There is no doubt SXSW was the place to be this month, as evidenced by shameless online bragging via tweets, Instagrams, wall posts, check-ins and posts that blew up the blogosphere. While navigating an event with 50,000 people was a challenge, one of it’s greatest rewards was bumping into friends, colleagues and clients. No wonder then that the most talked about startups this year were services that enabled users to detect who is around them by tapping into their social networks.
New and upgraded apps such as Sonar, Highlight, Glancee, Banjo and Kismet garnered the most attention. More than just geo-location, these location-based software services are about social discovery and ambient awareness. They are intended to help users discover the people around them who share friends or common interests. For a sufferer of FOMO (the fear of missing out), or someone lacking the social prowess to strike up conversation without an icebreaker, these apps could change the way you socialize, or at the least challenge your anonymity (desired or not).
Pros: Helps you learn more about the people around you. Will serve up the profile of anyone on Highlight in your vicinity, and will notify you if that person is a friend.
Con: Pulls data exclusively from Facebook, and tears through cell phone battery charge.
Pros: Can turn geo-locator on/off, and search for people in other places, can save photos to iCloud.
Cons: Automatically shares your data and posts to social sites.
Sonar “Uncover the hidden connections you miss everyday”
Pros: Speed and data from multiple social networks, including LinkedIn, makes it a professional, as well as social, tool. Works even if you are the only one using the app.
Con: The only way to turn off the geo-location is by removing the app from your phone.
Pros: Will tell you who you should meet, why you should meet them, and who you know in common. Gives you ideas for starting conversation with the people around you.
Con: Easily connects with Foursquare, but gets stuck trying to pull content from other sites.
As these apps attempt to help people standout to each other in a crowded, hyper-connected and choice-filled world, the apps themselves will need to use brand to help them stand out. This is especially true for companies that rely on the network effect, that is, whose value increases as more users opt-in.
While the functionality of these apps makes them extremely useful—a key behavior exhibited by game changing brands shaping the future of business –they would be best served by developing a stronger purpose. In much the same way that LinkedIn is professionally focused, while Facebook is more socially inclined, these apps should consider developing brands that cater to a specific function. Before I investigated iTunes reviews, it was difficult to differentiate one service from the other. In time, the app that best articulates its function, visually and verbally, will likely the be the one to break away from the pack and experience the highest rates of adoption.
Our mobile phones are a personalized space; the apps we choose can be added to and removed from our lives as our tastes change. It’s almost like a favorite restaurant or bar. One place may be your “favorite” for week or a year or a couple years but eventually, more places open and you begin trying new ones. We don’t just pick a restaurant for the food, it’s a matter of the experience within the place. The equation looks something like: food+service+ambiance+crowd=great place. In other words, we navigate towards places and experiences that fit our “type” or, more accurately, our social segment.
If this is how we treat our physical experiences, why should we expect that our digital experiences be made up of homogenous applications that “everyone” uses? Just as with restaurants and bars, this is not the trend present in business either. In the business space, we see unique companies within similar sectors succeeding for years and decades while keeping their differences firmly intact, even as they grow and diversify their offer. It is the role of brand to identify and share the uniqueness of a business with the world in a way that’s congruent with our lives. In the digital space, as more and more people join into a state of persistent connection we should see the role of brand increase, along with diversifying audience demand. This is really a process of specialization; small markets split and target specific groups, thereby growing the digital market as a whole and generating more specialized submarkets. This trend towards specialization is native to the advancement of technology. While today the “digital” market may feel saturated, in the future we’ll see specializations like “digital fashion”, “digital technology news”, or “digital restaurants” become more mainstream and diverse. Eventually the “digital” moniker will be dropped altogether as our experiences integrate fully with data.
Of course, this specialization is already beginning to happen. For example, the “hit” app at SXSW wasn’t one app, but a sector of apps, ostensibly called “Group Chat apps”. The functionality was virtually the same between GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society, Kik and the other group chat applications that were presented at SXSW. The only real differentiator was the experience of using the app, otherwise known as “brand”. The look, feel and functionality of interacting with the app defined the audience and drove who used which application. The general assumption is that one of these apps will “win”, but in reality there’s room for multiple applications offering the similar service. As long as those products are brand-led their uniqueness and usefulness can drive the creation of a targeted audience.
