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Recently, a charity called Living Streets dedicated to making cities more pedestrian-friendly, wrapped London’s Brick Lane lamp posts in football-esque bumpers to protect texting pedestrians from injury. Though the publicity stunt lasted a mere 24 hours, the effort highlighted what most of us already know: that people are addicted to being connected, even while walking.

A recent study by PEW found that more than roughly 6 in 10 American cell phone users text message. It’s no wonder that everyone from Presidential campaigns to police officers to WalMart to nonprofit causes (highlighted by MobileActive.org) seek to leverage the popularity of text messaging.

1. The mobile audience is wide and deep: Worldwide, more people have access to and use of mobile phones than the Internet. As Ethan Zuckerman of TechSoup points out, “The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio.” Given the penetration, personalization and simplicity of mobile devices, there is no better tool to reach both wealthy individuals and underserved populations. In addition, you can activate young, tech savvy people using the communications channel that makes the most sense to them.
2. Simple is superior: I may be biased given my blog style is list format, but people like byte-sized - and actionable - information. In an information economy, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the breadth of accessible knowledge. Communicating with individuals via the limited 160 characters in a text message requires the messenger to cut the window dressing and deliver messages that are simple, clear and clever to make an impact. To educate and motivate, it’s all about the words themselves (which is great since haikus are so cool).
3. Reach people where and when they matter: All politics are local and all advocacy is timely. When someone is checking email at 10pm after a long day of work, sending a letter to an elected official may be overdue. With text messaging, you can give people a specific address of a place to be, a direct action to take or short talking points while they are in a meeting or at an event so they can act on it when it actually matters. However, this means the action must be real and serious not just a faux-urgent engagement effort. The technique also allows you to reach people when their emotional senses are heightened before they lose their enthusiasm (or anger) about an issue.
4. Penetrate the “Circle of Trust”: While studies show that people will offer up their email address for almost anything, cell phone numbers remain relatively protected, both by the individual and the mobile service providers. Therefore, if your supporters give you their cell to reach them on their most personal device, you can assume you’re in the circle of trust and that your message will be read. The key is to maintain that level of trust through infrequent, authentic and relevant subsequent messages. Mobile communications elevates the level of accountability for all campaigns and requires listening to what supporters want.
5. Another spoke on the wheel of integration: Continuing to blur the lines of offline and online, text messaging allows marketers to both capture and measure the success of offline events and print advertising like never before. Supporters can text from an ad they’ve seen or post on a website a photo or podcast they record from an event. A mobile strategy is another tool to use in conjunction with traditional advertising and media, online marketing and in-person events but should not just replicate what’s being said through other channels.
6. Experimentation is expected: Because it’s still a relatively new channel, text messaging campaigns leave a lot of room for trial and error and users expect it. Advocacy organizations and corporations alike can promote their “products” in innovative ways that push the interactive brand experience envelope. Successful campaigns will think about marketing as two-way conversation and not just another medium to push an agenda.

Since the advent of YouTube, we’ve been advising people that the average user attention span is about 4 minutes, and that making anything longer just means that people will click away.

But this political season has been challenging that assumption, when some of the most viewed videos have been extended speechs of thirty minutes or more.

Are we reaching the turning point for web video where users are willing to watch longer content? Are people willing to reach the Illiad in addition to a haiku? And how do you test the proposition of a long form piece of content versus a shorter one.

I explore these questions below the fold…

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This was Beaconfire’s first year sending people to South by Southwest. Eve and I went to get connected to the buzz on the latest web 2.0 apps, meet with non-profits interested in incorporating more rich media into their online outreach and to recruit contractors to help us with design, development and production.

After being here all week, I think it’s worth sending a much bigger delegation next - there’s just too much for two people to cover. For example, while I was attending Findable Rich Media and Eve was attending Design is in the Details, we missed AJAX and Flash mistakes, Accessibility: Basics Quickly, and What Teens Want, all of which would have been valuable panels.

The tendency to stack useful panels on top of each other was something that I heard a lot of folks bemoaning, and hopefully it won’t be as bad next year, but it would still have been good to have had an information architect, functional consultant, and software engineer with us to attend some of the sessions outside our areas of expertise.

Just as there were too many concurrent events during the day, there was also too much going on at night for us to cover everything. The evening festivities were great chances for us to network with others working in the nonprofit space, and hopefully we’ll be bringing some of the folks we met onto projects as clients, contractors and partners.

