Still, I have fun every year. The best part for me is seeing my circle of SXSW friends expand and mature. My first year at the show, I fell in with a fun group of junior reporters, editors, bloggers, PR people, and developers. I’ve largely stuck with the same tight-knit group of friends; we only really see each other in March, and every year we expand the group just a bit. And each year, we’ve grown up just a bit–we now own companies, run magazines, launch startups, and have the skills to create really interesting things. And instead of working the doors at parties, we’re hosting our own.

The other great thing about SXSW this year is it was my first year not being responsible for writing anything about the show. No one was expecting copy out of me, so I could actually enjoy the panels and talk to people without rushing to file a story.

This whole not-writing thing suits me, because the really fun news at SXSW is the stuff that can’t be written about. Stealth startups, budding business partnerships, not-yet-announced financing rounds, alpha apps that totally suck right now but have a ton of potential…seeing that stuff is what pulls me back to Austin, year after overcrowded year.

I’ll just put this out there: Darth Vader stood next to Tark and watched as he blew up Alderaan, a defenseless planet. I don’t think I need to tell you that playing a role–even as an accessory–in blowing up an entire planet populated by millions of people is simply beyond the pale.

There’s no redemption possible for that. No “take off my mask, Luke”…”But you’ll die”…GOOD! He blew up a freaking planet!

And frankly, it’s completely ridiculous that Vader’s big redemptive act is to flush Palpatine down the drain, doff his cap, and then go join Obi-wan and Yoda as they haunt the victory party.

Guess what, Vader: Any father would toss an emperor over the railing to save his son from being killed by lightning shooting out of the dude’s fingers. That’s just baseline parenting, and it makes up for nothing. Even if all Vader ever did was slaughter a classroom of younglings–if we completely overlook all his crimes from A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back–he still didn’t do enough good to deserve a redemptive scene at the end of Return of the Jedi.

Lucas might have had his reasons for wanting to save Anakin/Vader. But should his word trump the millions of Alderaanians, who were suddenly silenced by a Death Star? No way.

“Darth, if you wanted to go to the campfire with your friends, you should have thought of that before you helped blow up that planet that one time.”

1. Didn’t even make it out of the Austin airport without eating great BBQ when I landed. Who knew the Salt Lick stand in the airport was open at 10:30 am?
2. While queuing up for a certain gadget to go on sale, I ended up waiting in line behind a prominent tech/startup lawyer from Boston, and we slowly discovered we have lots of friends in common.
3. While standing on the sidewalk with a coworker Friday night, three different groups of friends happened to pass by in succession, while a fourth pulled up in a pedicab. My friend thought I was some crazy Austin maven (when it was really just dumb luck).
4. Pedicabs as preferred mode of transportation
5. My panel on Saturday afternoon was standing-room-only; in fact, some of my friends tried to get in but were turned away. So, it was a quantitative success, at least. (There’s a good writeup here)
6. The panel moderator, Bob Garfield from NPR/Ad Age, said he wanted to punch me in the face. I called him a not-nice name. All in good fun (seriously, he was amazing).
7. Meeting the dude from @Longreads, my absolute favorite Twitter follow.
8. 90s karaoke after-afterparty with some coworkers and assorted other friends, half of whom are in good bands. We did three-part harmony on “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
9. Theophilus London did a 90-minute hip-hop set at the Bing party for about 60 people, and it was amazing.
10. Ted Leo solo show–just a man and his guitar
11. Local Natives show–like Beach House + Fleet Foxes. Awesome
12. Vimeo hosted a european-style rave at a giant abandoned power plant, with an amazing light show. When we got there we realized that Diplo was the DJ. Afterward, hosted a chilled out afterparty for some of the Vimeo folks in the Hilton lobby.
13. Excellent copywriting tips from the editor of Groupon
14. Geeking out with a handful of transmedia experts at GMD’s party
15. Ran into my college newspaper editor, who just finished a stint at Camera Bag and is now a researcher at Carnegie Mellon.
16. Watching the JWT folks have fun with the JWT BBQ truck and corresponding (disturbing) video, which was projected on walls around town.
17. So many great food trucks!
18. Club soda and Diet Coke, all night every night.

So this is amazing. Can’t wait for SXSW! (which, by the way, I’ll be blogging about on my other site, adgeek.us. Follow along at home!)

Guys. Just because something is on a slick PowerPoint slide does not make it true. This is not a knock at all on PowerPoint—the best and most dangerous thing about PowerPoint, though, is that the software makes it easy to take bad ideas and make them look respectable and polished.

