Gonzo’s adventures continued another day regardless of the fact that his face was on Wanted posters around town and a posse of lawmen were scouring the countryside for his hide. Even the livestock equipped with heat-seaking missiles coundn’t keep Gonzo from delivering the following nuggets of South by Southwest wisdom:

Digital’s Emerging Role in Unconsumption

What is “unconsumption”? It’s everything that occurs after you buy something. In many ways it’s the opposite of mainstream consumerism because it has little to do with making money. Instead, it’s all about making what you already have more useful, or exchanging it for something else in a barter system. Craigslist, Etsy and other swapping sites make unconsumption easy and mainstream. For more information on the concept, check out the Unconsumption tumblr blog.

Presenter Nita Rollins covered some consumer actions that go beyond simply buying a shirt at Walmart:

  • Reduce
  • Reuse
  • Recycle
  • Refuse
  • Make
  • Sell
  • Swap

One guy sold everything he owned on eBay with the requirement that the buyer tells him where his item ended up. He was able to trace the paths of many of his old possessions and found that they created a fascinating narrative.

Swap sites use a virtual currency (points) to facillitate the exchange. Even though they aren’t strictly necessary, humans seem to like (or are used to) currency/credits so they know where they stand.

Some other topics that are related to unconsumption:

  • Radical transparency: The death of greenwashing. Companies need to prove to consumers that they are not poisoning the environment and one way to do that is to allow unprecedented levels of transparency.
  • Disintermediation: Cuts out middle man. Etsy is the big one because it creates an alternate economy whereby anybody can become a seller/buyer of homemade goods, no matter where you live
  • Freeconomics: Free has a powerful hold on the psyche. Free is way different than five cents. FreeBay is the free version of eBay, but they’re currently battling eBay’s lawyers over the name.
  • Dematerialization: Atoms mix with bits; laser LED dresses; digitizing old stuff like clothes. This more of a fashion/hipster trend in my opinion, but it shows how far-reaching digital’s ascendance has affected the world beyond it’s borders.

Most marketers don’t think the alternate, unconsumptive economy is more than a fad but the MSM ignored bloggers at their peril. Companies that make and sell physical goods should not repeat the mistakes of the newspaper industry and find ways to embrace unconsumption. It’s good for the environment, it’s good PR and it engages customers in a new and unique way. Maybe one day Target will hold garage sales in their parking lot where anybody can sell old clothes (to make room for new stuff of course!).

Other ways to reach the unconsumer:

  • Offer no holds barred sustainable marketing like rental bridesmaid dresses. Access is more important than ownership in this case. It’s only used for one day so why should you have to buy it? I’m glad men are generally able to simply rent tuxedos.
  • Rent the newest, most covetable items.
  • Clarify sustainability. Most consumers don’t really know what that means. It’s a buzzword, so it needs to be backed up by something real. Video? Blog posts? Show us what it means when you say your product/business is sustainable.
  • Mirror consumers’ desire for disruption. Packaging deconstructed. People like new ideas. Tropicana made packaging that can be used as origami.
  • Support swapping on your own site.

Next Generation of Social Media: Keynote Interview with Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter)

You may have heard of this. It was a disaster. Imagine interviewing the founder of Twitter but deciding not to take any questions from the audience or from (derrr…) Twitter. There you have it, in a nutshell.

Ev immediately launched the new @Anywhere platform. It integrates Twitter into mainstream sites like the New York Times and high-profile blogs like HuffPo. The sites can suggest followers. You can sign into the site with your Twitter ID and tweet right from the site. Twitter really doesn’t care if you go to twitter.com or not. Like Facebook (via Connect) they want to be everywhere.

Some more takeaways from the interview:

They think of Twitter as an info network more than a social network. That’s why there isn’t the mutual-friending thing that happens on Facebook. You can follow them without the other person having to follow you back, or vice versa.

Openness

Twitter employees are organized into automonous teams that focus on one particular project. They get resources and freedom with support from above. They’re still working on scaling issues and creating a good company culture. Openness is an edict, but it’s easy to say hard to do. A window is transparent but a door is open; so they let people come in and mess with their stuff and learn from what users are doing. Openness is a survival mechanism. They decided to let Bing and Google in because they will ultimately find new value through expanding the ecosystem. Letting smaller fish have access so they can find new things to do with the data. Their growth is possible because of the openness that 3rd party developers have harnessed. There’s a hardware device for bakers now. Tells you when the cookies are done or whatever. Err on the side of openness but they need some degree of control. It’s not a panacea. It’s a weakness that spammers exploit.
They need some shepherding for the health of the ecosystem.

Inclusiveness

They don’t want to shut out new ideas or uses. They want to support the weakest signals which is why they support SMS. People on the wrong side of the digital divide can still participate. They are seeing strong growth in India. The Middle East and Haiti are growing rapidly. Twitter brings digital refugees onto the Internet even if they only have a dumb phone.

  • No longer saying “what are you doing?”; It’s a lot wider than that now. Robert Gibbs is using twitter now in a fairly authentic way.
  • Reducing walls between influential people and those they influence.
  • Realizing the promise of the Internet. It’s changing institutions.
  • Rewiring society. The Internet is a tidalwave that will eventually overwhelm repressive regimes.

Betterness

It’s all about improving people and their lives in a tangible way. They want to be a force for good. They would like to actually decrease the amount of time you spend on the site; use a third party app! They want to be a tool that helps people pay attention to the things that matter to them. They wanna let people make better decisions. People want to help each other so they want to reduce friction.

As social media changes society the winners will be most of us, but the losers will be those who exploited gaps in information.

If the business gets better because of Twitter it adds value on both sides. In the real world businesses often have no insight into what consumers want and costumers have little sway. There’s also a lack of accountability.

If you’re not hoarding proprietary data how do you succeed? They are only interested in win-win deals. They want something sustainable and scalable. Their advantage is having a bigger network and not giving people a reason to work around you. Working with “foes” rather than against them; Ev says Twitter compliments traditional reporting; it’s not a direct competitor to TV news.

Breaking Point

There might have been more, but at this point I couldn’t bear any more. The wretched noise behind me was distracting as hell; it sounded like metal rubbing against metal somewhere up in the airducts. Absolutely painful. Plus it was hot, boring and wi-fi was swamped. People were leaving in droves. It was a poorly executed keynote and most of the blame must go on interviewer Umair Haque for taking a very Old Media approach. Let’s hope Hugh and the other organizers learned from this debacle and make sure to manifest the openness and inclusiveness that Ev and Umair gave a lot of lip-service to. The Twitter back-channel was merciless.

Twitter Tools

Next up I hit the Twitter Tools panel, moderated by Guy Kawasaki and featuring Scoble and others. StingRay covered this in his earlier post, and my only addition is the defacto Twitter app store: oneforty.com

That’s it for Day Four! Only one day left. I hope I make it.