South by Southwest Day 1- Engaging Your Online Audience

Firstly, I went to a session about how teenagers consume online media. With a panel made up of half a dozen or so teenagers the session threw up a few interesting points of note including a general feeling of "social network fatigue" amongst some of the panel and a surprisingly high engagement with political and social issues. What was most interesting however was their reaction to online advertising and brand interaction.

Here, whilst the general feeling was that insensitive advertising that interfered with their ability to surf efficiently online was a bad thing, they seemed pretty aware that some degree of advertising was needed in order to fund the sites they love and therefore it was a necessary evil.

There was also generally a positive reaction to sites that encouraged them to create and upload content and some of the panel members had actively engaged with brands that had run user-generated competitions.

As one teenager put it: "It made me respect the brand more because they made me feel I was good enough to sell their product".

Whilst this was encouraging from a broadcast new media point of view given the current industry fixation with UGC, I felt pretty much the same as my fellow SXSWM deligate (and marketing whiz) Ruth Ward in feeling that a rise in teen creativity born of cynical marketing ploys by big soulless multinationals was somewhat of a hollow victory.

One of the most interesting events of the day was "The Suxors" a tongue-in-cheek "Razzies" type affair where a panel of design gurus took great pleasure in naming and shaming some of the biggest corporate perpetrators of what they considered to be the worst web marketing crimes in recent memory. Amongst the brands that the panel put in the stocks were a catalogue of household names who really should have known better including Coke, HP, Vespa and Sony, and some of the biggest lessons to be learnt from these ill-advised online campaigns included:

• Sometimes a viral campaign can horribly backfire. The panel pointed out that advertising house Agency.com learned this the hard way when they decided that the best way to win a contract from fast food giant Subway was to create video of themselves coming up with the pitch for the Subway contract and then to send it viral on Youtube. Well, half of their plan worked as the video spread like wildfire round the web. Unfortunately the excruciatingly cheesy footage of their creative meetings and their glamorous diamond-ring sporting ad exec going to work undercover as a Subway "sandwich artist" made them the object of both industry and public ridicule. Not only did they fail to win the contact but it did their company reputation no favours either.

• Don't be dishonest: Sony, amongst others, came under flak from the panel for this one. Sony's "All I want for Christmas is a PSP" campaign saw them set up a fake blog by a kid called Charlie who waxed lyrical about his desperate desire for the aforementioned handheld console. The public quickly saw through the subterfuge and Sony found themselves on the receiving end of some pretty bad feeling from some of its online customers who resented being taken as fools.

• Don't Splog: Candidate for my favourite new techie word of the day, "Splogging" is the term for "spam bloggers", people who either get paid to blog about a company's product or who are enticed to do so through the promise of material reward. Apart from the fact that the results are usually pretty unpalatable, the question is who the hell would read this tosh anyway? Lazy, counter productive and offensive to the very online customers you're trying to reach, this is online marketing at its worst.

• Brand recognition is everything: A bit of an obvious one this but a mistake brilliantly illustrated by the panel's example of the rather unfortunate campaign by beer brand Carlton. Despite coming up with a great ad, Carlton also learnt that viral success can have its perils. Sure enough the video became a phenomenon on the web as a fantastically executed visual experience, but without prominent branding within the ad, the people forwarding it and uploading it often forgot what the brand was called. Cue the advert being tagged as Carlson, Carlsun, Carlston, etc and a great marketing idea being totally divorced from its product.

• User-generated content can be your downfall. A particularly important one for us digital broadcast producers this one. The panel talked here about an alco-pop producer (sorry forgotten the name) who hit on the idea of rewarding it's customers for uploading content where they could be seen consuming their product. Offering an holiday to Mexico for the most interesting photo or picture submitted, the company instantly regretted its idea when the web was flooded with a ton of images showing boozed-up frat-boys and drunken college girls proudly brandishing the drink. Needless to say that this was not the brand image they were looking for. Lesson here: beware giving too much power to the people.

So there we have it; whilst using the web can be an amazingly powerful tactic for engaging an audience and promoting a product, it can also result in dire consequences if you get it wrong.

Day two's looming so it's time to hop in a taxi and throw myself back into the fray.

Now where did I put that Stetson...?