Our brains are wired to quickly determine the reliability and validity of ideas, pictures, people, and words, and external cues play a big role in that. If a book is nicely bound, if a movie is beautifully shot, if a man is well-groomed, if a song is well sung, we give more credence to it. It’s professional.

And therein is the dilemma. Good PowerPoint slides are easy to create. Good ideas are very difficult to create. But bad ideas can become good PowerPoint slides–we’ve all seen it.

Slideshare makes this situation even more dangerous. Edelman can put some sloppy thought into a social media deck, throw it on Slideshare, have Steve Rubel blog about it, and before you know it, the deck has 12K views and nobody’s noticed that it doesn’t really say much and a lot of the supporting data are mis-used.

Exhibit A: Attentionomics in the Digital Space-Time Continuum, produced by Edelman Digital. It’s embedded below; please join me on a brief tour.

Slides 1 and 2 are title slides—skip. (Although, frankly, a deck with two title slides? C’mon. This deck is about the “economics of attention,” and by slide 2 you’ve already sent the message that your branding is more important than either your ideas or my time. Fail.)

[That said it's a catchy title, albeit only catchy thanks to Steven Levitt.  I'd argue though that the deck is made in keeping with its own principles—the real reason these slides exist is to promote those showcased in the titles, and not necessarily the ideas beyond...]

I’m going to focus on two slides in particular. Not because I don’t take issue with the others, but a slide-by-slide breakdown came out to around 2,500 words, and you probably don’t want to read that much.

Click first to slide 7: “Trust in the age of streams requires frequency.” Pretty graphic of a burbling stream. Scroll up, read the slide, digest it for a moment, then come on back and we’ll continue.

…

[They've shortened a complex dynamic of viewership, reader attention, channel variation and content into some sort of new-agey sound bite.  "Trust in the age of streams"?  What is this, Myst?]

First off, ick—PR people and brands will be more trusted if they bug us with greater frequency? That can’t be right. And here’s the argument: “People need to hear things three to five times for it to effect a behavior change. Therefore, you must craft a strong narrative and have it reverberate across both traditional and social news streams.”

I absolutely agree with the second part. But that first sentence perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with PowerPoint thinking. Is there a citation for that little insight? It may be based on a credible study, but the context has been removed for the sake of fitting it on a slide, and now the statement doesn’t even make sense.

[Maybe you just need to see the same thought on the next few slides for it to seem more credible...]

Some amazing ideas only need to be heard once in order to change behavior. Some bad ideas can be repeated thousands of times and still be rejected. And by focusing on the frequency of repetition instead of the quality of the idea, we’re either assuming that the idea is good (and good ideas are rare), or that a bad idea will be accepted if only it is repeated a few more times. That requires too much cynicism for me to accept, despite the fact that the Black Eyed Peas’ success shows there might be truth in it.

If I could rewrite Slide 7 to be true, it’d say: “People generally need to hear a good idea three to five times before it affects behavior. But the odds of your idea being a good one are slim, so I wouldn’t worry too much about repeating it—you’ll probably just annoy people. Go back to your white board instead.”

[Agreed.  Brands need to realize that endless repetition of a failed marketing message won't result in success.  It will, however, result in an annoyed audience and a big dip in social marketing ROI]

Click through to Slide 10: an abuse of analytics if ever I’ve seen one. Take a moment to check it out.

…

The chart says it demonstrates “How Video Content Decays” by measuring “Online Video Attention Spans.” When viewing videos that are 10 seconds long, 89% of viewers finish them. Less than 10% of viewers make it through a 5-minute video. Around half the viewers of a 60-second video make it through.

Perhaps this measures online attention spans like it claims to. More likely, though, it measures the overall value of content, weighted for length. For instance, here’s a rephrasing: Only 10% of 5-minute videos are worth watching all the way through once you’ve started playing them. I’d say that’s accurate (if a bit generous). Conversely, once a snappy title or thumbnail has enticed you to click on a 10-second video, it’s almost certainly worth the investment to finish it.

[Agreed, the statistic seems to hinge on the assumption that content is fungible and consistent, that somewhere there's a 5-minute video that provides the same content experience as a 10-second video.  Otherwise we're not just grading attention spans, we're grading content]

Again, Edelman is using stats to avoid talking about the quality of content, or more likely to justify the low amount of time people spend with its content (marketers are probably making more 5-minute videos than 10-second videos). If you make a fantastic 5-minute video, “attention spans” won’t even come into play. People will watch it. They’ll share it. They’ll take time out of their busy schedule at the office or at home. My friend Steve IM’d me an amazing video today, and I paused a meeting so we could all watch it together. Slide 10 is not about content decay, it’s not about attention spans, and it’s not about our aversion to 5-minute videos. It’s about how sucky most content is.

