I probably also couldn’t say enough of Felicia Day’s keynote and panel today. I’ve been a fan since she created “The Guild.” Being a gamer, myself, (console and MMO) I connected with the show right away. Hearing her thoughts on connecting with her audience and the experience of creating the show and other projects also hit a lot of things home.

To cap it all of for me though – Felicia was kind enough to take a couple minutes of her time after the panel to sign the notes that I took during her sessions (bottom of the last page – second picture). So yeah, I’m feeling pretty lucky now. :)

Today I attended:

• Barry Diller Shares Insights on all Things Media
• Enabling New Experiences and Creating Serendipity Through Check-Ins
• Keynote: Felicia Day
• New Worlds: Creating Online Sci-Fi and Fantasy Experiences

It was great to sit in on the Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman) inteview. As he talked about the things he did throughout his successful career I could pick out a lot of the underlying similarities that bred success for others regardless of discipline or industry.

Here are my notes from Day 3 for the Paul Reuben interview and others for Day 3.

Today I attended:

• Radical Openness: Growing TED by Giving it Away
• Transmedia Storytelling: Constructing Compelling Characters and Narrative Threads
• A Conversation with Paul Reubens
• Keynote: Christopher Poole (Founder of 4chan)

Here are all my notes from Day 2.

Today I attended:

• Brave New World: Debating Brands’ Roles as Publishers
• Believe Me or Your Own Eyes: Eye-Tracking Entertainment
• Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better
• Brand Consistency is Killing Digital Advertising

When a couple of people saw my notebook from last years SXSW, they told me that I should’ve posted it online. I hadn’t really thought of it at the time, but thought I’d give it a go this year. So here are my notes from Day 1.

Today I attended:

• Fireside Chat: Tim O’Reilly Interviewed by Jason Calacanis
• The New Frontier of Social Gaming
• Shine Light on Others to Build Your Build

One topic that really stood out for me has been Content Strategy. Interactive has grown significantly over the last 10 years, but let’s face it – somehow content strategy (and content as a result) continues to take a back seat. The fact that this is being brought to the front of a lot of discussion is an important step for raising the interactive bar. This isn’t simply about copywriting. It’s about building a relevant messaging architecture that connects with the people you want to reach.

Back in art school, our projects were about reading an article or studying a topic, and then creating work that visually interpreted what we read. Somewhere along the line there’s been a disconnect when it comes to carrying that into the interactive space.

I think one of the biggest problems has been our inability to articulate the value of content strategy to our clients from a business perspective. It just so happens, though, that there were solid takeaways that anyone can and should bring to the table. Below are some of the points that make the case for starting your interactive projects with content strategy:

1. Messaging becomes focused on your visitor’s needs.
   Business tend to write a lot of content about themselves. By focusing on content strategy, you can evaluate existing content and focus on delivering a message focused around the needs of your audience.

2. You add authenticity to your brand.
   Not only with design decisions compliment the message, but content strategy can them been given to SEO strategists to extend the messaging outward. Having SEO, content, messaging, and design follow the same thread builds a seamless and consistent experience for your audience.

3. And your clincher – a project can be less expensive if you implement content strategy up front.
   The design/creative process is a very iterative one. It is significantly faster and easier to rework words than it is to rework a design comp.

If you’d like to learn more about content strategy Check out Margot Bloomstein’s SXSW presentation as well as Kristina Halvorson’s book, Content Strategy for the Web. I’m hoping that Kristina also posts her presentation on Slideshare. In the meantime you can read the backchannel discussion here. It has been one of the best presentations I’ve seen here so far!

What Constitutes a Storyboard?

The term “storyboard” can be used to define a variety of processes used to flesh out a final interactive piece. These can range from simple sketches on a napkin to flowcharts and functional prototypes. The purpose is to provide your project team members with a sense of how the final experience will work. The key to storyboarding is not in any single scene, but how each scene fits within the context of the overall deliverable.

The common challenge mentioned in the salon was how to comfortably fit storyboards into the design process, and most importantly how to identify what should be represented in your storyboards. At my company, storyboards play a vital role in the design and development process. Ignoring this step leaves a chance that the experience will feel incomplete and disconnected.

Elements of Interactive Storyboarding

I find that my storyboards tend to have two always have two common traits: (1) my boards incorporate techniques used in the film industry, and (2) they focus on the specific features of the final interactive project.

Interactive Design is so closely related to the film industry that for me it just makes sense to pull from a lot of their visual cues. Techniques that represent pan-and-scans, camera shots, scene changes and movement all lend themselves very well to this industry. For anyone interested, there is a great book that I would recommend titled From Word to Image: Storyboarding and the Filmmaking Processes hone your storyboarding skills.

