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The PDC (Portland Development Commission) put together this video featuring business folks from Laika, Ziba, Columbia Sportswear, Oregon Iron Works, Vestas, Wieden+Kennedy and eROI. If you dig Portland and the surrounding area, check out the video below.

“Let’s make technology that makes us more human, not less human.”

Portland, Oregon is a long way from Washington D.C. So, we should be psyched about playing host to the New Media Strategist, Rahaf Harfoush.  She led arguably the social media strategy for the best online campaign implementation of any major politician in the history of politics (love the drama of that sentence even though politicians have really only used the web significantly in the past 4 years). Harfoush is the keynote speaker at InnoTech Portland:

Date: April 23, 2009
Time: InnoTech starts at 8am, Harfoush speaks at 11:30am
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon
How much: BIG DISCOUNT if you use these codes when you REGISTER HERE >>

(INN48 – gets you a $12 Discount so it’s only $48 for General Administration)
(EMS20AT – gets you a $20 Discount so it’s only $129 for the two day eMarketing summit)

Of all of the talks given at SXSW ‘09, I loved the last 15 minutes of Tony Hsieh’s presentation the best. This part of his talk focused on The Science of Happiness and his earnest desire to spend 10% of his time studying the structured elements of what makes all of us happy. The three levels he shared were: rockstar, flow, and meaning/higher purpose (check out Slide 44 on the Slideshare presentation below). I’m now dedicated to reading and learning more about this balanced, structured approach to happiness. Comment below if you recommend a good book that speaks to you on this topic.

Watch the entire slide show—-

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Ah, the vastly entertaining Guy Kawasaki started off the keynote with swagger and a few digs on Sarah Lacy’s dismal interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg which happened exactly one year ago at SXSW. Guy followed up with some poignant questions for Wired Magazine publisher Chris Anderson who is about to publish his book “FREE” which of course be free in its electronic version. The debate centered around whether or not freemium (new word thrown around liberally in this SXSW Kawasaki / Anderson interview) products lower the value of that product based on pricing it as FREE for the standard/limited/trial version and a cost to the premium version of that product or software. Check out the video and tweets below to draw your own conclusions.

My Kawasaki / Anderson tweets—-

#sxsw keynote – who’s going to be the star – Guy Kawasaki or Chris Anderson? Will Guy give more Apple examples or Alltop?11:49 AM Mar 17th from TweetDeck

Kawasaki and anderson take the stage now. Gonna be good – I feel it.12:04 PM Mar 17th from web

Sarah lacey jabs already by kawasaki – nice.12:06 PM Mar 17th from web

The big question is how will twitter make money now?12:07 PM Mar 17th from web

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Before this presentation at SXSW, I had no idea what “whuffie” was. Check out the video, slideshare presentation, and tweets below to get the real definition, but my paraphrased version is that whuffie is good karma points but more in the context of an online community. I sat next to Portland’s social media guru, Dawn Foster, Shizzow founder Ryan Snyder, and Silicon Florist’s Rick Turoczy – so the side conversations were as valuable as the actual presentations. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, there was a huge Portland turnout for SXSW ‘09 – impressive.

Watch Tara Hunt’s slide show—-

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Got some great ideas from the Breakthrough Innovation talk at SXSW. Instead of looking at incremental changes and feature bloat, look at game-changers (e.g. Wii, iPhone) by focusing on one thing you do really well – so well that you’d put it as the word or phrase on your super hero outfit. A phrase that does NOT work would be something like “Increased Productivity.” A lot of her points reinforced what I recently read in the book “Made to Stick” by Dan and Chip Heath. If you are in a product development cycle like we are here at eROI, this session was uber-relevant. Check out the video and my tweets below.

My tweets—-

#sxsw session on making breakthroughs – we often get into an arms race w/ competitors and hit a brick wall1:34 PM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

breakthroughs with ideas or performance – Kathy Sierra seems like she’s gonna be a rockin speaker #sxsw1:35 PM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

you need to help people kick ass to breakthrough the competition1:39 PM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

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One contributor, Zoey Margolis or “Abby Lee”, turned her popular blog into a book:

My tweets from this SXSW author session—-

Zoey margolis, author and blogger, talking about being a sex fiend.9:03 AM Mar 14th from web

She has a british accent – must be smart.9:05 AM Mar 14th from web

Love her words like tosser and wanker9:07 AM Mar 14th from web

Angelic feet. Guy saw her at the tube station. He had foot fetish. Great vocab.9:09 AM Mar 14th from web

She had a snog with him. More british slang. F word works for her. Good emphasis.9:12 AM Mar 14th from web

Girl with a one track mind with sordidness all about her. Very entertaining.9:15 AM Mar 14th from web

Presentation Based on the book by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval—-

Great examples in this presentation and the book is an easy read for the flight home – I got through it in a couple hours.  The only bummer was that the authors couldn’t make it to present and sent one of their execs instead.  Otherwise, lots of great examples about how paying attention to the details matter.  A lot of times it is important to “sweat the small stuff”.