[Couldn't agree more.  If anything, social media teaches us that there is still plenty of room and demand for long form content, but it needs to be informative and engaging.  It's not like people have stopped thinking in full sentences.  Successful thought leaders aren't simply condensing their messages to 10-second videos; they're providing interesting content in both short form and long form that all dovetails together.]

Edelman’s interpretation of these stats totally ignores the sophisticated, almost instantaneous process we go through when we evaluate content. Time of engagement–whether on videos, web sites, tweet streams, or blog posts–is a decent measure of how good stuff is. Of course, that’s a dangerous statement for a PR person to include in a PowerPoint slide, because it’s an easy leap from there to the conclusion that almost everything marketers make is stuff that people don’t actually want to engage with. And yet that’s true, isn’t it?

This deck looks like a very involved way of saying “everything matters about your content except how good your content is.” Which is sad, because marketers are expending energy on building a better pipeline for their crap instead of questioning whether people want crap in the first place.

[I'm sure that no one involved in putting this deck together would say that content quality is irrelevant in social media -- that would be ridiculous.  But the emphasis in this deck is on getting attention, period -- and it seems to be betting on the notion that content quality IS irrelevant to getting initial attention.  I don't know if that's true or not.  I hope it's not true.  But even if we take that notion at face value, you can't build your brand around mere attention-getting.  Sooner or later people will realize there's nothing to you but a noisemaker, and then your brand is dead.  Remember those irritating HeadOn commercials?]

People make time for compelling experiences. They always will. If a trusted friend tweets a recommendation to “CHECK THIS OUT!,” I will. I’ll find time, I’ll bookmark it, I’ll email it to myself, I’ll star the tweet for later, but I’ll figure out a way to check it out. That’s the truth, and that should be the goal of marketing. Instead of optimizing our pipeline to better dump crap on people, let’s make stuff that’s so good, people want to spend time with it.

But first, let’s make sure we pitch it with a good PowerPoint slide. The only thing more tragic than a bad idea on a good slide is a good idea on a bad one.

Full disclosure, I do a lot of work for Microsoft—including Microsoft Office 2010—through my job at JWT. And I don’t speak for JWT here or anywhere.

Same thing applies to Steve…he doesn’t represent Banyan Branch, and his agency does some work for Microsoft as well (but our friendship predates either of us working with Microsoft, JWT, or Banyan Branch).

A couple of my journalist friends were a bit creeped out by the extent to which brands are listening to customers, fans, and detractors, which I thought was common knowledge by now. Just so you all know, yes, companies are monitoring what you say about them on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, comment boards, etc. If it’s public, it’s being scraped and served up as market intelligence.

It’s not spying and it’s not a bad thing at all. Companies listen to online conversations so they can monitor what people are saying about them, find out what people say about competitors, and gather feedback that leads to improvements in products or operations. It’s really a no-brainer, and it benefits everyone. If it creeps you out, stop tweeting/commenting/blogging. (In which case we call in THIS guy to gather info…but wouldn’t you rather we just read your tweets?)

Anyway, the column and the panel are about best practices for conducting these monitoring activities. Obviously, the live discussion will be more fun than words on a page (if only because there could be dissenting opinions), but check out the column and let me know what you think. Any questions or issues we should be addressing during the panel?

If you’re in the NY area, you should come. The panel will be in JWT’s office building (a sponsor of Social Media Week). Register here.

I participated in a BYU-Idaho student documentary about Mormon art (probably because I wrote a blog post agreeing with a Slate blog post about the lack of great Mormon artists). It’s well done and it’s embedded above…give it a view and a good rating.

The documentary starts with a famous quote from Orson F. Whitney, a leader in the church about a hundred years ago: “We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”

The question the Slate article addresses and that I address during my comments in the video is simply “Where are they? Why hasn’t our culture produced them yet?”

If there’s one negative about the video, it’s that everyone doesn’t agree with me all the time like they’re supposed to. There are a few local/indie musicians and artists who participated, along with academics and writers. The creatives were understandably defensive about the idea that Mormons can’t create great art (and, seemingly, to the idea that they themselves aren’t creating great art).

But there’s a distinction between creativity and greatness that the documentary doesn’t make quite clear. Mormons can be creative…ANYONE can be creative. Write a song–any song–and boom, you’ve created. Write two songs and now you have a tendency to create, therefore you are creative. Get some friends to create  bass parts and drum beats for your songs, and now they’re creative too. And you can book a show with your friends at a live music club and now you’re creative performers. Which is great, I encourage everyone to do just that! It’s rewarding and fun and I guarantee that your faith won’t stand in your way.

