SXSWi truly is the Zion of the digital and social community and 2014 saw no less than 33k smart phone carrying, tweetastic, tech lovers complete a pilgrimage to the city of Austin, Texas for 4 days.

I was a #SXSWnewbie – wide eyed and shaking with excitement, I was ready to rock “South By”. Tasked with wading through the waffle and the geek speak to find actiona-ble insights that we can implement immediately to make a difference, I approached SXSW with my typical no-nonsense attitude, a pair of very comfy shoes, many battery chargers and an open mind. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy to find logic amongst a tribe of magic lovers.

Everyone at SXSWi was looking for and expecting ‘the next Twitter’ to be revealed, but alas, it would seem that innovation has plateaued and SXSWi was much more Logical than I might have expected.

So, after attending 16 sessions, I am pleased to report that #SXSWLogic was alive and well and it gives me great pleasure to share 5 of the key logic themes I came across and share some of the actionable insights and links to fur ther reading if any of these resonate with you and your brands.

THEME #1 SOCIAL 2.0 – IT’S TIME TO GROW UP & EVOLVE

"I feel like we are in a Golden Age for brands, and our ability to engage with consumers on a 1 on 1 basis is unprecedented." – Jason Levine, VP of Mondelez (the guys who make Oreo cookies).

Almost all of the talks I went to paid some attention to stressing that marketers have to evolve their approach to the digital and social media strategies that they are implementing. We are through the looking glass… and some. When it comes to using social media to

connect with customers and to grow our brands, we can no longer get away with “winging it”. Ten years into it (and that really scared me… are we really a decade in?!) we really need to start taking social seriously.

The simple ‘rules of social’ no longer apply – we need to evolve and start thinking more innovatively in these channels and we need to invest more into doing the right thing. Here are some pointers we picked up...

CONTENT PLAN? YES, BUT YOU NEED A SOLID MEDIA PLAN TO GET IT SEEN.Whilst it’s true to say that creating content is really important, and creating good content is absolutely essential, the general consensus is that we need to move on from the “let’s post twice a week”/ “ask your community questions!”/ “share some behind the scenes content”/ “create a Facebook app that tells your brand story through gamification!”. The channels have moved on, and so must we (marketers). Namely, we need to start paying for our content to be seen in social channels. It was bound to happen at some point, and so it has. The feeling across the board at SXSW was very much one of “Come on guys, let’s move on and stop moaning about it.”

The means ensuring their media and social agencies work closely together to maximize reach, engagement and the opportunities to be seen.

It was interesting to hear how few of the marketeers that I spoke to in the halls had implemented paid media plans in social, mind and you can be sure that if you aren’t spending on media, your competitors probably are.

NO ONE IS CLICKING ON BANNER ADS ANYMORE PEOPLE. I saw the stats. Divert that media budget away from banners and into paid media in social.

STOP BEING SO CONDESCENDING

FACEBOOK *MIGHT* BE DEAD…For the last 5 years, brands have been convinced that Facebook is the platform to start with and certainly the one that they have invested the most money and resource into. After all, it has over 1.2 billion users and “…even your Grandma is on Facebook now!”

So where do we go then? The age old “Is Google+ really worth it?” came up quite often too. The answer? Yes. Do G+. But interestingly, no one seemed to be able to say why, other than to note that it’s Google… it will improve your search rank and they are unlikely to lie down and just take a whooping from Zucks forever.

If brands want to future proof their social strategies, they might want to start investing in other channels.

Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest were the 3 of the more established channels that seemed to be on everyone’s lips when it came to where we think brands should be now.

Future channels talked about were places like Secret and Shrtwv (anonymous sharing communities) – communi-ties that are single minded in their design and purpose but that can be used creatively by brands for short bursts of activation that create engagement.

For the last 5 years, brands have let their agencies and community management teams get lazy. Southby speakers ardently championed the call for brands to stop “asking for likes, demanding shares or thinking that anyone wants to like a photo of your office HQ night janitor”.

PAY ATTENTION TO MILLENIALSSouthby speakers felt strongly that marketers and brands are not paying attention to the next generation when it comes to social media and shared plenty of stats showing that Facebook is not the network for Millenials but… and it’s a big but… sometimes it’s not the channel, it’s what you do with it.

