She was 24, smart, funny, snarky and had infinite potential. Don’t take life for granted. Make every day count. I think she did.

#followfriday @agrahamwilcox <- Must follow for NBA fans

Today, Brad Ward decided to take it all up a notch.

The story begins at SXSW. SXSW is the conference that keeps on giving. In the past I have equated it to cramming a whole semester of college into 2 weeks. The people that you meet are the people you want to meet, the experiences that you share are meaningful both in the “classroom” and in the bars and social events.

On the night of the mashable party, Not only did I sing Ziggy Stardust with a live band, meet Seth Rogen and Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordan-Levitt, I met Brad J. Ward.

I was heading to the bar to pick up my 4th (or so) and I was in queue to sing with the band. Well, the video tells the story

Did I think he was going to gank my charger? No. But my own phone was low on juice and I couldn’t hear the bartender. The band was RIGHT in front of us and Brad was looking to disappear. What good is a business card if I can’t charge my phone later? I decided to chill out about it, sing my song and have fun at the party instead of worrying about whether I would be connected later. Glad I did. Brad is an amazing person that I met at the conference and I am having a good time getting to know him better through twitter. Follow him!

Rebecca Corliss and the Boston University Terriers are Elite from Schneider Mike on Vimeo.

I just wanted to proclaim that the Boston University Terriers are far superior to my beloved Miami University Redhawks. I would also like to encourage you to follow the incomparable Rebecca Corliss on twitter! . Which I would recommend whether I lost the bet or not. She rocks.

David Armano nicely asked about the Oprah effect on twitter, which got me to thinking. How many people joined twitter since Oprah first tweeted? How many people is she responsible for bringing to twitter?

In order to answer this question, I collected a sample of Oprah’s twitter followers on 5/6/2009, 774,561 of them. Don’t let me lose you here, but I must caveat that twitter is a moving target. As of this post, Oprah is sure to have well over 850,000 followers, but people add and drop all the time. As a result, it’s tough to collect everyone because the API allows you to take a 100 person-at-a-time chunks called a page. That sample becomes changed if someone decides to follow or unfollow Oprah. This basically means that without being able to stop time and twitter and grab all of Oprah’s followers in one swoop, our data is bound to be incomplete or different within seconds of the processes completion.

CYA aside: let’s take a look at Oprah’s following by the date that they joined twitter.

PERCENT GROWTH CHART – First Tweet to 5/6

As you can see, Oprah-twittermania exploded and peaked in 7 days. In our sample, 389,067 of her followers joined twitter on or after First Tweet.

So who is following Oprah? What is the breakdown? I divided followers into the groups.

Elite = 50,000+ followers
Mavens = 10,001- 49,999 followers
Twelebrities = 1,001 – 10,000 followers (hey, if 1000 people know you…)
Starters = 101 – 1000 followers
Noobs = 1 – 100 followers
Nothings = 0 followers

Elite is that tiny sliver (62)

Wait, 159,448 (20.6%) of her following hasn’t done anything yet. Could be spam. Could be lurkers or people who just do not understand how to get involved. Could be the cult of “create-wealth-online”. [I have over 4 businesses online! I am creating wealth! Ask me how!] Could be new people. When I get another cut of data, I will compare their followers and conversations and see if they have become more involved.

I asked 200 people who joined twitter after Oprah started if they joined because of Oprah. This is not scientific, but about 50% of my replies were “yes”. Anecdote: one person said MC Hammer was their inspiration! Please Hammer, don’t hurt em!

So the lion’s share, more than 93%, of her followers are people who are brand spanking new or just getting started at the party (Noobs + Nothings). The question is: how will these people assimilate to twitter? This is a question I will attempt to answer over time. Let’s chew on this a bit. I’ll refresh the data and maybe we can drill into some of their conversations. What do you want to know about these people? Comments on this “study” are appreciated and I will try to incorporate your feedback. Example: Maybe I should reorganize the segments to take updates into account? Does only having 100 followers really mean you are a NOOB? Some digging showed that a good deal of low follower / high updates were content aggregators like @sevenplanet and spammers like @hardflash. Let’s keep them in this category for now.

Thanks for reading! @SchneiderMike

Guy Kawasaki was hanging out in the blogger’s lounge early one morning at SXSW. He had a coy smile and announced that he had something cool that we would all love. As a result, I got to try Starbucks VIA! Thanks Guy!

At SXSW, I sat in a session with some of the brilliant minds in interactive experience creation including: Victoria Ha from Stitch Media, Phil Stuart of Preloaded, Mark Pytlik of Stink Digital and Rick Webb from the Barbarian group. They wasted a good 10 minutes of the panel discussing the classification of games versus experiential video. Is it a game? Is it a video? Stop worrying about how to classify the damn thing and put that time to good use working on the experience. Writer, researcher Martin Sarafian [God Marty, why aren't you blogging yet? At least get on twitter!] and I classified all of this stuff 10 years ago so you would not have to worry.

