Some thoughts from #SXSW 2012
So as some of you may know, Andy Hadfield and I had the privledge of attending South by Southwest again this year, spurred to a large degree on by the fact that we hosted a 'core conversation' on African Innovation entitled 'You don't need bandwdith to be awesome' and a sponsorship from those rad folks at Discovery Health.
While it's always a priviledge to get to talk at an event such as SXSW, it's something you do because it cuts down on your costs and gives you access to the massively vauable content the 'conference', or 'unconcference', or 'gathering' serves up each year, particularly when it comes to spotting new trends, chatting to interesting people and gaining insights into where our industry is going.
The first thing that was particulalry interesting for me this year (and I'll acknowledge that this could have had a great deal to do with where my mind is at right now, or the kind of information I'm craving at the moment) was how foused the average SXSW Interactive attendee has become on content and getting the mix just right.
It's something I've felt moving through the industry for some time now.
It's like (and this is super-cliched, I know) the technology isn't important anymore. People resonate with content and sucess in the connected world, whether it's with a website, in a mobile application or in
delivering one or another service, depends on the quality of the content, not how rad your button animations are, or how cool and slick your colours blends are.
I'm not for one second saying the other stuff is unimportant. It's just seems like you shoudl do your best to 'not piss your user off' with bad UX, while delivering killer content.
The scond big learning for me in attending SXSW this year is that (at least in my opinion), organic growth is dead. Well, maybe that's a bit extreme. Maybe 'organic growth just isn't what it used to be' is a little more on the money.
What I'm trying to say is, you can't just have a rad idea, develop a rad product, fil it with rad content and expect the world to notice it's there... and then bury you in web traffic and support anymore.
Today, there's just so much awesome (and non-awesome) stuff going on online, that it's a pretty noisy place to be.
So, in order to be sucessful in building an audience, you need a smart strategy to either get in the face of your users really quickly, be able to exploit your contacts and an extensive social network to get in the face of your users really quickly... or be prepared to dedicate some of your startup capital (if you're lucky enough to be funded) to market the hell out of what you're building, which will in turn - you've guessed it - get you in the face of tons of users really quickly.
But relying on the utopian concept of 'build it and they will come' is a little naive, at least in today's
day and age.
Apart from these two learnings, there were a bunch of other cool (yet small) learnings, like for example that Andy - no matter how hard he tries - is in incapable of pronouncing the word 'taco'; and that American cars are huge gas guzzling monsters that corner like speedboats and have no soul.
But seriously, a big thanks to Discovery for making our trip to South by Southwest possible and hopefully, we can do it all again next year.
Technology today evolves faster than what we can often imagine. It progresses our world and shapes how we think and behave. It can even help us be healthier and live longer.
At Discovery, we’re passionate about using our imagination to evolve our world and yours. For our clients, it means helping them lead healthier lives and protecting their financial future. Technology, and the smart people who evolve technology into every-day solutions for our clients, help us to achieve this.
Discovery, it’s an exciting place to work right now. Go to www.discovery.co.za for more information.