There were also a few events that we really didn’t get the chance to participate in. The core conversations were a new feature this year that I missed out on, due to session conflicts (not sure about Eve), but hope to try next year. Similarly, there were a variety of design and dev competitions that we talked about participating in in future years. And I wasn’t able to make time to attend book readings or demos at the Adobe Day Stage, except when they coincided with a lunch break.

In the end, I think SxSW is a valuable conference for non-profits and the consultants who work with them to attend. The applications and ideas presented were for the most part universal, and it’s a great look at where the web is going in the next year. While, as I’ve noted, it is to some extent a gathering of early adopters (note that percentage of Twitter users and iPhoners), it’s also a chance to get to meet the super-activists, those top-shelf constituents who will make use of the advanced features of your site that make them evangelists for your cause.

And let’s not kid ourselves - the people attending the conference were activists in addition to being technologists. Jokes about voting in Texas got a good reaction, many a MacBook sported an Obama, Clinton or "Stop Global Warming" sticker, and every time I told someone about Beaconfire’s nonprofit portfolio, there was at least one organization that caused them to say "I know them - they do great work." Many of the startups that are just pioneering an idea were excited by the possibility of partnering with leading nonprofits.

I’ll continue to followup with takeaways on the individual sessions - for Beaconfire, next week we’ll have a significant presence at NTC, so look forward to seeing posts from there.

I’ve added a few more pictures below the fold.

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Howdy from Austin. Today’s the last day of the conference, and I’ll be taking my camera in again to get some pictures of what’s going on at the convention center. Once again, for more up to the minute updates, check my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/johnbrian. Previous updates on days 0, 1, 2, and 3 here. -John Brian

• 11:52: As I pack up to leave, I’ve got a bunch of pics I haven’t posted yet. I’ll upload a few now, and save the rest for the wrapup post:

Even for a tech conference, in a paperless society, there were tables set up to capture the massive amount of junk lit. It reminds me of what a friend once said to me at a rally, "When someone hands me a flyer, I feel like they’re asking, ‘Could you throw this away for me?’"

One thing I was surprised not to hear such a libertarian group discuss was the massive number of cameras in the convention center. I mean, it makes sense, but they were really obvious and omnipresent - you’d think that there’s at least be something on Digg asking Ron Paul to do something about it.

Yes, even Judge Dredd uses Twitter. Okay, not really - the guy in the costume is Adam Lavis, who made a film about John Hicklenton, pictured on left. Here’s a blog post with more if you’re interested.

There was serious work going on with regard to the Legos. I considered building a Beaconfire logo, but saw very few standard 4×2 and 2×2 red and white blocks. Oh, and there were panels to attend. Feel free to discuss in the comments how Legos have morphed from when you were young.

That’s all for tonight - I’ll write a wrapup on the way home. Earlier posts from today are below the fold…

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Howdy from Austin. I’m going to be using today’s space for larger thoughts than can fit in Twitter (140 characters cramps my style. Though some would argue it could use some cramping), along with links. But for more up to the minute updates, check my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/johnbrian. Previous updates on days 0, 1, and 2 here. -John Brian

11:41: First, I just got back from the Facebook party, where I was interviewed by ABC News as part of their partnership with Facebook. Let’s hope I talked too fast for the 5 minute segment to be used; after being at the conference for almost four days, I may be looking pretty grizzly. I’m not seeing it anywhere on Facebook or ABC yet, but will post a link if it appears.

Second, the party itself was also pretty excellent - for anyone staying for the music festival, they have another party later this week for you, but pre-register to avoid the line.

Third, tomorrow’s the last day of panels, and I’m not as impressed by the lineup; there’s general consensus that they frontloaded the good panels, and I’ve heard grumbling that they scheduled panels for similar interests at the same time (to be fair, some of that grumbling was coming from me). Any insights on panels that I shouldn’t miss? Check the list and leave a comment.

Lastly, one BF Wire reader today suggested I post these updates in chronological order rather than reverse cron, since I refer to things from earlier. I pointed out that I run them this way so you don’t have to go below the fold to see if there’s new content. What do you prefer? Leave a comment with your opinion, which we’ll use to format our blog coverage of NTC next week.

Post-lastly, if you’re going to be at NTC, sign up to our Facebook event invite so we know to find you - there’s a good portion of the Beaconfire team going, and we don’t want to miss seeing you!

2:23: Here are some more photos from this morning (I’ve moved the others below the fold to allow for easier scrolling to earlier posts; check flickr for full size):

The corridors were filled with masses of hallway bloggers - maybe there were power outlets on this wall?