My tweets from this session—-

In “the power of small” #sxsw session now in Room 10 – great examples of shreddie diamonds (vs. squares), aflac, and swiffers8:24 AM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

great SNL spoof called “swiffer sweepers” with sweeping your floor with your kids bodies in swiffer outfits – good stuff8:25 AM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

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To the rebel in all of us, James Powderly is our part-nefarious, part-make-the-world-a-better-place hero. As you’ll see from the video and my tweets live from the Monday keynote speech below, Powderly is intoxicating in his allure to scrawl graffiti all over a 500 foot building with amplified lasers and projectors. He even got incarcerated before the Beijing Olympics last year for 10 days for attempting to pull off an impermanent graffiti trick on mass scale. What he didn’t talk about until the last question of the session was his new project to enable a quadriplegic man to be able to do art again, but this time through his eyes (and lasers) instead of his hands. Creativity in such an authentic way – not sure you get a sense of his energy from the video below.

My tweets for this SXSW session—-

#sxsw keynote – just had 2000 people cooperatively give middle finger to speaker james powderly, grafitti research lab12:18 PM Mar 16th from web

Research and track grafitti all over world12:19 PM Mar 16th from web

Learning what a #led throwie is. Very cool on a mass scale12:23 PM Mar 16th from web

Take a laser and write in huge letters on a huge building12:25 PM Mar 16th from web

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This SXSW panel was great from an entrepreneurial perspective, especially with Kaiser Kuo’s insight into Chinese entrepreneurialism and how American entrepreneurs can partner with Chinese companies to enter the Chinese market. Robert Scoble has the rockstar fanfare from the SXSW crowd, but I thought Kaiser Kuo was the real star on this panel from his insights.

My tweets for this session—-

In #sxsw session with scoble – ditch the valley and run for the hills8:03 AM Mar 15th from web

Mike maples jr invested in twitter in the beginning – it could have only started in the valley8:11 AM Mar 15th from web

Kaiser Kuo: the world is NOT flat. It’s spiky with major innovation centers like San Fran, Beijing, Boston, etc. It snowballs from epicenter8:21 AM Mar 15th from TweetDeck

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I went back through my 287 tweets from five days at SXSW Interactive with an intention to do a dozen different blog posts.  Instead, I realize that I just need to share bits of inspiration instead of piecing together thorough notes for each session I attended.

Overall takeaways:

• Portland interactive and social media attendees were huge – there were probably 250+ Portlanders attending SXSW and we got to spend more quality time in sessions, restaurants, house parties, and bars in Austin, TX than in Portland – funny how that happens.
• eROI team-building was pretty amazing.  There were 15 of us at the event and it allowed us to learn and share in a very human way, which is a lot tougher to do in the office.
• Informal vibe to the event: thankfully.  Couches were in some sessions, outdoor tent parties just outside the Convention Center. But, the tone that speakers and attendees had was very informal and allowed for the walls/barricades to be down to facilitate networking and learning.
• Rebellious attitude – maybe this is the influence of indie musicians and film-makers filling in towards the end of the Interactive part of SXSW, but one keynote in particular exemplified this: James Powderly explaining his mass-scale graffiti art. I loved this edge to the speakers and sessions.

OK – I guess I need to do separate blog posts to show some cool visuals and videos of my favorite influences there.

I’m publishing my schedule for SXSW – it’s kind of ridiculous how much stuff there is to see and learn.  This is my first time to the amazing, well-known event and we are showing up in full force – 1/3 of eROI staffers will be there, but clients, don’t fret, we will be on email and working during most of it.  Cheers!

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Come to the Portland Art Museum at 7pm tonight, March 7 to check out 8 Cut&Paste contestants do some insane speed designing using Photoshop and Wacom digital pens and tablets. My wife and I are joining another dozen eROI peops to cheer voiceferously our own Tom O’Toole – the talented eROI designer – who is predicted with 3 to 1 odds to win this thing. No matter what, it will be a good time.

Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament 2007 from Cut&Paste on Vimeo.

Geoff Ramsey, co-founder of eMarketer, wrote an awesome tactical article on “How Staying Positive is Good for Business.”  As you know, I’ve been writing blog posts for the past 3 months about how fear is so 2008 and that this year, 2009, is the Year of Optimism.  Well, it keeps getting harder and harder to truly believe that 2009 will be optimistic as the news media keeps reinforcing doomsday news constantly.  So, take a minute to Geoff’s 5 guiding principles of positivity:

1. Understand Your Locus of Control

2. Tighten the Spigot

3. Focus on the Opportunities

4. Leverage Data to Construct Opportunistic Experiments

5. Invest in the Future

I especially like this quote from the article: “I don’t care how hard this period is. You have to have the combination of believing that you will prevail, that you will get out of this, but also not be the Pollyanna who ignores the brutal facts. You have to say that we will be in this for a long time and we will turn it into a defining event, a big catalyst to make ourselves a much stronger enterprise.”
—Jim Collins, management guru, as quoted in Fortune, February 2, 2009

I’d also like to hear from all of you about a specific positive personal or business experience or news that you’ve read that stood out above the rest – please comment below (in haiku format, of course).