Additionally, if we want to capture the hearts and minds of Millenials, we need to stop looking at ourselves when defining how we engage this tricky generation. How did amateur vlogger Michelle Phan get 5 million subscribers on YouTube when global brands spending hundreds of thousands and with teams of marketeers are still struggling to get to 100k fans on Facebook? Well…

• She creates useful, unique content.• She listens to her audience and creates content for them, not content that is about her (brands really need to think more like this).

MILEY IS THE NEW MADONNACelebrities with large social followings were referenced quite often as examples of how to engage mass audiences focusing on their ability to “talk in-time” with their fans and this ability as an example to brands for how to behave.

“Be more like your target consumer and less like you.” seems to have been a popular answer, but many brand owners in the audiences challenged this sentiment.

As a great way of demonstrating how out of touch we are, it was pointed out to us that once upon a time we thought Madonna was outrageous and that she was ridiculous. And now she is the matriarch of the Western World. The outtake? Watch these huge megastars like Miley Cyrus carefully and notice how they engage in social media – we {brands} can learn a thing or two about how to talk to our fans from these global superstars.

THEME #2 WE’RE IN A POST-PC ERA

30 years ago this year Apple introduced the Macintosh and people wondered whether every one would need a PC on day – this year the same question was being asked – for very different reasons.

After years of analysts and observers calling for the ‘Year of mobile’ it seems we have now slipped past this to what is euphemistically now being called the ‘Post PC era’.

Mobile is digital now, It's the domi-nant screen, and so the assumption is that everyone will be designing for Mobile first and with the burgeoning number of different devices and types of screen cross platform development is key.

MOBILE FIRST! REPEAT, MOBILE FIRST!Almost every speaker noted that consumers no longer use their PC to actively search your brand out and find out more about you. Just a few of the mind blowing stats, for you:

• Mobile devices now account for 14% of all internet use across the globe – a phenomenal increase in the last year that is really worthy of our attention and our action.

• Mobile penetration in the Middle East is currently 172% - that doesn’t even take tablets into account.

• M-commerce through apps is now the ‘preferred’ way to shop by 75% of under 25 year olds in the USA.

• 25% of mobile web users in the USA are mobile-only users – they rarely ever access the internet outside of they’re day job via a desktop computer (maybe the scariest and most jaw-dropping stat I heard!)

• Emerging markets are often mobile only with consum-ers rarely having disposable income levels high enough to have broadband and a home PC, but mobiles are affordable and data and free wifi means the internet is more accessi-ble than ever.

So why are we all designing websites about ourselves in the parameters of a desktop and then adapting it last minute for mobile?

We need to pay attention, a LOT more attention, to the way consumers are using their mobiles and how smartphones are almost wearable tech themselves (never out of sight and rarely far from ones person) and we have to start with mobile platforms and content that suit the device.

The biggest benefit for brands of designing content mobile first? You’ll focus on only the most important content you have to communicate, which is usually all your consumer needs to hear from you anyways.

THEME #3 REAL-TIME MARKETING NEEDS TO GET REAL

The rise of real-time marketing through the adoption of social media by brands has been evident over the last few years, with many companies increasing their spend in an effort to achieve viral success through single creative messages or longer-term engage-ment strategies.

Called lazy by some, genius by others and a trend on the decline by strategy, the

problem is that much real-time marketing of late has largely been denigrated to well-timed, “me too” memes.

It was hugely refreshing to see examples like the content within Lego’s Cuusoo & Rebrick communities, Melbourne’s Remote Control Tourist , even the Sharknado craze, demonstrates how using real-time, shared experiences can be that catalyst for true audience unification.

GO HOME, REAL TIME MARKETING. YOU’RE DRUNK.I can sum up 5 days worth of talks on real-time marketing in three words for you:

1. Oreo2. Cookie3. Tweet

Yup. Pretty much every marketer and speaker was still waxing lyrical about that amazing real time tweet from the crew at Oreo during the Superbowl black-out.

SO what can we learn about real-time marketing from it? That we need to be always on? OK, got it. What else? We need to be creative? Er, yup. What else? Truth be told, I was a little disappointed that that tweet was still being heralded as the last word on real time marketing.

