Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video...

SXSW Interactive had more attendees than ever before. A lot more. But here's the confusing part: the people attending are the same people who create and evangelize the tools that make attending totally unnecessary. I started my keynote by asking if anyone was live-blogging. Hands shot up across the room. Someone yelled "Twitter!" The whole thing was recorded on video and audio. So... if nobody needed to be there, why were they?

Lots of people claimed it was all about the side/hallway conversations. But chat and Twitter and all the other non-face-to-face tools are pretty damn good at letting you have conversations. Some said it was for the free beer, but seriously, if you needed to come to Austin, pay a few hundred bucks, and stand in lines just to get a beer, you have other issues. The only logical excuse was for those few (or perhaps more) singles who were hoping for some... action. So it must be something illogical, or rather--some ineffable human thing that defies a simple rational explanation.

The point is, face-to-face still matters. And in fact all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y'all are building, we now have more far-flung friends--including people we've never met f2f--than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

All we (and the scientists researching this) know is that there is something we still haven't managed to replicate in a meaningful way, even with the highest-resolution video conferencing tools. One theory is that it has something to do with smell. Whatever it is, it exerts a powerful pull on our legacy brain... a brain that still has no idea we aren't living in caves where human contact and social face-to-face interaction are key to our survival.

The most underrated benefit of the face-to-face effect of conferences is INSPIRATION.

For me, the single biggest reason to attend an event like SXSW is the feeling of motivation and--as David Seah so aptly put it -- "Rededication". Almost everyone I talked with at SXSW said they were newly inspired. Was it from the ideas they were hearing in the sessions? Some of it, sure. But again, those same ideas are going out to everyone with a browser. No, there's more to it. There's mirror neurons, for one thing, and the effect of emotional contagion that happens when you're around a pile of people who share the same interest and enthusiasm. Everyone comes out re-energized. And you don't need to go to SXSW to get that benefit! Simply attending any live event--from the three-person lunch meetup to the 100-person local user group can give you the most positive effect of being at an event like SXSW.

In my talk, I mentioned two implications of the importance of face-to-face:

1) We should encourage our (human) users to get together in the offline world.
2) We should add more human-ness to the interactions in our software.

In this post, I want to mention a few ideas for the first one.

Get your users to meet other users in the real world!
Where there is passion around an activity or product or service or cause, there are always people wanting to connect with others who share that passion. The more we can help put our users together with one another offline, the more likely we are to get--or increase--user passion.

Suggestions:

1) Put together a "How To Start A Local User Group or Club" document.
Include tips on things like finding a space, topic ideas, and getting speakers. (If anyone has one of these, please let us know!)

2) Offer free materials for the user groups
User group meetings often start or end with prize drawings; give the user group leaders plenty of swag for the meetings. It'll make the leaders look good, etc.

3) Treat your user group leaders like royalty
Sun puts JUG (Java User Group) leaders on a pedastal--helping them promote their groups, giving them special receptions at the annual JavaOne conference, etc.

4) Instead of a traditional user group, provide guidelines for a Study Group
(Or a related book club.) Collect advice and lessons from other existing groups. Provide a list of suggested books to read, and 6-months' worth of topic plans. For example, "Month One: read [insert book related to your domain], and have each attendee discuss the following key points..."

5) Hold a very low-cost annual weekend conference.
Make it ridiculously easy for people to get there. Find sponsors to help. Even better if you hold several mini-conferences a year, in different locations.

6) Encourage users to start a local BarCamp (or other *Camp).
Direct your users to the BarCamp Wiki where they can learn how to do it.

7) Use Meetup.com as a resource!

8) If you already have online user forums, enlist moderators to try to form an offline meetup.
This is often one of the best places to start.

9) Hold special cocktail receptions/parties for user group leaders at industry conferences in your domain.

10) Advertise/promote your user group events on your main page!
Remember, passionate users MUST connect with others who share that passion, so this is not a nice-to-have... it's an essential part of any product, service, or cause for which people are passionate.

Bottom line: Face-to-Face matters, and the more people we meet online, the more people we now want to connect with offline. Perhaps one day in the future, the technology will finally catch up with real-life and we'll get the same brain/health benefits from a non-real-world experience. Personally, I hope not. I'd rather see technology that lets us come together in the real world as cheaply and easily as possible, despite wide geographic distances.

And to all who bothered to come to my SXSW talk when you clearly didn't need to, I so SO much appreciate it. I've only recently been speaking at conferences, but I've been attending them for almost 20 years like a junkie. And I don't even go to the parties. I go because I always come back motivated, even by the things I had begun to take for granted.

You don't need to go to SXSW to take advantage of the ideas there... just read the coverage and listen to the podcasts. But to get the real benefit of SXSW without being there, find a local group of people to meet up with! Even if it's three people having a coffee morning, it's important. A lot more important than most of us twittering, IM'ing, blogging, video-chatting folks like to acknowledge.