If I tried to storyboard an entire interactive project at a high-level I wouldn’t know where to begin. The whole thing would seem overwhelming. So what I do is break down my project into a bunch of predetermined linear flows. From here I can focus on creating boards that illustrate details each of these features.

Even a smaller microsite is made up of many predetermined linear elements. For example, a viral site with only a few pages and an emailing functionality might include:

• Site preloader
• Section preloader
• Emailing entry, validation and confirmation funnel
• Navigation interactivity and transitions
• Scene transitions

Breaking these out allows you to put detail into those elements in a way that raises the experience to a more meaningful level.

I originally came from an illustration background so when I start my storyboards I like to go straight to paper to sketch out initial ideas. It’s fast for me because I know I can bounce the ideas off of other in a matter of minutes. From here we know whether or not to continue to explore an idea or scrap it all together and move in another direction.

The important this to note here though is that you don’t need to be a great artist or draftsman to create storyboards. The key to storyboards is to share ideas quickly. Not to create masterpieces. It might take some time at first if you aren’t used to creating them, but once storyboards becomes a natural part of your process, you’ll really begin to see the pay off.

Prologue

I’ve always noticed that anytime something new is introduced to the world it will inevitably go through a certain life cycle before its effectiveness matures.

Stage 1: The New Idea

What I’ve found is that we’ll always start with the big idea, new medium, or new invention. It’s that idea that will change everything. The way we work, the way we live, the way we think. Big things will come from this as soon as we introduce it to the world. (See the MP3 player)

Stage 2: Just Add Insanity

For some time after, in a need to bring it down to a kitchen-table understanding, we’ll apply older designs, approaches, and thoughts to the new idea expecting this to work as well as it did in the past.
(See the Nomad MP3 player that looked like a portable CD player)

Stage 3: The Revelation

Suddenly there is a stage of relearning and training ourselves to look at the problem we are trying to solve differently. The light will turn on, and it’s at that point when we really see great things happen. (See the Apple iPod)

Stop Applying Insanity to Your Interactive Strategy

I look at the terms B2B, B2C, B2G, B2E, and every other term like this as an old world approach being pinned to a brand new medium.

Any marketing firm, design firm or advertising agency that looks at the interactive space through these filters has already began from a failing position.

Relearn the Medium

The problem with the above terms is that it groups people into irrelevant buckets. What you’ve done right out of the gates is set yourself up to look at your audience in industry segments, and not as individuals. This is acceptable in the traditional spaces of radio, print, and television commercials. You simply didn’t have much choice beyond a one-way, one-to-many message.

By taking this approach with interactive you ignore one of the core benefits of moving into the this space – creating a two-way, one-to-one dialog. No matter what industry you consider yourself to be in – interactive design always boils down to one person interacting with you at a time. Even at a global scale, it comes down to millions of one-to-one experiences. You have an opportunity to here to connect in unique ways and engage each person at a level they could never have experienced with traditional methods. So from this point forward I suggest throwing the old terms out when dealing with interactive.

Regroup Your Audience

All this talk of breaking down the groups, and now I’m talking about regrouping? Yes, but this is a different type of grouping. Not by market segment or business sector, but by type of individual audience member. Now that you have millions of one-to-one experiences between millions of different individuals, the next point is to understand with whom are you starting a dialog. With interactive you are really only talking about two different types: Visitors and Messengers.

Audience Type: Visitors

Visitors are the ones that will participate in your interactive experience. They will learn from it, respond directly to you with it, be entertained and informed by it. If done remarkably, they will return over and over, and be willing to lose track of time with it. The primary type of dialog they will have will be directly with you and the story you’ve shared.

Audience Type: Messengers

Messengers are your storytellers. They are like visitors, but they don’t stop there. They are the bloggers, the contributors, the responders, the visitors that decide to share your post or “email the page.” These are the people that share your story in a way that is relevant to them and their audience.

Now Create Something New

These are your two main audience types. If anything you’ve learned before doesn’t relate directly back to your audience at the individual level, forget it.

Going forward what you need to do is:

1. break down the traditional silos (or groups, tribes, whatever),
2. understand them as individuals,
3. identify with them, and then
4. enable them to engage as visitors or messengers in your story.

Making sure that you start from this point, and answering questions that enable your audience in either group will help you create experiences that you couldn’t have traditionally achieved or thought of.

If you retrain yourself to look at your audience in this way, you’re solutions will begin to change drastically. You will turn on the light, and begin to make great things happen.

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.