The Dell lounge - like many Dell products, it has proprietary hardware that keeps you from adding your own peripherals, like a roof. But there were regular live acoustic performances, which was cool.

The Opera booth was the place to be, and I don’t think they were even giving out swag. Buzz there was mostly around Opera mini and the Opera install as the browers for Wii. Firefox didn’t have a presence.

I shot this walking into True Stories from Social Media Sites. It was a pretty popular panel, with some pretty well-known names. When asked who here used Twitter, about 75% raised their hands - I’d be interested to see what that percentage is at NTC.

The Zappos guys were handing out rain ponchos at all the exits at noon. Smart way to get their brand out there - my #1 rule of swag is "Make it something useful to me, not just branded placement for you." As a result, ponchos and shot glasses get kept, stickers and T-shirts get tossed. I’d like to think that BF’s booklights and Magic 8 Balls are in the "keep" category.

More pics from the conference tomorrow.

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Howdy from Austin. I’m going to be using today’s space for larger thoughts than can fit in Twitter (140 characters cramps my style. Though some would argue it could use some cramping), along with links. But for more up to the minute updates, check my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/johnbrian. Previous updates on days 0 and 1 here. -John Brian

• 12:14: I haven’t had a chance yet to catalogue some of the cool stuff we saw on the trade show floor. Here’s a sampling, based on what I’m taking out of my bag:

1. Utterz.com, in addition to being proof that yes, every web 2.0 domain name has been taken, allows you to blog remotely using a combination of voice, video, pictures and text. I actually saw the demo at the Google party on Saturday first, but wanted to get more info before posting. It’s free and ad-free at the moment, and they indicated that when they do go ad-supported, they’ll have an enterprise version for NPOs that don’t want to share branding. Could be cool at conferences or for companies that spend a lot of time on the road where it’s tough to blog.
2. Izea.com has a pay per post blogging program. While I’m still not convinced that it’s not conceptually a bad PR move, it does provide some opportunities for quick SEO. They also indicated that they now require disclosure, to the level specified by the client, which reassured me a little.
3. Mapquest was located right across from arch-rival Google, and had some interesting things to say. Their API is free and unlimited, and allows programmers to work in a variety of languages. Mapquest really pioneered online maps, and while most of their work seems to be in static maps, they’ve since expanded as a serious competitor to Google and Yahoo.
4. Zappos also had a pretty significant presence - I was a little confused, since they don’t really do any B2B, but I guess they’ve been having a big presence for years. They were also there to recruit talent.

• 11:33: Almost everyone here at the interactive festival seems to be with a company of some sort - very few independent contractors here. Is that because of the cost or some other factor? I’d also be interested to hear how big a delegation came from some of the giants in the field - I’ve met folks from Apple (one of whom stood in line next to me earlier tonight, defending flaws in the iPod/iPhone before finally revealing that he was an Apple developer) and Google (who indicated that their grants/.org folks weren’t here - maybe they’ll be at NTC?) - wonder how big a delegation these folks sent.

This post is getting long so I’m updating it to add a fold - check below for more from Day 2.

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Hello from Austin! Eve and I are here at South by Southwest Interactive to scope out the latest innovations, meet with potential partners and non-profits, and check out all the conference has to offer. I’ll be updating semi-live blogging from the conference from today through Tuesday - be sure to check back regularly for updates (assuming the wireless holds out). Day 0 here. -John Brian

• 11:52: Lots of good sessions tomorrow morning - I’m weighing A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?, Scope Creep and Other Villains, Social Design Strategies, Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World, and Increase Revenue by Mobile-Enabling Your Services. If you have any insight here, leave a comment.
• 11:31: Back at the hotel now - couple of thoughts from the interim:

