People need understanding and connection, not just information.
If all you’re doing is blasting your community with content, you–and your audience–are missing out. Both the Future of Context and How to Spark a Movement panels beautifully explained this point. Help someone truly undersand something, connect your community members with each other and unite people around a common mission. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

Think Visually
Three of the best sessions were about this. Dan Roam’s Why Words Won’t Work explained that we’re all visual thinkers, and pictures are key to solving problems. Interactive Infographics showed off how data can come to life if the visualization is done well. And they pointed out that infographics have gone mainsream: How I Met Your Mother uses them regularly (Marshall even needed a charts and graphs intervention because he was using them so frequently) and comedians like Demetri Martin use visualiztions in stand-up. In other words, infographics are cool.

And Visual Note-Taking 101 was the perfect primer and call to action for all of us budding artists.

Stories are powerful
Storytelling, experiences, journey, quest – whatever label you use, a narrative arc is going to resonate with people. A panel about enhancing the museum experience asked “What’s the epic win for your user?” In Narrating the Crowd, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and his brother showed off their project, The Kahani Movement, which is capturing the history of Indian-American immigrants by asking people to record their own family’s stories. “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share,” they said.

Stories help us remember information. In his Perfectly Irrational presentation, Stanford prof Dan Ariely explained how we are motivated by short-term rewards by telling the story of how he treated himself to a movie day every time he gave himself a painful injection he needed to treat his liver disease. That kept him on track and made sure he got his medicine. I”ll never forget that story, and as a result, that lesson will stay with me.

Open Up
NASA has embraced President Obama’s call to government agencies to become more transparent, and as a result this massive, aging organizations is connecting with new fans in a way that hasn’t been seen in a long time. All of their content is in the public domain, which means anyone can participate in space research and exploration.

Embrace Contradiction
You can be a cool science museum, an open bureaucracy, a warm-hearted business person, a funny girl, a designer who fights malnutrition. In fact those apparent contradictions are often where we find the most interesting people and projects.

Bonus – 5 Cool Web sites
Each of these was mentioned in a SXSW talk. Click and explore!

Apture.com – add contextual multimedia content to any site
www.Walking-papers.org - print maps, add notes and scan them back to share with others
www.Futureofcontext.com and www.explainthis.org -making online journalism more relevant
http://www.data.gov/ – more data than you could ever ask for

This session’s description of itself best sums it up: a case study on how the California Academy of Sciences - a traditional museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park — transformed itself into a global online education and research presence and integral social hub for the City, using the best tools and techniques of technology, social media and design.

Jonathan Denholtz, the museum’s director of interactive media and Maria Gidudice, a designer who consults with the museum, explained how they transformed an “150-year-old dusty institution into an organization that’s committed to experiential 21st century learning.”

Sound familiar, higher education friends? 

Their approach covers 4 main phases of a museum visitor’s experience:

• Inspire (pre-visit)
• Enhance (during)
• Extend (post-visit)
• Export (the virtual experience)

Unfortunately Denholtz and Gidudice were a little too giving with the crowd, so audience questions took over the session and we didn’t hear about the museum’s in-depth approach in each of these areas. But even without that it’s a thoughtful example of a way to frame your audience.

Here’s what they did get to:

Inspire (pre-visit)

• 70 percent of a museum’s revenue comes from the admissions gate. This is good during the first year, but more challenging as traffic levels off.
• CAS uses the web, mobile, social media and hybrid exhibits
• Segmenting the audience
  -CAS uses social media to target 20-30 somethings to publicize Night Life - Thursday evening parties where you pay $12 for a DJ and dancing at the museum. They also sell drinks. Attract 3,000 people every week.

Enhance (during the visit)

• How do you focus on an experience and not just information?
• Audio tours for CAS haven’t been super successful. Now they’re trying downloadable tours built around specific themes. Connects different exhibits while giving people a reason to come back multiple times.
• Look at user-generated vs. curated content
• What is the epic win for the user?

Export (virtual experience)

• The museum can only hold 2 million visitors annually, so how can they reach more people?
• Your Web site can be more than just an information repository. Create new, compelling content that keeps people coming back.

Photo by Kevin Dooley

This solo presentation from Scott was the last session on Saturday, and it was the perfect way to cap off my first day. He did a terrific job of infusing his talk with both enthusiasm and practicality:

There are people everywhere looking to connect. He showed a screenshot of a girl named Erin writing on Invisible Children’s Facebook page, asking if there was anywhere near her in Chicago who would like to do something for the movement together. “Erin’s are everywhere!” he proclaimed. Referred to Erin throughout presentation.

