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I just got home earlier today after attending the second and final day of the Interact 2008 Conference here in Washington, DC. Overall I thought it was an interesting conference, but I’m going to hold off on my opinions for a later post. I will say that it’s good to finally see this type of event in the DC area. It’s been a much needed conference, and for some reason DC doesn’t get enough consideration as a venue from the interactive industry unless it’s directly related to Government.

So Much Interactive. So Many Buzzwords.

There were some excellent proofs of concept from the interactive space, but there was still a bit of a disconnect in the message when it came to the thread that tied those successes together. The convention moved into the different topics and paradigms within web and interactive. This included the subjects of tribes, demographics, psychographics, market segments… the list went on. What surprised me was that the most important identifier of the bunch – the individual – was only brought up sporadically only to then be lumped into the traditional business categories of B2B, B2C, and B2G in the same breath.

My advice to anyone working in or wanting to break into this industry is to forget the above categories. They don’t exist when you’re talking about the interactive dialog.

Great! Now What Does It All Mean?

I’ll jump back to a question that the emcee asked in Monday’s panel: “How do you give a unique message to so many different tribes?” There was a bit of bouncing around as far as a definitive answer, but in the end it came down to everyone landing somewhere between “provide unique messages” to “know your audience.” The correct answer would have been “We don’t give the message to these tribes. They do.” Let me explain.

When it comes to interactive, you never give out the entire message. Doing so would be a direct contradiction to the way this medium works. Instead you are simply starting the conversation. From here the members of your audience will continue the dialog. That’s the whole point of interactive design and marketing.

“We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.”

That’s a quote from Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech. My apologies for injecting a bit of politics here, but if you follow along you’ll see the point I’m trying to illustrate. Let’s look back at the question of “tribes.” If you’ve now broken down all these groups to individuals, then you begin to see how an individual usually belongs to more than one tribe; all these people in different tribes will share specific traits. By providing the start of the conversation and enabling them to continue the story they will deliver it to their own tribe in a way that is relevant to themselves and to their peers.

To sum up, interactive isn’t about telling the entire story. As interactive storytellers we are simply starting the story and enabling others to share, evolve, and contribute to that story in ways that can’t be achieved through traditional mediums.

I plan to delve more into this topic over the coming weeks, but I wanted to make this point upfront since to me it’s the foundation of anything that exists in this medium now and in the future.