Cerebra

This morning the office was abuzz with talk of Facebook’s latest change – seems the company has rolled out preliminary testing on their messaging service. Basically, should you wish to send a private message to someone who is not a connection, Facebook will charge you anywhere from $1 (approx. R9,46) to deliver your message. If you don’t pay, your message will be sent to that recipients spam folder.

I tried to test this today by sending a message to a colleague who is not a friend on Facebook, and my message went through just fine. So although this testing phase has been rolled out in South Africa, it’s clearly only to a percentage of the South African users, for now.

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.

A big discussion point at SXSW is the learning and innovation around social and television. The US pretty much leads the entertainment business and their social media integration into their television series, reality, sports and news has been quick to market. Stepping back to look at trends and what has worked shared her insight, as well learning’s from the social team at WWE.

The most tweeted about categories are still Reality TV, Sports, Series and One time special events. Interesting insights:

- Reality TV & One Time Events – The selection of hosts and the conversations around them show there to be more conversation on social media than the actual contestants. This could be a strategy from the producers