A movement=big change! People identify themselves with it: I’m an… environmentalist, feminist, evangelical

“History of the world is defined by what happens when people meet up.”

You go to a movement’s Web site and it says “Watch us! Download us! Friend us! Follow us!” User thinks “What about ME?”

Many movements suffer from the illusion of engagement. So you signed our pledge – so what? It’s easier than ever to have pseudo-followers, but…

Followers are great if you’re starting a cult, or a dictatorship, or an autocracy.

How to engage followers?

• Distribute responsibility, not just info or tasks.
• Get people to self-organize and connect
• Watch what happens when people connect and share stories.
• On Meetup, people use “Let’s” in their posts a lot. “Let’s build a business together!”
• Go from Me to We

“Organizing the world’s people (not information) is really the heart of the internet,” says Scott.

Movement strategy: BE EVERYWHERE! But that’s impossible. So, crowdsource your everywhereness.

A movement is: “universal distribution, leadership factory, local representation, personal care and contact, turn people into participators, turn your audience into an army.” –Rick Warren, pastor

Engine of Sustained Movement
1. Get followers and fans around the mission.
2. Get them interactging online globally.
3. Meetup locally. (“Use the internet to get off the internet.”)

Set things up so that leaders can emerge. “Who’s going to be in charge of____________?”

ASK for commitment! People will surprise you.

Small organization? Think of yourself as a node that ‘s part of a larger movement, and tap into that power.

I expected this panel to be kinda off the wall, but I was pleasantly surprised at how prepared and organized everybody was. Way to go, comedians! Hargarave asked each panelist to share their top 3 tips for successful online comedy:

Malkof

1. Put together a great team.
2. It’s all about the idea: Be original!
   -Something that stands out
   -Something you love
   -Should be able to sum it up in one sentence (Think about it like a media pitch)
3. Think big; have a long-term plan.

Rubin

1. Have a hook
   -The reason you’d want to send it to your friend, beyond just the fact that it’s funny
2. Think Visually
   -Rubin showed this “Luigi Finally Snaps” bit to the room and noted afterwards that the biggest laughs came from the non-verbal jokes.
   -Even if something is text based, maybe you can make it visual – can you turn it into a chart?
3. Feel free to ignore comments.
   -If even half of the comments on a piece are positive, that’s great!

Wilson

1. Consistency
   -Make something often
   -Give people a taste of your ideas
   -Get them in the habit of coming back
2. Publicity
   -The Cyanide & Happiness team lets anyone put their stuff anywhere, and that has helped build their audience
3. Passion
   -Cheesy, but true
   -This is fun content, but people are working really hard on it

Cockerham

1. The title is by far the most importnat thing
   -Get a joke in the title
   -Anything with the word “prank” will rise in search rankings fast
   -Use “vs.” e.g. Shark vs. Octopus
2. Make the audience feel smart and useful
   -Cockerham posted 2 different quizzes about book titles. The easy one got 4-5 times more traffic than the difficult one.
   -People like being surprised at how clever they are.
3. Nurture relationships with link-keeping gatekeepers.

Other tips:

-When you run out of steam for fresh content — and that will happen — link to other people’s stuff.
-Regarding self-promotion – if your content is good, people will appreciate it.

Random:

An audience member asked the panel if they ever think about or are concerned about the lack of females in comedy. The panel – 5 males who had just finished showing a bunch of clips about video games and beer – cited Tina Fey as proof that there are plenty of female voices in comedy. Inspired by the Visual Note-Taking panel earlier, I drew a sketch to capture this part of the session:

#futureofcontext

This was one of the most intriguing, thoughtful panels I’ve ever been to. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen wrote about how they prepared for and ran the panel, and their work really paid off in a terrific presenatation:

Definition of Context: Something that precedes or comes right after what you’re talking about.

Thompson asked “How do we encounter news?”

Chances are that what you’re hearing about healthcare reform is episodic. It’s hard to keep track of. Constant, torrential.
We sell you quantity and newness of headlines – every time you go to NY Times home page, you expect to see new headlines that were updated just minutes ago.

We believe that over time, all these headlines will cohere into real knowledge. But evidence indicates this is actually debilitating. So we start gravitating to things we don’t really need an attention span for. So….

We need a larger framework and system to organize all these episodic bits. Create an intellectual framework and systemic information.

This is good for readers, but also for news producers. CONTEXT SELLS!! This American Life’s financial crisis reporting – “The Giant Pool of Money” has been enormously popular.

***

Rosen asked “What is the future of the timeless web?” Rosen: I’m a pragmatist. We advance when we have a really good problem.

“In order for news to be informative, people need to be informable,” Rosen said. We can’t receive updates to software that was never installed.