And then I stumbled into a talk by Kristina Halvorson that was surprisingly refreshing! She called bullshit on marketing, and I am so glad she did. Whilst we’re all still holding the Oreo tweet on a pedestal with it’s 15k RTs, 6.5k favs and 20k likes… in actual fact, 5.1m people tweeted during the Superbowl. So just 0.008% of active tweeters during the Superbowl “engaged” with Oreo.

And, horror of horrors, sales of Oreo Cookies did not go up. But no one seemed to be bothered about that!

It was a refreshing reminder that whilst real-time marketing can help you drive (some) engagement, it’s not always brand building and it rarely makes a difference to your bottom line, so don’t get too hung up on it.

A copy of her presentation is here, if you want to check it out.

INNOVATION DOESN’T NEED INVENTIONAmil Govil & Ben Malbon of Google made some strong arguments that marketers aren’t properly using the tools and the tech available to us all now, let alone the new. They rallied for us to all start focusing on what’s out there now and making the most of free tools from Google before you invest heavily in the cutting edge tech and channels. Fair point.

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underesti-mate the effect in the long run."

- Ray Amara of the Institute for the Future

They showed us how (using Superbowl ads as an example) you can look at search traffic lift directly after a tv ad to define whether an ad has truly had an impact on your consumers. It was fascinating to see – they then re-ranked the Superbowl ads in order of search uplift and we saw a very different picture to the one the brands presented to us – in fact it was almost a completely different picture entirely.

More interesting was their prompt for us to investigate why people Google a brand after seeing an ad and to consider how we create responsive systems that can allow you to build, deliver & capture an audience in the 15 minutes after an ad, when we see this kind of spike.

THEME #4 CONTENT MARKETING NEEDS TO GROW UP

Brands need to become publishers – no one wants to hear about the in’s and out’s of FMCG product benefits, consumers are weary of poorly executed UGC and no one hunts out brand websites to read about your brand anymore (if anything, they’ll trust Wiki over your brand site). So we have to create content, got it? Ok cool.

Speaker after speaker told us that Red Bull do content marketing really well.

Seriously, though… they do. The Red Bull editing house is now larger than the New York Times, apparently.

But content creating, and doing it well, is expensive. Any marketer knows that! So I was less interested in hearing how amazing Red Bull were, and more interested in hearing about how we can maximize the creation of content by brands and so a couple of talks that I went to seemed to really focus on the hows and here’s a summary.

THE AGE OF THE ALGORITHMFacebook EdgeRank really threw a cat amongst the social brand pigeons when it came into effect a few years back and whilst the current algorithm Facebook use to determine what content appears in the Newsfeed is no longer called EdgeRank (it has evolved a lot over time), the impact of Facebook’s shift from a community to a paid media channel has probably been the most significant shift we’ve seen in social since Facebook became popular for brands.

Eli Pariser of Upworthy and author of ‘The Filter Bubble’ shared some great thoughts on the ‘Age of the Algorithm’ and how to create content that is truly engaging – as he put it “these little pieces of code are more powerful than a lot of the most powerful editors in media”.

He challenged audiences at Soutby by suggesting that these algorithms are the cure for ‘content chaos’ and that they actively force content creators to be more mindful and to create better content. I couldn’t agree more, really.

There is a great overview of his talk here, if you wanted to read more about content curating algorithms.

Here’s the upside from him and others on how to create more engaging content, it’s quite simple, ask yourself:

1. Is the content useful?2. Is it interesting? Noooo… come on now. Look again. Is it really interesting?3. Is it entertaining?4. Is it for the greater good of humanity?

If it isn’t one of these, then don’t approve it for posting. End of. As Andrew Hanelly put it, quite simply: "Be useful, be interesting, or be ignored."

YOU CAN’T JUST “MAKE SOMETHING GO VIRAL”. OR CAN YOU?Much healthy debate could be heard at Southby – I’d say a 50-50 split between marketers evangelizing and agreeing that we should all be creating more viral content and those suggesting that it is impossible to set out with the intention of creating viral content and delivering.

