Trumblog

The following is my post last week on the Jack360 blog:

Last week I was at South by Southwest interactive with a few colleagues from Jack Morton to listen and learn about what’s new in interactive, what people are thinking about and generally absorb the experience of having tens of thousands of developers, designers, writers, strategists and marketers in a very concentrated space.

In two and a half days I filled my brain with as much information as I could and my stomach with as much barbecue. I’ll be sharing what I saw and learned at SXSW here over the next few weeks, but I’m starting with 5 overall trends that I saw across all of the sessions that I attended. They are:

1. No Matter Where You Go There You Are – The social network Foursquare was the was the breakthrough application at SXSW last year and as a result this year there were over 10 different location based social networks in play and the “SXSW stance” was head down over your smart phone checking in at your location. During South by SOuthwest Foursquare gained over 100,000 new subscribers and logged over 300,000 check-ins each day. In panels the value of geolocation was discussed as a means for monitizing social media, it’s value to social search and the expectation that by the end of the year every social network will have location integrated into their network. Where you are has, well, arrived.

2. We’re All Gamers Now – From your Wii to Farmville to earning badges on Foursquare, games seem to be everywhere. Whether the game is something as involved as Mafia Wars or just a point based leader board based on network behavior, games are being used to engage the audience, encourage behavior and keep them coming back to your social network. Are you using gaming to persuade your audience?

3.With Geolocation There Is No Privacy – Most people the same travel paths every day; home to work then back home with a stop at the grocery store or restaurant 5 days a week. With this travel information and a few other data points it’s pretty easy to figure out many more details of a person’s life. As a result, at some point in the not to distant future there will be a privacy debacle caused by social media and geolocation. It’s only a matter of time and hopefully the impact will be minor. It’s going to be up to the social networks to both maintain personal data securely and to help members make smart decisions about what data they share and who they provide access to it, because when something goes wrong they will be blamed.

4. The Rise Of Transmedia Experiences – If you are not in the know a transmedia experience is an activity, often a game, puzzle or tour, that involves multiple media types , for example a website, video, telephone and email. While transmedia experiences have been around for years they received a lot of mention at SXSW this year. There were several sessions on Transmedia and the concept came up on a couple unrelated panels as well. I suspect that this is another byproduct of smart phone adoption that make access to websites, video and email available just about anywhere not to mention the added bonus of geolocation that provide new ways of finding and delivering clues.

5. Media Environment Convergence – We have 3 screens (TV, computer and cell phone) and may be adding a 4th with the tablet and we simultaneously interact with multiple sources for information on the same topic. Think of watching the Academy Awards while IMing friends on your cell phone, watching a baseball game with a laptop open to view detailed statistics, reading the latest news that is imported through a social network. The convergence that we’ve already seen as our phones became small computers is only the beginning. Now imagine what the iPad may usher in for the experiences of watching television, socializing, surfing and creating content simultaneously.That is the converged future.

Did you attend SXSW? What trends did you see? How do you foresee the impact of these trends? Let me know in the comments

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