After listening to This American Life’s financial crisis series, Rosen “found myself following financial news with ease.”

***

Harris: Think about 2 ways of walking around a museum:
1. You wander around on your own, staring at art and reading a little card next to each piece that lists the artist’s name and the title of the work.
2. An art historian guides you through a tour of select pieces, explaining the historical significance, the painter’s state of mind at the time, his personal background, etc.

Trained musicians here more complex patterns in music than someone who doesn’t play an instrument.

Context and familiarity deepen our understanding.

Journalism is structured around an article. How valuable is that?

Harris founded http://www.apture.com/publishers/ – super cool platform/plug-in that brings rich video, reference articles, images, maps, etc. on to your site so readers can get more context without leaving.

***

Thompson: NPR creates topic pages, but he worries that their approach to context on the web too closely mirrors other formats. What’s the effect when we just sell context as more info?

Context should be the foundation. The episodic stuff should be the “More info…”

Context is not just a collection of links that looks like a fancy google search. Are we creating a topic ghetto?

Harris: Use past content you’ve already created to help provide context.

It’s writing something today that still has value in the future. It doesn’t go out of date.

Object-oriented storytelling. Engineers never do work they can’t use a second time. That helps scale context.

The movie “Food Inc” helps people understand the food industry. You put someone through that movie, they come out the other side as someone who now understands.

The web REWARDS context – google searches! Wikipedia pages are often the top search result.

Thompson quickly hacked together an WordPress site: http://www.themoneymeltdown.com/ to gather and archive quality stories about financial crisis. 50,000 people looked at it 75,000 times in 1 month.

It’s ok to pull together links, but you start to lose context when it’s just automated.

Rosen: Freedom of the Press includes the right to avoid and ignore the press! There are people who don’t want to be informed. But let’s start with what people do care about and expand from there.

Get people to do something: make things easier for the reader; Incorporate game mechanics (What if a news site was more like Super Mario Bros?)

Rosen: How are we doing at turning mystified users into people who understand something?

Think of journalism as a source of continuing education for readers.

Reorganize an article as a quest for clarity, not just reporting on something.

The panel created www.futureofcontext.org to continue the conversation.

Also check out http://explainthis.org/ – Started by Rosen. A demand-driven assignment desk where people can ask to have something explained and journalists can respond. Not much traffic yet.

YouTube’s Margaret Gould Stewart joined TED Talks Director of Film and Video Jason Wishnow and Damian Kulash, he of the OK Go and Treadmills viral video fame. The session was the perfect blend of informative and entertaining.

Some of the big points:

• “Viral” doesn’t have to mean 10 million views. It’s people responding to a clip and feeling compelled to share it. The numbers may be different for everybody. Try your best to set a goal, and see what happens. TED hoped to get 40,000 views on their first video. Now their talks have been watched 230 million times!
• Match the style to your content and purpose. TED Talks need high production values, mutltiple angles and close ups to help make the lectures come alive on camera. But the low-budget, single-camera approached was important for the first OK Go videos because that was unusual for a music video and made it clear the band made it themselves. It felt more personal and helped fans connect with them.
• Most common traits of viral videos: Inspiration, surprise, a sense of wonder, clever and POSITIVE. “People don’t really like sharing negative stuff,” Stewart said.
• Kulash says internet communities have a “permeable wall,” so this means you should involve your community by hosting shoot-offs, inviting or linking to parodies, holding contests, etc.
• You don’t have to always create content–you can be a curator too, like Fail Blog.
• Wishnow says there is no one way to reach your audience. You have to be “platform agnostic.” TED posts videos on their own site, YouTube, iTunes and many others.
• Emededibility is key. On average, during the first 48 hours a video is posted on YouTube, half of its traffic is from people watching it on some other site. Bloggers want to keep people on their own site, so they’re most likely to share a video they can embed.
• Your video’s title and meta-data are just as important as SEO on Google. Wishnow suggests adjusting your title for a video based on didfferent audiences and platforms.
• Make something people want to watch multiple times. The average viewer watched Ok Go’s new “This Too Shall Pass – Rube Goldberg Machine version” video (below) 4-5 times.

The panel’s favorite viral videos:

Kulash said they had a team of 60 engineers working on this video for months. It took 65 takes, and they only got all the way through the sequence successfully 3 times.

I think this one definitely has the element of surprise.

Kulash added that any good viral video should have boobs or kittens.

And how do you wrap up a viral video panel? By making one of course! Kulash and Wishnow used the audience to remake the surprised kitten video. Can you spot me?