But that’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about great art. There are millions upon millions of creative people. There are millions of artists. But then there are the thousands of people who qualify for the moniker “Great Artist.” The question at hand isn’t WHETHER Mormons can make it onto that list, it’s WHY they haven’t.

A common answer (and one that was repeated by almost everyone in the documentary) is the proportionality argument–”there just aren’t that many Mormons out there.” To which I say “bah.” There are 6 million Mormons in the U.S. There are 6.5 million Jewish people. It ain’t about the numbers.

Anyway, I don’t want to retread all the stuff from the video and my earlier post, but read/watch/comment…I love talking about this stuff and would be interested in hearing your views.

Here’s a fun talking point to get started, which I wish they’d addressed in the documentary: Does the Mormon ideal of “faith, hope, charity, and love” even let us look at life in a way that non-Mormons would consider authentic? This Salon article from last week seems to be saying “if yes, then barely.”

Instead of doing that, I’ll just link to other people’s rants. Today’s rant comes from Danny Sullivan, who is definitely on my short list of brilliant tech writers. Sullivan broke a nifty story last week about a lady who is suing Google because Google Maps’ walking directions allegedly directed her, on foot, onto a highway where she was hit by a car.

Great story with all the right ingredients: a crazy lady we can all shake our heads at, who had a problem we can all identify with (who hasn’t been led astray by Google Maps at some time or other?) And it plays perfectly into the whole “don’t trust technology” mindset that old people love, and the “haha stupid people” mindset that young people love.

Anyway, a tipster led Sullivan to the story, and he posted it on SearchEngineLand. And a million news outlets piled onto the story, like they always do, including TV, radio, other bloggers, and professional reporters. And, as always happens, Sullivan’s site got very little credit for breaking the story, even though his screenshot was repurposed (read: stolen) by lots of reputable news sites.

You might not think this is such a big deal…but that’s only because you’re not running a blog that needs eyeballs to pay the bills, and you didn’t just get stiffed out of what could have been a million page views had everyone attributed properly.

But beyond the laziness/churlishness/competitiveness that keeps reporters from citing their sources, the bigger concern is the lazy reporting that lets this happen. I’ve seen it up-close and first-hand–a story breaks, and everyone uses that original story as the source material for their own reporting. These me-too stories almost never have sufficient fact-checking, because hey, this other reporter already did the verifying, right? And so from time to time you get flat-out wrong stories that are repeated far and wide before anyone figures out that there are mistakes. I know professional reporters who almost never pick up the phone or email ANYONE for verification…their “reporting” consists of grabbing recent stories and boiling them down a bit. On any given day, go to Google News or TechMeme to see these bloggers and reporters in action, piling onto stories but adding nothing original.

If you’re a news hound, watch out for journalists and news sources that do that (like, um, every TV news program except 60 Minutes and the Sunday morning shows). Breaking news is hard, and rare, and expensive. We ought to value news outlets that make the investment to provide original reporting.

While I’m running my mouth fingers, here ‘s a bonus tip:

• Don’t trust news outlets that use journalists as sources. Journalists interviewing journalists = big red flag. Means the TV producer is too lazy or too busy to get someone who is actually involved in the story, so they turn to an attention-hungry journalist who wants some camera time. I’ll tell some embarrassing stories about my own TV appearances someday, but for now, it suffices to say that I was rarely adequately prepared or expert on the subjects I was talking about.

Anyway, go read Sullivan’s rant. It’s a great look at the day-to-day hustle of breaking news and watching your story blow up.

Been thinking a lot about my own news consumption habits lately (as in…oh…the last 8 years). But especially today, because I totally missed the Nashville flood until my friend Whitney tweeted about it this afternoon. Honestly, hadn’t heard anything about it.

I spend pretty much all day every day immersed in tech news sites.When it comes to non-tech news, I get almost all of it from The Daily Show and from links I see posted on Twitter (I follow mostly journalists and news organizations on Twitter).I also read The New Yorker, Wired, and New York magazines, but those aren’t really sources of “hard news.” On a day-by-day level, my news consumption is admittedly a bit scattershot.

I don’t think I’m that different from my peers (could be wrong though), but I’m probably vastly different from older demographics for three reasons: I watch no TV news, read no newspapers, and listen to no radio. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I did any of those things…probably following the election results back in 2008. Overall, I rely on my Twitter friends to curate my news for me, instead of having an editor in a newsroom do it.

