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Factory’s Picks for SXSW Interactive 2010

By Kevin Shoesmith on March 8, 2010

Taking a cue from my friend and colleague, Nick Finck, who put together a list of UX sessions at SXSW 2010 Interactive, I thought I’d trawl though the sessions myself and put together a list of presentations and panels that might be of interest to content publishers.

SXSW Web page detail

Some of the sessions might not seem to be entirely relevant to publishing but I’m guessing there might just be something for content producers to take away from each of the sessions listed here.

If I’ve missed any that you feel are valuable to content producers, publishers, or journalists of any kind, please add them below.

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HootSuite for Publishers

By Kevin Shoesmith on March 4, 2010

HootSuite is a full-featured, easy-to-use Twitter application that gives internet magazine publishers abilities which make it the ideal tool for managing the Twitter part of their publishing process.

Note: This post isn’t intended to be tutorial, but rather a short list of the reasons why HootSuite is a Twitter app worth looking at if you have in-depth Twitter management needs for your publication.

What is HootSuite?

HootSuite is a web-based application (versus a desktop application that you download and install on your computer or device), that gives you the ability to send Twitter posts, follow others’ twitter streams, create lists and set filters for content published on Twitter. You can also manage multiple accounts from HootSuite if you have more than one account. A magazine editor for instance, might have an individual account through which she shares her more personal tastes and interests, but she might also manage her publication’s primary stream. Being able to manage this in the same application using familiar browser-like tabs is rather handy.

HootSuite does what many of the other leading Twitter apps do—TweetDeck and Seesmic come to mind. But where HootSuite excels is in the control it gives over Twitter content in ways that a metrics-driven organization needs to measure the efficacy of their campaigns.

Separating the Tweet from the Chaff

One of HootSuite’s great features, and the one that got us to start using it in the first place, is its filtering abilities. Creating a column in HootSuite’s interface is a dead simple three-step process that can give you as targeted or broad catch-net as you want for absolutely any topic that’s being talked about on Twitter. Just click the Add Column button, enter your parameters, click “Create Column” and you’re off.

HootSuite Add Column

They’ve also recently added the ability to filter on streams coming from other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Ping.fm, so you can stay on top of multi-channel streams from a single interface.

This isn’t unique, of course, other Twitter applications will let you do this, but since HootSuite is a web-app, you can access it from almost any browser. They’ve even launched apps for iPhone and, very recently, for Android too.

This filtering ability is particularly useful if you want to follow particular discussions using keywords or hashtags (those little one word phrases that begin with a hash symbol #) or even if you want to set a filter for your organization’s name or products. It gives you a way to stay in touch with what people are saying about your brand and its goods in near real time. Pretty valuable, especially since you can get into the conversation and engage one-on-one about those things. People like that.

Weighing in

Another native ability of HootSuite is the ability to look at statistics about your Twitter posts and how popular they are. You have the ability to view an aggregate summary of how well your stream is doing as a whole, or drill down to get a view of how popular individual posts have been. This is an incredibly useful feature for determining what post constructions are having an impact with your followers, or what keywords are eliciting the best responses. It’s a great tool for A/B type testing (or as close as you can get with Twitter), giving you the ability to track which approaches are working best.

The catch here is that you have to use HootSuite’s native Ow.ly link generator to build statistics. Ow.ly is a link shortener function that reduces the size of long links to something that fits better in the 140 character maximum posting length. The added benefit of the service is that it also tracks click-throughs, which is what we’re talking about here.

Most people don’t mind this, but I’ve heard some HootSuite users complain that the Ow.ly browser bar that appears when an Ow.ly link is clicked is a nuisance. I’ve heard others complain that the Ow.ly service seems take ‘ownership’ of the link it generates despite the fact that users can turn the bar off. In either case, it’s a small tradeoff for those who value the ability to measure their campaigns.

If Ow.ly doesn’t cut it for you, you can always use the Bit.ly which also generates very useful stats, much like Ow.ly. The trouble there is that if you want to use an external link shortener, you have to leave the HootSuite UI to get the link and then copy and paste it into your field. Cumbersome. There are other link shortening services that you can use too, but the same applies, and some may not have static generating abilities.

Time, please!

What I like best about HootSuite, and it’s something that TweetDeck doesn’t do, is that it allows you to post to Twitter at preset times. This is what sets HootSuite apart from most other Twitter clients.

HootSuite's time function

There are a couple of key reasons why this is an advantage.

The first reason is that for an organization’s Twitter manager, the ability to write 6 or 12 tweets all at once and have them posted at intervals throughout the day is huge. Spending a few minutes creating those posts in the morning and have them published while they’re doing other things is liberating. It keeps the stream active, giving the impression that its being populated all day long, but doesn’t interfere with spontaneous posting which Twitter is best known for. They don’t have to be posting all day long to appear as though they are.

The second, and perhaps more important reason, is that Twitter users (myself included), don’t like being bombarded with 12 posts from a single account at the same time. One of my favorite magazines dumps 5, 7 or sometimes 10 consecutive posts into their stream often enough that it drives me a little crazy. I love the magazine, so I don’t complain. But I’ve lost followers on Twitter because I’ve had too itchy a Twitter finger at times. And I’ve stopped following others for the same reason.

