Cerebra

The majority of all the sessions I attended had one key point - explaining how humans behave on the web, and how we can take "advantage" of that behavior.

Sounds easy, but it seems most of us, as much as we use the web, take little notice of the finer human nuances to how people share, gather, read and talk. In a talk about cyber bullying with the creators of itgetsbetter.org, they highlighted the fact that in certain communities people enjoy being anonymous. This simple human truth - that we all have secrets and don't necessarily share everything with everyone - is why many LGBT forums exist, allowing people to come together in a closed community and talk about their challenges or fears. Community, even in anonymity, is strong.

Anyone who knows anything about SXSW knows that it is a frenzied week of interactive conferences, film and music. This year it is even bigger as its the 20th anniversary of the event, which means there are over 5000 events in the city of Austin.

Born in 1987 as a music festival only, the organisers added the film festival and interactive conference in 1994. Johnny Cash was the keynote speaker in 1987 and in 2013 the main keynote was Elon Musk.

This is a clear indication of how the super conference has evolved over the years from music dominating the scene up to 2009/2010 to the switch to interactive becoming the biggest pull for people. The numbers speak for themselves, as you can see in the table below.

It was with great interest that I attended a working group session on social media ROI. The room was filled with both brand marketing as well as agency social media people. I must state up front this was an open discussion session and not a talk from a panel.

First off, I was fascinated at how sales focused most of the questions were, with the majority of the Q&A revolving around how people have succeeded in selling more via social. Considering the environment and audience, I really would have thought the conversation would have progressed a bit.
The main points, which we’ve all heard over and over, are outlined below:

• Billboards can’t track sales so why should social.

After 6 years of research into why businesses succeed or fail in China, Emily Chong, the AVP of Design and Marketing for Frog innovation specialists, tackles the subject of survival strategies for brands in China. The parallels and differences in marketing to South Africans were startling.

Here are some of the insights for anyone thinking of taking their products or services East, or for anyone venturing into new territories.

Stop thinking these are nascent markets

Lyn Jeffery from the Institute Of The Future has drawn fascinating correlations between the counterfeit goods industry in China and how their approach can help western businesses innovate faster. Their most lucrative market at the moment is technology, where the counterfeit mobile phone market is said to be worth $15billion, and the Shanzhai produce all of these handsets.

The Shanzhai (A collective network of counterfeit goods manufacturers in China) get products to market faster, in bigger volume and cheaper than anyone else, but how do they do it?

The Shanzhai work in highly effective agile networks, and there are five rules they apply to innovation:

1. Never build anything from scratch