We Call it Non-Linear Entertainment

A vocal academic came to the microphone and offered her “perspective” on the conversation, arguing with the panel about her thesis in which she wrote 400 pages on the classifications of various mediums. Either she did not do the paper justice or she wasted a lot of time and money at Indiana University (see below for video) because I can sum it up right here. It’s called Non-Linear Entertainment (NLE). The criteria of NLE is that you have some sort of story line that requires the consumer of the video to make some kind of choice. NLE does not usually go from point A to Z in a straight line so that everyone (given 5 senses and taking perspective out of the equation) experiences the exact same content in the same way. The Dark Knight that I saw was the same as the one you saw. That was linear. This is different.

Non-Linear entertainment allows the viewer, or even the reader to make choices. These choices are influential in the way that the content is consumed. NLE includes games, ARGs, MMORPGs, RPGs, experiential videos, even choose your own adventure books. Most times NLE has alternate “plots” or even open-ended outcomes, the exception would be instances where the camera angle can be changed to give a different visual perspective, even if they do not necessarily change the plot. I still call that NLE because the user has an aspect of control. Rick Webb summed up arguing the symantics pretty well:

Non Linear Entertainment Panel at SXSW from the Michael Schneider on Vimeo.

Writing a Matrixed Script is Tough

Eventually we moved onto bigger and better things. What kind of writers do I need? The answer is that you need people who understand writing matrixed scripts. These experiences are time consuming to write, shoot or develop, particularly if you want them to be particularly long. I suggest not attempting to boil the ocean in the short term. Keep your experiences to 60-180 seconds of content and limit the amount of characters because every character adds complexity. Imagine a very simple storyboard beginning, middle and end. Now lets say there are 7 controllable characters in the story and that each requires perspective. Now each character needs a beginning middle and an end.

Thank goodness we finally moved on and Victoria Ha took over and told us about their execution of an event at a comic convention that featured “hot chics” (her words, not mine) with water guns and temporary tattoos approaching nerds at the convention and asking them if they could apply the fake-ink which actually was a series of clues. So here you have a bunch of people walking around the convention with contest clues on their body which caused people to interact both on and offline. I can imagine the conversations: “Hello, I am Milton Scrathmore. I love your Frank Cho, limited edition t-shirt, can I please scan the tattoo on wrist?” Should we call that offline experiential gaming with QR codes? Nah. NLE.

excerpt from the #specwork09 discussion

• Sessions begin with definition of business problems. We actually go into them hoping to define a business problem or series of problems to solve. It is not about “we want to design something” yet.
• Audience Intelligence teams learn the needs, size, segments and location of the marketplace.
• Strategists start to define the idea and the brand pillars or align the idea to current brand pillars. Design, Audience Intelligence, Media, and Analytics resources are involved to protect design interests, media availability and possibilities, and success measurement.
• Consensus on ideas is built.
• Campaigns are defined. Briefs are written.
• Analytics teams figure out how to measure success, spot trends and forecast futures.
• Now we design!
• Execute
• Measure
• Rinse
• Repeat

Through this process a connection is built between the agency and the client. The agency treats the client’s brand as their own and takes a level of responsibility for success. The designers are part of the strategy. They understand the process. They can discuss the pillars with the planners and strategists. They get true audience insight in a way that a single specification sheet cannot bring to light. They can talk to the measurement folks about how we define success. They weave themselves into the brand fabric and in some cases they follow a similar process across projects.

Your brand, your campaign, your SUCCESS depend on your experience and your marketing. The way I see it, you can pay a premium [or put together a creative model that allows an agency to be payed based on your success] for any agency that is thoughtfully integrated or you can throw it into the one-off crowdsourcing blender and hope you get a smoothie.

Pepsi Built a SXSW Information Command Center

Jumping right into the zeitgest stream gives you a a real-time summary of SXSW conversations. The current trend is towards eating [as it's lunch-time]. Other trending topics are arriving, drinking, connecting and partying. Messages that flow through the stream are color coded to their topic.

The “popular” feature shows the most popular words and assumes that those are also topics. Trending topics right now include Facebook, Austin and work. I would love it if this feature let me drill to the tweets so I could see what people are saying. Bigger points if I could follow the people on the fly.

The “swarm” is a geolocator that shows where tweets are coming from and who is tweeting. It’s a real-time maplication. It’s kind of cool to see people migrating to and from the convention center.

My favorite feature [and perhaps the most useful and innovative] is the party watch! Not only is it a good way to find out what is going on, you can find out how people feel about the party good/neutral/bad. I was tracking the Burlesque/Cupcakes party last night and found out that not only was there a long line, but that generally people thought it was a bust.

If we take some of the learnings from Jamie Monberg’s panel this morning which basically says that your application should be more like a pencil than a helicopter when it comes to usability. I think Pepsi has struck the right balance here. Good job Pepsi. I hope you do not let this die and figure out cool ways to use it beyond SXSW.