And now, because I can’t stop, 3 of my favorite viral videos. Interesting that they all share the traits listed above:

First, a great example of using positivity, for a subject that could easily have been much more serious.

Next, a beautiful video that shows the power of fun and humor to change people’s behavior. Good lesson for, oh I don’t know – everything.

Finally, this video just makes me happy and bolsters my wish that sometimes life was a musical.

University of Kansas Professor Nancy Baym led an interactive session about conducting great interviews, whether for broadcast, print or recruiting. Some of the points were pretty standard, but overall it was a helpful discussion. Some main points:

• “What questions should I ask?” is not the first step in prepping for an interview.
• You have to understand who you’re interviewing, but also what audience the interview is for.
• Design questions with a story arc in mind.
• If crowdsourcing questions (i.e. “What would you like me to ask They Might Be Giants”) – make sure your crowd matches the audience the interview is for. Don’t ask fanboys to give you questions for an interview that’s meant for a general audience.
• Don’t call it an interview – say ‘I’d like to talk to you about ______” or “Let’s have a discussion.” Often less intimidating.
• Dry questions elicit dry answers. “What do you love about your job?” will probably pull out more passion from someone than “What’s the best part of your job?”
• Give people a chance to tell stories. Rather than ask “Are you a self-starter?” try “Tell me about a time when you had to build something from the ground up.”
• If you’ve noticed someone often repeats themselves in interviews, pull out one nugget from one of those interviews and ask them to elaborate and expand on that point. This will help get new answers.
• Instead of e-mail interviews, consider an online chat. Real time back and forth, and you’ve got a transcript of the interview built in.

I asked the crowd to share their favorite all-time interview questions and got some great responses:

• What’s next for you?
• Why do you keep coming back to this (line of work, perspective, city, etc.)?
• What do you wish people asked you?
• What do you wish I had asked you?
• What did you want to be when you grew up?
• What’s your story?
• Do you have any questions for me?
• How have you changed? How have you grown?
• How have past experiences changed or informed your current situation?
• What gets you out of bed in the morning?
• What keeps you up at night?

For more on conducting great interviews, see my post on 10 Interview Tips from former Texas Monthly Editor-in-Chief Evan Smith.

Visual Note-Taking 101 was the perfect follow-up to Dan Roam’s Why Words Won’t Work session. The session kicked off with free sketch books (pictured left) and tons of enthusiasm from panelists Kleon, Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde and Dave Gray. They each have impressive drawing portfolios, but Brown tried to demystify it for the drawing newbies in the audience.

“It’s actually not that sophisticated. It just looks like it is when you’re finished.”

Each panelist took a turn offering basic tips to get started taking visual notes:

• Use bullets, frames and dividers to break up the page and organize information. (“Bullets are for guns AND sketch notes,” Kleon quipped.)
• Tie your bullets to the theme of the talk. Taking notes on healthcare? Use little red crosses for your bullets.
• Look at comic book pages for ideas on how to frame a page and call out dialogue.
• Adding a shadow is a simple way to enhance your drawing and “make it look like you know what you’re doing.”
• Take notes for yourself–don’t worry about what other people think.
• Use font size, underlining, etc. to emphasize certain text and create information hierarchy within your notes.
• You can “sketch” text, not just pictures. Make your words visual. Rohde is a master of this.
• Slow down when you’re drawing. This helps you filter out the crap you don’t need to write down.
• Practice! When you’re sitting at the bus stop or the airport, just start drawing the alphabet or straight parallel lines. One established artist the panel mentioned practices drawing the alphabet every day.
• Develop your own key to call attention to portions of your notes. For example always use an asterisk to note that something is an action item.

My sketch from the session. Rohde explained how to draw text and Gray taught us how to draw people.

Related:

Kleon: How to Draw Faces
Gray: How to Draw a Stick Figure

#Viznotes tweets

Roam says you have to talk about an idea and draw it in order to truly understand it.

Dan Roam’s SXSW Interactive talk on visual thinking was far and away a highlight of the conference for me. His book, “The Back of the Napkin,” has been on my reading list for awhile, and it just shot to the top after hearing him speak.

Roam’s central point: EVERYONE is a visual thinker. 75 percent of your brain is devoted to visual processing.

“We are going to save the world by drawing pictures,” Roam told the audience. He argues that drawing pictures can help us solve problems and give shape to new ideas.

What do leaders today do to clarify their ideas? They talk, talk, talk, talk. We’ve come to equate intelligence with our ability to speak. That’s a big mistake.

Standardized testing focuses on math, critical reading and writing. It ignores visual reasoning. But while our educational system may ignore visual thinking as soon as we leave kindergarten, some of the world’s greatest minds keep returning to it.

