We know – we’re a few days late (blame that last winter storm) but we had to deliver our wrap up of the final day of SXSW Interactive.

Day 5 was bittersweet as we got a stellar lineup of talks on the final day of the conference’s interactive portion.

Up first was Yu Kai Chou, talking about how to create a successful framework for gamification. An early pioneer of gamification, Chou demonstrated ways of incorporating gaming theories and practices into business models – helping to sustain engagement with consumers or internal employees.

Chou also presented some compelling stats on who the “typical” gamers are and definitely broadened people’s ideas of who’s playing games (whether that’s console, PC or mobile). In fact, consider that 68% of gamers are over 18 years old, and 47% are women (there are more adult women gamers than under 18 males).

Our next two sessions were different takes on Internet communities with George Takei talking about developing his massive fan base and mobilizing them for social causes. Takei’s take on community building was pretty simple – don’t ask your community to do something right away. Build trust; build a relationship before you want them to follow through on something. This is true whether you’re asking them to sign a petition or buy your product.

Biz Stone (founder of Twitter and Jelly) picked up on the idea of social good when he talked about the effect tools like Twitter have had on our culture in the past few years. Stone’s take is that people are generally good and that when given the right tools – they’ll do good things.

Our final session for SXSW may have been the most compelling and uplifting of the entire conference. Our last session was with Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS shoes. Mycoskie walked through how he founded the company and the factors that lead him to creating the one-to-one model TOMS is so famous for. He also delved into the unique marketing angle the company has taken – by forgoing traditional ads, etc., and creating brand evangelists who actually work with TOMS to deliver shoes to impoverished countries. Inspirational to say the least.

I’m sure we’ll have more thoughts in the coming weeks, filtering out of our packed SXSW schedule. There were some big thinkers delivering fascinating, new takes on where digital culture is going and we’re happy to have been there to hear it first hand.

Can’t wait to head back next year.

Posted by
Gary Edgar
on 14/03/2014