Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people.

The SXSW conference started with opening remarks from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh on how fostering a passionate culture of employees while proving extraordinary customer service can massively extend your brand. He spoke about good deeds, chasing your dreams, greater life purpose, goals, inspiration and ended with a strong recommendation for a book by Jonathan Haidt called, "The Happiness Hypotheses". Heavy stuff for a company that known best for selling shoes.

It was inspiring and while obvious on many levels, became an underlying theme throughout the conference: sharing, open, trust, playing fair.

Over the next four days, the number of references to relationships, friends, community, openness, honesty...were many. While not a new concept to business chatter; individuals, brands (countries, civilization...), are realizing the need to focus on the basics to create, foster and extend their image, products, brands and survival.

Concepts like sharing, openness and free may be the new buzz, but would never have made it to the white boards of corporate America as a priority or requirement to remaining relevant. It's a monumental shift for companies formed around protecting intellectual property to now open their doors to the open sharing of content, often for free.

The panel on Becoming Social: This Changes Everything, lead by the heads of development for Myspace, Yahoo, Google and Reuters Thompson was interesting specifically in that the former was a perfect example of a company founded on the dissemination of proprietary information finding it a difficult transition to becoming transparent with it's data, while acknowledging that there was not a choice. To survive, brands need to not only acknowledge consumers, but to open their doors, give them something they don't expect and foster the open conversation that drives perception, respect, trust and happiness?

Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Figure out how to monetize free.

CrowdSourcing

Crowdsourcing has been a hot topic for a while now, but I thought while at SXSW why not hit this panel and find out what's new? I found out it is just more of the same - but still it got me thinking of how fast our world around us is changing and how this will ultimately affect advertising.

Crowdsourcing is a term for delegating a specific task (that perhaps was considered a specialty) to a large diverse group to gain results. One of the best examples is within the stock photo industry. It used to be that if you wanted quality stock photography you had to go to Getty or Corbis, but now there is a multitude of stock houses that get their photos from Joe Traveler or Jane Amateur Photographer. Now the market is flooded with stock photos. These vendors, such as iStockPhoto pay the artist, but it is pennies compared to what the professional photographers get paid with Getty or Corbis. The savings are passed on to companies like Fallon that use this type of photography. While this may be bad for the major stock houses and their associated photographers, it is great for the businesses purchasing the photographs. A great example of the "supply and demand" model for business.

Now take this idea and apply it to science or technology. It's expensive to hire a fleet of scientists, developers, or engineers, but crowdsource your problem and you got yourself an army of people looking at it. A while back NetFlix put out a million dollar challenge for anyone who could make their algorithm a mere 10% better. This algorithm is used for predicting whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked their other movies, making suggestions on their user page. This challenge caused some stir in the technology world. People put together teams, started sharing information, and ultimately created a community. It has been over 2 years and the best success so far has been 9.65%. The return for NetFlix is great. They could have never hired this many developers/engineers/statisticians with a million dollars - and even if they put one million into their own staffing, there would always be a chance that they wouldn't reach their goal. (Read a Wired article on this here)

As you can imagine, this has got some photographers and scientists pissed off. They were getting top dollar for their work and now there is uncertainty to their future. So what does this mean to us in advertising? Well, we are seeing many effects of crowdsourcing around us whether we recognize it or not. Social Media has become the ultimate brand crowdsourcing. If people like, or don't like your brand they discuss it on Twitter, Facebook or blogs. Brands are reacting to that. Fallon needs to keep an eye on the discussion. All of a sudden this is used to measure our success.

Recently we did a site where we asked the user to upload a video explaining why they were Phil Mickelson's biggest fans. The winners were placed in a TV ad with Phil. It was a great success and the spots were funny. Well, what if we put it out there that we needed an idea for a brand campaign? If your idea is picked you get credit and we will send you copies of the completed work. Maybe we pay that person a small fee - say a couple hundred bucks (think of the salaries Fallon would save!). Would we get entries? You know it! Would they be good? Well, I am not going there, but I will say that none of us are safe. We need to constantly question our importance to the industry and make ourselves valuable by understanding the changes around us.