Another benefit is that if your publishing schedule is extremely rigid, the ability to co-ordinate Twitter posts with HootSuite’s timed posting will be a real advantage to both your organization and its followers.

At any rate, check out HootSuite. It’s free and gives you great control.

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Factory Interactive. Now.

By Kevin Shoesmith on March 3, 2010

What does Trent Reznor have to do with Factory Interactive? Well, a lot. And he has a lot to do with it for the simple reason that his approach to fan engagement and communication on the Internet changed my thinking about web’s potential more than anyone else since I’ve been a web developer.

This is about how Trent Reznor, frontman for Nine Inch Nails, has influenced what I want Factory Interactive to be as a company—the agency people use to give them the tools engage people on the Internet.

Engaging people on the web is one of the hardest things to do well, especially for sustained periods of time. But I believe Trent Reznor does this better than anyone. It likely has a great deal to do with the fact that he legitimately cares both about what he does and about his fans. And I believe that because everything thing he does to engage people seems both well-thought out and spontaneous at the same time. The execution hasn’t been perfect, but that’s what guarantees the authenticity of it.

I’ve been in the web business for a long time—more than 10 years—and on occasion, I think I understand how things work when it comes to communicating in the medium. On occasion. But this is where Trent Reznor has helped me understand that on occasion is enough to learn some extremely valuable things.

Engagement, Reznor style

I’ve been a fan of Nine Inch Nails for nearly 20 years. I’ve seen them play five or six times, enough to have been satisfied if I hadn’t had the chance to see them again.

But in 2008, Trent Reznor released a full length album called The Slip. He gave it away on the internet as a free download. I liked it so much that I bought the limited release CD anyway. I started poking around the internet a bit after that, fueled by the fact that he’d just given me something incredibly good, for free, just for being a fan. I was looking to see if he was touring in support of the new album. There were two dates near me that summer, one two hours north at a huge outdoor festival in Pemberton, British Columbia, and one a few days later in Seattle, but none in Vancouver.

Now while it didn’t seem to matter to me because I’d seen them many times before, I kept poking. What I’d found out was that in the last 3 or 4 years a lot of intriguing stuff had been planted on the web by Reznor: virtual detective games, a community for his fans and a rich collection of artwork and music that had always only been available in hard copy.

There was also stuff like this:

At the same time that NIN released The Slip, they also released four very well produced ‘rehearsal’ videos of themselves performing songs off the album. All of these shipped on a DVD with the CD too, by the way, but the moment after I discovered these, after wishing more than anything that I’d there for the shoot, I found myself ordering NIN tickets at three times their face value for the Seattle show.

I’d been seduced. I went to that gig. I bought merchandise. I was a NIN fan reborn. And it was all because Trent Reznor had engaged me in exactly the way that I wanted to be engaged. He rewarded me simply for being interested and he asked for nothing in return. It was authentic.

I followed his Lights in the Sky Tour on Flickr, on the NIN.com site, and on Twitter. And when the tour passed by at a range close enough that I could justify another intercity journey, I went again. My wife stopped me from getting on a plane to fly to a third show.

That occasional understanding

What I know about this is that Trent Reznor’s strategy to create a presence on the internet elicited exactly the result he was hoping for. He did it with great content deftly placed.

Trent Reznor played to sold out shows for more than a year an half, long after most critics had written him off as no longer relevant. He even allowed his fans to photograph and records his concerts with video cameras, the footage of which was gathered to produce a fan-created high definition film of the tour. He allowed people to download it free and produced limited edition DVDs he sold through his site. PC World magazine called NIN ‘the first open source band’. Reznor was including them in his work, engaging them at meaningful levels.

Reznor made exceptional use of the web’s existing channels to create an incredibly strong pull back to a definitive source of all things NIN at NIN.com. Part of it was carefully calculated, part of it the byproduct of just being out there to connect with his fans with no real plan other than that, to connect. The result has been the precipitation of one of the most recognizable brands in the music industry in the last 20 years. He even won the Webby Awards Artist of the Year.

And every kind of business can learn extremely valuable lessons from his work. In a future entry, I’ll deconstruct his work so that organizations keen to engage fans and supporters can forge a plan to emulate his success. Achieving that kind of success isn’t easy, but seeing it deconstructed might give a better understanding of how it might be achieved.

I was influenced enough by Reznor’s strategy that I took steps to focus my business exclusively on the music industry. I wanted to help artists and labels do what Reznor had done. What we found out after a year of relentless focus on the music industry is that there’s no significant money being devoted to web efforts, so we had to re-chart our course. Again. But the lessons we learned in the process about using the web in ways that build true fans and devoted members of solid, active communities are priceless in building any kind of faithful brand following.

For Factory Interactive it all means a renewed focus on internet development that is as much about engagement and content strategy as it is about the technology used to execute it. We used to be happy to build websites for people that simply gave them the ability to publish their own content, now we know it has to be much deeper than that. Just ask Trent Reznor.

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Factory’s Picks for SXSW Interactive 2010

Friday, March 12

Saturday, March 13

Sunday, March 14

Monday, March 15

Tuesday, March 16

HootSuite for Publishers

What is HootSuite?

Separating the Tweet from the Chaff

Weighing in

Time, please!

Factory Interactive. Now.

Engagement, Reznor style

That occasional understanding

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