. Add in multiple parties, approvals and revisions and it's a recipe for disaster. Pro tip: Launching on a Monday with a press release on the wire is quite possibly the absolute shittiest thing you can do to your client, designers and developers. Sure, it makes for a great news cycle, but it's not practical or realistic (News flash #2: PR hits rarely drive web traffic, let alone sustained web traffic).

Similar to the example above, don't promise promotions or rewards to your staff and don't seed ideas into a client's head that you aren't sure can happen; it creates disappointment for everybody.

5. Surround yourself with great talent.

This could have gone under point #2, however it's worth noting that while the quarterback gets all of the glory, it takes a great offensive line, wide receivers, running back, defense and special teams to make the team successful. This isn't by accident and there's a huge lesson to be learned by agencies. Hiring people to fill seats versus finding great talent means you're compromising the work, which ultimately is what clients will judge you on.


There you have it. Five things that will help you build a great agency. They all seem simple, but you'd be surprised how the work and clients become compromised once the politics, P&L (profit and loss) sheets, time sheets/billability and other garbage that most agencies face get in the way.

So Close, Yet So Far Away: Foursquare's Super Swarm Sunday Promotion

This week Foursquare announced their new Super Swarm Sunday Superbowl promotion (Well, unofficial as the naming rights cost money) whereby checking in on Superbowl Sunday will get you $5 off at Pizza Hut. A few people on Twitter and Facebook were saying it was a great promotion, but after a few second analysis this falls under the category of "So Close (Yet So Far Away)". Here's why:

After years of struggling to find a way to create something that the majority of the country can identify with (Sorry, but the People magazine and Louis Vitton partnerships et al, while early, were absolutely pointless) -- read as "Obtain users outside of NYC" -- they finally figured out that, beyond lame 'Polcalypses, the Superbowl is the uber sporting event of the year. Kudos to the team there.

They then figured out something everyone does during the Superbowl: Eat.  Yes, people consume so much food and booze that it's almost illegal. Partnering with a pizza place was a great move as well! (See, it's not all Debbie Downer)

Finally, you have to pay for this pizza, and since they already had a partnership with American Express it was the lazy easy logical thing to do.

Sounds like a great promotion, right? Not so fast, my friend.

I literally just posted about Foursquare today and how I'm done using it for a few reasons, one being that there are very few specials near where I live just outside of NYC. So where did this promotion go wrong?

The first mistake is that it's being announced only a few days before the big game. With so many dormant users giving them short notice isn't enough to time to bring them back.

The second piece that makes no sense is that their current user base is predominantly in urban centers, such as New York City and Chicago. I can tell you that when it comes to pizza, the Hut is quite possibly last on the list for New Yorkers to order from.

The final piece is that AmEx just put on one of the best local market campaign ideas ever using Foursquare, and while merchants I spoke with said they saw almost no impact, it sends a mixed message having partnered with quite possibly the most generic pizza chain possible.

Foursquare is trying desperately to prove it serves a purpose and can be the best friend of mass retailers. And while the value proposition of saving money is dead on, their core feature -- the checkin -- is something people just aren't willing to do. Not even for a mediocre pie.

Checking Out of Foursquare

I've been using Foursquare for several years now. For those unaware, it's a location based "game" whereby you use your phone's GPS to "check in" at locations; some are real, like a restaurant, and some are virtual, such as "Snowpocalypse". At first, it was exciting to see all of the early adopters you know from the Twitter- and Blogosphere checking in. A lot of people asked "What's the point?" when you inexplicably whipped out your phone upon walking in to an airport, their house or other location. The value proposition was hard to communicate, as most non-techies would usually say "So you're telling other people you're not at home?" and "I don't get it".

Flash forward several years, Foursquare finally put a video on their website explaining to new customers what the point of Foursquare is:


Hi! I want to learn more about foursquare! from foursquare on Vimeo.

Foursquare claims to have 10 million registered users on their service but as it's been pointed out not everyone that has signed up is actually using it. Also, many of the early adopters that found the gamification of coughing up their location finally got tired of it. I fell into this camp again (yes, this marks the second time I went dormant for an extended period of time) about a year ago, when I decided I wasn't going to bother using the service anymore.

I didn't quit using Foursquare just so I could write this post or be a contrarian. In fact, I really wanted to stick with it because as a marketer I need to see how it progresses. I'll still read the Foursquare-dedicated blogs but I have stopped using it because:

1. No one else was using it

Despite their claims of a growing user base, even with several hundred "friends" I've seen less and less people actively using Foursquare. In fact, over the past six months of using it I was able to crack the Top 10 points list several times just checking in at my house and running a few errands every few days.