Sometimes I feel guilty about that. I know 60 Minutes does quality journalism, I know there is valuable information coming out of Meet the Press and the other Sunday morning talk shows. Many of the newshounds I respect swear by NPR. And say what you want about The New York Times: I think the organization serves an extremely important, hard-to-replicate public good.I even majored in print journalism in college! I’ve just never gotten into the habit of reading a newspaper or watching the serious news shows.

I’m too impatient to consume information that way. By the time the newspaper hits the front porch, it’s too old. And I’m not going to spend time watching a TV newscast that is 15 percent commercials, 10 percent “human interest stories,” 20 percent celebrity news. The web generation as a whole demands absolute relevance, and a very high signal-to-noise ratio that TV just doesn’t deliver. And besides, it’s so much faster to read a news story than to watch that same story read on the air.

I even feel that way about Sports Center.  Life is too short to spend an hour watching NASCAR and hockey highlights (and commercials), waiting for those two game recaps that I’m interested in.

I bumped into a good friend of mine recently who works as the host of her own web video show and also as a reporter for a national news show. She puts a lot of thought into how to help her shows grab viewers, especially younger viewers who are used to a level of interactivity that they get on the Web. Twitter use and crowd-sourced news are some of the more popular methods right now, but I think the jury is out on whether they’re effective at grabbing new viewers or just at ticking off existing viewers (and watering down the newscast with amateur news analysis from @JoeBlow28). If the networks and newspapers want me to change my media habits, it’s going to take something much more radical.

I’m not sure what that is. My friend is working on some great out-of-the-box ideas, so hopefully some of that will bear fruit. If/when the NYTimes has a better iPad app (and they will, soon), and if/when I get an iPad, I can see my NYTimes consumption increasing quite a bit. Especially if they update the content throughout the day. I would regularly browse a news format like that, and watch embedded videos about subjects I’m interested in. And I’d tolerate display ads, but probably not video ads. No time.

Would you? How do you get your news on a daily basis? I’m interested in hearing about different methods–mine’s perhaps too scattershot. Sorry Nashville. Get dry soon.

Like all communities, the SQL Server community has established social norms and best practices for itself. If you’re a DBA with a question, tweet about it using the #sqlhelp hashtag and someone in the community will probably respond to your request with help (either the answer itself, or a link where you can find the answer). I’ve seen extreme kindness around this hashtag, where the community will band together and spend an afternoon helping someone fix a bug or a piece of faulty coding, all in public, all on Twitter. Anyone that can jump in with a suggestion is encouraged to do so.

But there was a major kerfuffle last week around another social norm.

A SQL consultant who goes by the handle @SQLTech2 was called out on Twitter for plagiarizing a Microsoft white paper on his blog without attribution. The white paper was written by @PaulRandal, a SQL community heavyweight, and the plagiarism was called out by @MrDenny, another heavyweight. @SQLTech2 defended himself, then got a bit testy, and it spiraled into a big argument with all the SQL Server heavy hitters on Twitter against this one guy. Blog posts were written, lessons were learned, and a funny “Downfall of Hitler” parody video was posted on YouTube about the incident. And the next day they were showing that YouTube video in Microsoft Certified Master classes and chuckling about it.

This all happened within 24 hours, the community rising up to defend itself against plagiarism by someone outside the circle.

Anyway, these two examples demonstrate that communities, even (or especially) niche communities, have rules of engagement and initiation. I occasionally contribute to a blog that’s very high-profile in the world of mormon blogging (or “The Bloggernacle”). The bloggers and readers have a tight-knit community that interacts in the comment section, and the blog has a huge readership of non-commenters because it can be daunting to enter the conversation. There are lots of inside jokes and personal references, and the moderators keep a sharp eye out for arguments and trolls–and take pleasure in humiliating and then banning any newcomers who appear to be picking a fight. The moderators can appear harsh, but they treat their web site like a conversation. If a group of people who all know each other are having an interesting conversation and you butt in to say something obnoxious, they’re going to ask you to leave, usually in the same spirit in which your obnoxious comment was made. Rudeness begets rudeness, snark begets snark. And I get that–it’s a religious blog, after all, so all kinds of strangers are stopping by to say obnoxious things without first observing the discussion and learning the rules of engagement.

At this point, I was planning on sharing my notes from a SXSWi panel featuring Chris Brogan–which was the purpose of this post–but it’s late, this post is already long, and I’m boring myself (I can’t imagine why you’re still reading). To recap: be polite, be friendly, help people out, and people on the World Wide Web will like you. The End!