• The session of social media metrics was fascinating - it’s going to take some time to digest, but of particular interest was what one speaker had to say about the frequent desire to measure success in impressions, which paraphrases to "If all you care about is impressions per dollar, just buy some really bad Google Ads, which will get you a million impressions for no money." They then went to talk about ways to quantify social media success, which I’ll go into in a separate post.
• Google throws quite a party. The line was out for about a block even an hr after it started, and it was not clearing out even after the official ending.
• I’m impressed by the number of nonprofits here - there’s quite a few with a commitment to new media, particularly with NTC coming up later in the month. That said, most folks I’ve talked to have said that the line production and pm folks are here while the execs are going to NTC.
• Tomorrow is daylight savings, which means I’m basically back on Eastern time. Well, it was nice while it lasted. Also, according to the front desk, if I want to move my clock back, I need to disassemble it. Boo.
• Going through my collected stuff for the day, I found the lit piece from Angelsoft, which says "$1 buys access to 1.2 angel groups for entrepreneur funding." Attached is a $1 bill, which seems legit. I’m not sure if this is a good tactic, since it guerentees that everyone will pick up your lit, or a bad one, because your gimmick is gone as soon as I get thirsty.
• Also notable swag: Adobe had a fortune cookie in a Chinese food box. Cool enough, but the fortunes are only half written, and if you match your’s to the person who has the other half, you win a complete Adobe suite. Makes people not just keep your chum but also discuss with others.
• What both these have in common is that they’re something of value to the attendees. On the contrary, most of the bag with filled with generic lit and stickers - why should I advertise your product with something that has no other value to me? I’ll hit the show floor tomorrow to see what other swag I can accumulate.

This post is getting long so I moved everything else below the fold.

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Hello from Austin! Eve and I are here at South by Southwest Interactive to scope out the latest innovations, meet with potential partners and non-profits, and check out all the conference has to offer. I’ll be updating semi-live blogging from the conference from today through Tuesday - be sure to check back regularly for updates (assuming the wireless holds out). -John Brian

• 6:11: I’m headed out now to get my badge, scope out the convo center and attend the opening night party. Maybe when I get back tonight, I’ll migrate this to Twitter.
• 5:02 pm: Don’t let your cabbie handle your notebook, under any circumstances. I now have a big crack in my battery that scratches my wrist when I try to type. Anyone know where I can get some tape?
• 4:55 pm: I’ve been given no less than four free cookies so far today. Midwest’s are much better than Doubletree’s. Of course, more than 56,000 people signed a petition to support them…
• 3:37 pm: About a third of my flight from Kansas City to Austin is coming here for the conference. Thank you to the flight attendant for being a good sport and asking for a show of hands!
• 1:31 pm: PackRat is some Facebook game that’s got an ad in the SxSW convo booklet (pdf). I installed it on my FB on the assumption it has something to do with SxSW, but it doesn’t seem to. What a waste - this could have been much better if it involved the conference in some way. Wonder how much that ad space cost.
• 1:12 pm: Kansas City Airport has free wireless. Not often you see that anymore, so I figured it was worth giving props for. It was so slow it was nearly useless, but better than the usually outrageously priced, but today mysteriously nonexistant wireless at National’s Terminal A.

I was perusing the Presidential candidates’ blogs a couple weeks back, looking to see where they were headed in my old stomping grounds in Wisconsin, when I came across this item, at the bottom of a post about a supporter-created video:

You can create your own video ‘mashups’ too — feel free to download high resolution footage from our resource library today

Though I was annoyed that they put mashups in quotes (putting web 2.0 terms in quote marks, as if you’re not quite sure it’s a term yet, is almost up there with saying "online blogs"), I was fascinated by how open they were to releasing raw video footage to their supporters.

Looking around the internets, it looks like Obama’s campaign isn’t alone in releasing semi-raw video footage to supporters, but it’s a practice that hasn’t trickled down to non-profits yet. Below the jump, I explore the how this has paid off for some candidates, and why NPOs should join them.

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Today’s election day in Wisconsin, where most of my Facebook network resides. I’ve been watching my mini-feed in fascination as various friends update their status with who they’re voting for. Could Facebook be the secret weapon that’s turning out the youth and creative class vote this year?

In particular, watching status updates come in today show that in some ways, Facebook’s core functionality is more effective in reaching other users than any application: it’s word of mouth, plain and simple, except that it’s delivered to networks of people at a reach and speed that no mere "I voted" sticker can manage. To say nothing of the fact that few of said stickers indicate for whom you voted, an endorsement that can have more meaning for young people than all the Kennedy’s in Massachusetts.

Just looking at my own feed today, here are some of the status updates I saw (names blurred out for privacy reasons):

Could Facebook, because of it’s natural ability to broadcast messages, addictive nature, and near ubiquity be a stronger mover of votes than offline social affiliations, like unions or churches? Based on the results we’ve seen from youth turnout this year, along with the growth potential as these networks age, more members of the creative class already post-college begin adopting it, and the number of people attending college increases, I’m betting that that’s the trend we’re going to see in this election and the ones that follow.

And it’s a trend that that I, for one, welcome.