SXSW Interactive Day 5
posted Mar 24, 2011 at 11:25:23 AM by Doug Gibson.
Tuesday, March 15th marked the last day of SXSW Interactive. I got up bright and early to catch “Long After The Thrill: Sustaining Passionate Users” with Stephen Anderson was by far the highlight of SXSWi for me and I took more notes during that session than the previous four days combined. The gist of his talk centered around engaging users and sustaining users’ interests by intrinsic rewards instead of extrinsic rewards. Psychology was central to much of this talk and made it that much more interesting. The talk was actually a followup to last year’s talk that focused on making a game out of goals, which can easily lead down the path of focusing on extrinsic benefits.
Mr. Anderson's slide show presentation used some cards from getmentalnotes.com and he gave away sampler packs at the end of the session. They look like a great resource that I'd never heard of prior to this talk.
“Adobe’s Tooling for jQuery and the Mobile Web” was an ok preview of how Dreamweaver and the Flash IDE are being developed to integrate with mobile technologies better. Flash can actually output code that’s not flash now! The talk focused on the tools way too much for my liking, however, as I’m not a fan of either Dreamweaver or Flash.
“Merch: The Other White Meat Of Monetization II” was a good panel to put late in the day, as it seemed relevant for musicians who might be attending both segments of the conference as well. The talk was actually very interesting, covering the effectiveness of selling merchandise by a number of sites including LiveStrong.com, CollegeHumor.com, Despair Inc. and more - so different business models, not just selling a shirt for your site. They covered some of the high level strategies and considerations for merch and social media, as it applies to each of the business models represented. A lot of the focus was on signal and message over the merch itself.
Day five was a strong ending to the interactive conference. Overall, I think it was worthwhile as a way to get caught up with all the hot topics (social, mobile, and the convergence of web, marketing, advertising and games in those areas), although there were a lot of panels that were big on talk and light on actual answers. I met a lot of developers there, but felt that the schedule was pretty light on pure development topics. There were a few workshops that I opted to pass on, however, and I was just as happy with the UX focused talks that are just as important to me in creating quality applications and sites.
The crowds were noticiably thinner throughout the day and that night, with many people opting to leave on Tuesday. Check Metalunderground.com for the reports on SXSW Music, spanning the next five days.