2. It's not really a social network

The term "friend" is used on Foursquare to describe someone you've accepted into your network. Aside from "friend" being a loose association of people from the online world, and maybe a few locals, very few of the people in my real friend circles are using it, and unless I was with one of those "real life" friends I was never in the same place as they were - ever. So it's not based on real friendships of people you see in real life, and it's not really based on the virtual friendship you've made over the years. At best it's Yelp, without lengthy reviews.

3. No deals

Ok, fine. I'm checking in by myself and I never run into anyone I know around town at the same time. What about saving a few bucks, as noted in their new video? Unfortunately, aside from the holiday Shop Small initiative, none of the deals were strong enough for me to change my behavior. Even with that noble promotion the barrier to entry was that you had to use an American Express card to participate. No thanks, I'd rather use a debit card or pay with cash. Furthermore, the number of people outside of mega markets actually using the service combined has to have local businesses shaking their heads at the purpose of even offering a checkin deal.

Given how quickly Facebook dropped integrated their competing service, noting that very few people were actually checking in, a stand-alone location based service cannot survive without mass appeal and reach to make it worth a marketer's time.

A Look At Facebook's Ponzi Scheme

I posted something yesterday on Twitter and on Facebook was favorited and Liked by senior executive at one of the world's largest retailers, an executive at a massive, global CPG and senior executives at agencies, respectively, so I'm going to repost it here to share it with you.

A little background, first: A lot of folks in the industry had been creating fan hubs long before Facebook went from being a college hook up site to the place where everyone over shares everything constantly. These hubs had analytics built in, rewards/points systems, mature communications tools, and an organized way of aligning data sources to truly manage customer data. Life was good because it kept true fans in a separate community, where only those people that love your brand could communicate with marketers and each other. Life was good.

Then along came Facebook Brand Pages.

As those of us who've felt the growing pains of the social network most of this won't come as a surprise. For those who haven't engaged in the Facebook Ponzi Scheme, get ready to open up your wallets.

Facebook for marketers is like the "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" books: 

If you build a page here, not on your web site, for "fans", we'll give you rudimentary tools to manage and measure it. If you're dissatisfied with our garbage tools, you can hire someone full time and rent a bunch of startup tools to do it.

Once you've rented a bunch of tools to do it and built a team, you should make it worth your investment by advertising to grow your fan base. In fact, don't even bother sending anyone to your website -- just put our logo on all of your TV, print, web and mobile ads.

Now that you have all of your customers giving us their data, you should hire analysts to help you weed through all of that data. Don't worry, it moves fast enough that most of their quarterly reports will be outdated anyway. Oh, and most of these folks aren't really marketers, so you'll get back meaningless suggestions without any idea how to implement it. You might even want to bring in an agency, but not one that knows what they're doing -- just give the responsibility to the youngest person in the room at your current ad, PR or digital agency.

Now that we have your money and "fans", we'll hide brand status updates so that 3-7.5% are seen by the people you paid to drive to your page. But there's an easy solution to your problem:

You should advertise some more.

Facebook's Changes Means Digital Agencies Should Thrive

Thursday the bomb was dropped at f8 that Facebook is going to be ditching the Like in favor of user actions and passive updates, meaning that when you engage with apps and have the "Add to Timeline" feature enabled it will automatically update your Timeline with what you're doing (for an example of this, check out the Washington Post Social app). It's mildly reminiscent of the auto-checkin app for Foursquare, and of course the "please rob me" site that followed, however this latest change is not only a strong push for brands to do more on Facebook than create pithy status updates to get noticed, but should be a huge wake up call for the marketing industry as to where the budgets will be going.

Get Me To The Schmoo

Unfortunately this happens all too often at companies: We need to prove that social media delivers a return before we can invest budget in these sort of programs. Pretty chicken and egg, right? The fortunate part is that it's easily correctible; if you set up your social media programs and measurement properly you can determine the ROI.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Since it's Friday and everyone's talking about Hurrican Irene, I figured it'd be a good time to slip in some shameless self promotion for a few upcoming speaking gigs in New York City. You know, provided it's not flooded:

September 16, 2011
PRSA's T3PR: Theory, Tactics and Technology for High Tech Public Relations
New York, NY
Technology Crisis. Digital Age.

October 26, 2011
ACI's Focus on Social Media, Business, Technology and the Law
New York, NY
Measuring Social Media’s Value to Your Business Processes in Order to Justify the Investment