“I rarely think in words at all. My visual images have to be translated laboriously into conventional mathematical terms.”  –Albert Einstein.

Physicist Richard Feynman was so bold as to say Einstein failed at the unified theory because he stopped thinking in concrete physical images. Roam shared a collection of presidential doodles, including sketches from JFK, Reagan and Obama. Reagan’s were drawn during a cabinet meeting.

The Fox vs. The Hummingbird

Roam says you’re one of two kinds of people:

Fox: LINEAR, Clever, Analyzing, A little self-satisfied, Eyes on the prize
Hummingbird: SPATIAL, Spontaneous, Synthesizing, Flighty

Business is wary of having a hummingbird in the room instead of a fox.  BUT…

A fully formed idea emerges when you combine the fox and hummingbird (Linear and Spatial). Roam calls this hybrid approach ViVId Thinking:

Visual
Verbal
Inter-Dependent

The fundamental truths of Vivid Thinking:

1.  We haven’t really explored an idea until we’ve both talked about it and looked at it.
2. We can’t share an idea until we’ve done both.

Imagine if Obama had used a flip chart to explain his healthcare goals!

Roam downloaded the proposed healthcare bill last fall. After reading pages of dense text, he wondered: Where is the vision, the big picture—literally—in the 1,400-page healthcare bill?

Roam decided the bill needed to be interpreted, so he drew it out and posted it on SlideShare (below). As of mid-March, it has been downloaded 200,000 times. Most of the commenters say “Thank you for clarifying!”

Fox News saw his slides and gave him 7 minutes on prime time to use his drawings to explain the bill. The White House communications office saw the segment, called him and said “We need to talk.” His response? “How about we draw?” He’s now working with the White House in some super secret capacity.

“He who draws the best picture wins.” Roam is not a healthcare expert, but he drew the best picture.

Roam is a fan of the old standby, the 5 W’s (+ How). He says Who, What, Where, When and Why actually act as a coordinate system to help us understand our world. In his drawings, he uses a portrait to represent Who, a map to show Where, a timeline to show When, etc.

He adds that whenever a speaker starts to make a list, you should start to draw.

I can’t really draw very well, but I’m excited about exploring this new way of thinking. I’m sure my crayon-wielding kindergarten self would be proud.

P.S. – I heard a wonderful interview on NPR last year where an artist wondered why we stop drawing after childhood. I’m determined to find it and will share a link here when I do. Huge thanks to Austin Kleon, who found the segment for me! Take a listen – Mo Willems on Getting Adults to Draw.

Good grief.

But in 2010, I didn’t hear the word even once. [And the people rejoiced.]

No, this year was all about helping the planet, deepening relationships, telling stories, finding your passion, solving problems and understanding each other. Your basic save-the-world stuff.

Just look at some of these panel titles:

• How to Spark a Movement in the 21st Century
• Games for Good
• Haiti Crisis Camp: Techies Unite for Earthquake Relief
• Don’t Stop Believin’: Singing our Way to Changing the World
• RT: I’m Going to Kill Myself. Preventing Suicide Online
• What Guys are Doing to Get More Girls in Tech!
• How Nerds Can Foster Democracy in Local Government
• Kicking Recession Ass With A Killer Company Culture
• It’s Time to Save the World with Design Thinking

 Even the business sessions seemed to have a heart:

• Millionaire or Artist? How About Both?
• Unsexy and Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype
• The Socially Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doing Good
• Shameless Self Promotion Without Looking Like an @#$%^&!

 I’m not sure what brought on this shift, but I love it.

There were less self-promotional pitches in the Q&A times, less shoving business cards in your face, less bickering between panelists. Even the corporate lounges had a feel-good vibe: AOL’s Seed Lounge asked people to share SXSW stories and photos online, and the Pepsi Refresh project offered up $50,000 for the best digital social change idea.

I’m sure some of my impressions are simply a result of the panels I self-selected. And I don’t want to sound as if I’m opposed to all talk of making money—I think it’s a valid and necessary pursuit.

But I certainly haven’t built my own career around the biggest paycheck possible. And I don’t go to SXSW to make money. I go to learn, get inspired and connect. Judging from this year’s conference, the world is with me.

Bonus: Books to Change Your World

A list of titles suggested by SXSW presenters and attendees:

• And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey, by Studs Terkel
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World, by Ed Emberley
• Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, by Nancy Duarte

Stay tuned this week, as I’ll be posting recaps, insights and resources from panels, including fabulous visual thinking stuff from the Visual Note-Taking 101 panel and Dan Roam’s Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won’t Work; thoughts on better storytelling from The Future of Context; How to Make a Viral Video and more.