Fishing for votes for our fellow SXSW fish
Razorfish and some of our friends have submitted a few panel ideas for consideration at the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival, please take a moment to peruse our potential sessions and vote for your favorites by this Friday, August 31st. And we hope to see you in Austin in March!
The list of Razorfish panels are below…
Unsexy, But Mandatory, Side of Social Media: SEO
Social Media has a fast-growing influence on SEO as we know it: It affects Google’s alogrithms, Your friends’ photos show up on Bing results and LIKES and TWEETS can affect how your content appears in search engine results.
Our session will illustrate social’s effect on search show several tips and techniques on how to optimize your content and web properties to fare the best via several case studies.
The most well-known social media activities are flashy campaigns. We’ll uncover the less sexy but more valuable (long term) underbelly of SEO + social.
Speakers:
Matt Heindl Razorfish
Sri Nagubandi Razorfish
Give Us This Day Our Daily Brief
In social, speed makes stars and the briefs come in daily. Social campaigns shouldn’t be approached or implemented as a one-off effort. Rather, marketers should empower savvy staffers to ride the waves of the real-time “hive mind,” re-tooling their strategies weekly (or more often), to create and hold brand buzz. By defining a strong strategy, creating overarching briefs and constantly monitoring the space, brands will always be ready to respond quickly and smartly, even it’s unplanned (and unapproved).
Razorfish, a leading global digital agency, will share how they have created quick-fire, rapid response programs for some of their large, corporate clients, and present case studies from brands such as Axe, smart, and others, demonstrating how social listening programs can be used to keep online audiences entertained and wanting more.
Speakers:
Robert McCutcheon Razorfish
Matt Heindl Razorfish
Deconstructing Philanthropy: The Story of Good
Before digital communications, non-for-profits would message donors using direct mail and pamphlets for donations. Now, the most successful charities are employing stories to inspire and motivate donors and volunteers alike. As Google teaches audiences how to tell stories through digital with their re: brief campaigns, we see that storytelling in the digital becomes even more essential for non-for-profits. Using the charity: water and several local charities as case studies; we will explore the idea of stories for the charities as the ultimate motivator that elevates brand stories into action. Similarly, brands and start-ups will be able to learn the foundations of digital storytelling in order to communicate with their target audiences.
Speakers:
Raashi Bhalla Razorfish
Paull Young charity:water
Meta-Funny: the Psychology of Internet Humor
Has digital media created a new kind of funny? Do the constantly evolving modes of memes, response videos, and remixes make us laugh because they are “meta-funny,” drawing on the established forms endemic to electronic culture to create humor? In his largely unfunny “Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious,” Sigmund Freud deconstructed some Fin de siecle thigh slappers to identify both the universal and highly personal psychic operations that lead to a guffaw. As was his wont, he positions these observations as timeless truths, distilling the mechanics of humor to their essentials. Obviously, he did not consider YouTube or First World Problems in his analysis. So could new forms of humor develop, layering new context onto old? Or is it just the same old jokes recycled for a new medium? Funny you should ask. (This topic comes with two-drink minimum)
Speakers:
Tim Sheridan Razorfish
Suzanne Westenhoefer
One of the greatest lessons we can teach people as experience designers is that everything is not important. It seems an easy lesson to learn, since after all, it’s our job to sort through huge amounts of information in order to decide and to highlight what is important. Still, it may seem impolitic or it may conflict with our liberal sensibilities to simply say: “That’s not important.” As so we need help.
Our goal then is to provide simple ways to diagnose and treat the disease of the Inflated Importance.
Speaker: Robert Stribley Razorfish
Content Modeling: Where Content Meets Tech
Any good content strategy has to align with business goals, user needs, and editorial capabilities. And, under the good, a content management system (CMS) succeeds or fails based on its ability to support all three. How often have you heard content creators say “This CMS is awful!”?
This may not be because the CMS is inherently bad. Often it’s just not configured properly. We can’t convey every aspect of the content with examples, writing guidelines, and annotated wireframes. Instead, we create models that are used to communicate all the types of content, the elements they’re made up of, and their relationships to each other.
In this presentation a tech-friendly Content Strategist and a content-sympathetic CTO will discuss how to create content models that will spur discussion, identify gaps, align teams, resolve issues, and ultimately sit alongside functional specifications to define how a site - and the CMS that populates it - should be built.
Speakers:
Rachel Lovinger Razorfish
Cleve Gibbon Cognifide
Gibson Patterson is a Strategist, Social Media for Razorfish in Chicago. You can ask her to share her thoughts about her home state of Texas, as well as, her passion for movies and Pilates at @gibsonpatt