Maybe the most interesting talk I went to was one by Jonah Berger called ‘The Science of Word of Mouth” where he examined in detail the common threads amongst some of the most viral content that drove social WOM over the last few years. He argued ardently that your objective isn’t just to get people buying your brand, it’s to get them telling other people about it and becoming your earned media. Here’s a stat that’s going to blow your mind…

JUST 7% OF WOM IS ONLINE.

Use social media channels and your digital marketing plans to enable consumers to share, but bear in mind they will only do a small portion of that online. How can we all best use the tools and channels available to us to provide content, informa-tion and entertainment that will allow consumers to advocate about you away from the screen? After all, you don’t want 10-20% more views, you want 10-20% more customers.

Here’s Jonah’s 5 rules of viral marketing:

1. Shares, not views - you can buy views. What we care about are shares – shares are free, that’s where the value of WOM is.2. +10%, not 10m - we need 10% more business not 10m more views – start creating content that drives sharing and the sales will follow, not the other way round.3. Psychology, not technology – stop jumping on the next tech bandwagon and just being in new social channels all the time. Pay more attention to the reasons why people share and then create content that is aligned to those reasons.4. Offline and online – 93% of WOM is happening offline, what’s your offline plan?5. Give - turn your customers into advocates. If they like your product, they’ll know someone else who will like it too. It’s the oldest trick in the book, yet brands seem to be scared of MGM schemes now. Why?

Dave Evans wrote a great piece after SXSW about how the important themes of the weekend, and content marketing sure was one of them.

THEME #5 TIME TO GROW A PAIR

There is an infection overwhelming social media strategy development and the virus is fear. It seems in many successful businesses the overwhelming reaction to social media “Can we please just make this go away!”

The fact of the matter is, “fear of change” is always the biggest obstacle to progress. If you look around the companies that are creating new value today and achieving breath-taking business results are those that are not only doing social and digital they are actively embracing it and integrating it into their business. In short if you don’t have a digital and social strategy, you are most likely on a path to irrelevance.

MAKE CONTENT THAT DRIVES COMMERCEI really enjoyed hearing from Ben Learer talk about the new content marketing – creating content that actually makes you money. Ben shared some pretty convincing stats from his own retail media sites that proved how LTV skyrockets when you’re able to leverage content & commerce correctly.

You will have seen Net-A-Porter do this brilliantly, starting out as a retailer but now they’ve created a magazine called ‘PORTER’ and it’s already rivaling VOGUE. The difference? Every product in PORTER is sold on, yes, Net-A-Porter. Well played, Natalie Massinet.

So the key outtake being we need to create genuinely valuable and interesting content that is the Trojan Horse for your brand, content so compelling that consumers can’t help but want to buy.

A copy of his presentation from the day is here .

‘CREATING BRAND LOVE’ A general theme that came through really strongly for me was this thought around brands, marketers, agencies and companies needing to be creatively braver. It would seem that as monetization becomes ever more important and with digital needing to prove that ever elusive ROI, creative teams have become too scared to try the unheard of and a lot of speakers championing the return of the brave creatives. This proved to be a popular opinion, however brand leaders often bringing the room back to earth

Andrew Hanelly from McMurray TMG had an interesting POV for brands and agencies - “’Thought leader‘ is a bullshit term. You want to be a problem solver.”

And the team from Google noted that we are rewarding creative teams for playing it safe when we brief them with strict criteria and objectives, ambitious KPIS and restrictive budgets but disappointed when we get anything less than an Oreo cookie moment.

I even went to a talk focused on the Neurochemistry of brand love where Dr. Paul Zak and INNOCEAN USA's Uwe Gutschow shared how they currently judge whether content is good enough to create real change by measuring peoples changes in hormone levels in response to seeing content – their measure of success for a piece of creative is “did this move me, emotionally – did I have an emotional reaction to it?” and that’s the only KPI their creative teams are meas-ured by. Whilst that might be a step too far for most marketers, it would seem that this is certainly an interesting way to approach the creative process and outputs!

IF YOU’D LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU,GET IN TOUCH ANDREW@GRAVITYTHINKING.COM

OR VISIT GRAVITYTHINKING.COM