In the future we could see one social app for frat boys, another for nerds and, of course, an ironic one for hipsters.
At SXSW this year, I had the unique opportunity to understand “brand” from the perspective of a startup. I spent much of SXSW with two unique startups, Giftopera.com and Voyurl.com. Both of these are distinct products with quite different founders. Giftopera was founded by a developer I’ve known for years named Vineet Choudhary and his business partner Simon Tiemtore. It’s a group gifting application that, once built, will allow people to pool their money to buy a gift for a friend. Voyurl is founded by Adam Liebsohn who has seemingly scraped every dollar he has into the creation of Voyurl while maintaining a full-time job at an award-winning ad agency. Voyurl allows users to elect to be tracked as they move around the Internet with the trade off that they can then see their own stats and compare them with their friends’. The idea is to even the playing field against Google, Facebook and others who are tracking our online activity with every click.
Vineet, Simon and I rented a house from HomeAway for the week of SXSWi. They have been working on GiftOpera for a couple months now but the product isn’t online yet. Vineet, the quietly-social father of two, is able to build much of the framework for the product on his own, but has chosen to bring in some outside resources from India and Sweden to work on the development and design of the app. Simon, a magnanimous finance guy originally from Burkina Faso, heads the business thinking and sales side of the company. Over the course of 6 days, I watched them give out over 500 business cards, with Simon chatting up everyone he met while casually explaining the product to a captive sidewalk audience. Their goal for SXSW was simply to raise awareness about their infant brand and sign up users for a future launch. Both of them worked hard exploring and learning everything from the SXSW panels to talking with venture capital managers to make sure they were at enough events to make their presence known. This meant building brand awareness through fairly traditional means; shaking hands, passing cards and sitting with influential decision makers. Their brand is about bringing groups together who want to achieve a common goal, it is as personal a brand as the relationships they are looking to build.
On the contrary, Adam texted to tell me he’d be coming down the day before SXSW. Adam’s Voyurl.com application has been in private beta for over a month and has built up a solid following that’s garnered him several high-profile interviews with publications like the New York Times. (Private beta is where friends and friends of friends are invited to test the product while the dev team releases new updates. For the user it usually involves a lot of patience balanced with the trade off that they were “first”). At the conference, I first ran into him outside the convention center with his messenger bag pulled around over his military jacket. He was handing out printed tags and preparing to give out a couple thousand stickers in a traditional, but effective, guerilla marketing tactic. Like Vineet and Simon, Adam’s goal was also to raise awareness, but he had to go about this in a different way. His stickers, with the tagline “prove you weren’t looking at porn” found their way into nearly every available space at SXSW. His brand isn’t about shaking hands and handing out business cards, it’s about building buzz. It’s the kind of non-traditional product that wants to be promoted as something secret so new users want to have an invite.
These two startups say a lot to me about where the Internet has led us as branding professionals. We can’t assume all websites are the same. We can’t decide that just because someone talks “tech” that they fit into a single category. We can’t assume that simply because startups aren’t treating “brand” with marketing directors and brand managers that they don’t have just as much of a need for it. Brand in the startup space begins with the founders’ vision and then grows and defines the experience of using the product. The logo is both placeholder and promise that must encapsulate both experience and future growth. Voyurl and GiftOpera are different in their brand because the people behind them are different. Yet as each company evolves, their challenges will center around the traditional pressure points of any company; how to create growth and how to ensure the company doesn’t lose what made them succeed in the first place.
Our challenge, as brand leaders, is to understand this offer and redefine how we help these future companies achieve the growth they aspire to.
In a collaboration with Wolff Olins and AOL’s music website, Spinner, AOL hosted four free pop-up shows during the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Broken Bells kicked off the series on March 17, followed by Rogue Wave on March 18, VV Brown on March 19, and Rival Schools on March 20. It was surely an exciting weekend for art and music lovers. Times and locations were revealed the day before each performance on Spinner, AOL music’s SXSW hub, the Spinner Facebook Fan Page, and to Spinner / SXSW Twitter followers.
The posters were designed by WO and were beautifully screen printed by D&L Screen Printing of Seattle, a legend in the grunge music scene.
The spirit of this collaboration truly lies in the heart of AOL. Connecting with the latest in art and culture is an important aspect of their brand and one they aim to bring to their readers.
