An Accidental Advertiser

SXSW volunteers stuff bags with swag in preparation for the conference.

Fifty hours of labor in exchange for a pass worth $700 works out to $14/hour. Volunteering at SXSW made sense, or so I thought. I signed up online and made plans to be in Austin for last weekend’s volunteer call, where I could arrange my committee assignments and create my schedule.

It didn’t work out that way. I was unsuitable in three key areas. Be like me, and you too can fail to volunteer.

Be Old

For our purposes, old means anyone who is beyond college age. The sweet spot for music crew volunteers is 21–22, which is old enough to get into the music venues and past TABC, but young enough to be on spring break during the festival. Which puts the age range of the conference volunteers at 16–20.

The 18-year-old in line in front of me at the volunteer call thought it was “unfair” that she couldn’t be on the photography crew (age 21+), since she had tons of experience and had been shooting “since middle school.” Her friend stated that no one else had her talent, but she didn’t really want to be there anyway with all the “old people,” did she? The girl concurred. No old people.

Be Slow

The volunteer call was spread over six hours on two days. But it’s more like college class registration in that you don’t stand a chance unless you’re ready and waiting the moment the window opens. So show up an hour after the start of the first day, like me, and expect over half the committees to be full up. I honestly should have known better.

Be Busy

This one I didn’t see coming. In the advance information given to volunteers, SXSW warns you that you absolutely must be available on March 10, the Wednesday before the conference starts. But once you’re there at the call creating your schedule, you’ll discover that all the committees also require you attend pre-event orientations. Many of these meetings were on February 28, but some weren’t yet finalized and would be “sometime the week before the conference.”

Again, it makes sense to have orientation sessions before the conference, but why they aren’t on March 10, and why the dates weren’t previously disclosed, I have no idea.

I’m frustrated that it didn’t work out for me to volunteer, but it wasn’t in the cards. I might try again next year, but if I do, it will be as an “out of town” volunteer. I suspect they make scheduling accommodations for anyone with travel arrangements. But more likely, I’ll be fully employed next March, and I’ll buy a badge like a normal person.

Love Changes Your Secret Santa

The obvious problem I have with this billboard is that it’s STILL UP. In January.

But the bigger problem is that I don’t understand it at all. Is there some kind of workplace romance going on where the guy spends way more than the $10 limit on a gift for the cute girl in accounting? Did one of the two of them switch names or otherwise rig the drawing? And why are they skiing?

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While I rouse myself to write a new post, here’s an old one on social media from my student days.

Google’s announcement this week that they will begin personalizing search results based on opt-out cookies and not opt-in accounts has stirred up the following pots:

Privacy

Google will use a cookie to keep track of 180 days of your search history, and it will then use the information it gleans to improve the quality of your results. Don’t like the idea of the information giant knowing what you’re looking for? You’ll need to actively disable the feature. You know what? I like this move, even though I dislike the need to make it opt-out. But I understand. The average user has no motivation to turn this feature ON, but the privacy-sensitive will definitely be motivated to turn it OFF. Google has decided to annoy a small group to improve the product for the whole user base.

Twitter

The incorporation of live micro-blogging posts in search seems gimmicky to me. Has it been included simply to keep up with Bing? Regardless, brand managers are nervous. Twitter noise previously remained on Twitter, and if you weren’t among the small minority of people involved on that site, you didn’t hear any of it. No more. Whatever is said about a brand on Twitter now appears on Google, where A LOT more people will read it. So get a-twittering, marketing folks, if you weren’t already!

SEO

There is an entire industry built around helping website owners increase the ranking of their sites on search engines. I imagine these business are a bit dazed right now. This isn’t a tweak to Google’s Page Rank algorithm, this is a land shift. But I don’t think it’s necessarily bad for them or their clients. Any site that employs “black hat” tactics to rank highly (including keyword stuffing, doorway pages, link farming, etc) will suffer. Because they focus on tricks rather than providing desirable content and establishing authority, they’ll find themselves soon shut out of most Google searches. But the sites that invest in “white hat” development (code and site optimization, content creation, conscientious link building) will be well rewarded.

I’m willing to say the good outweighs the bad.

I was asked this very question the other day at the grocery store, and chances are, you’ve heard it in many other retail situations. It’s become somewhat of a stock cashier greeting — a way to acknowledge the customer’s arrival at the front of the line and to express concern for her full satisfaction.

Now, how often have you answered in the negative? I’d wager occasionally. I also maintain that by providing this opportunity for feeback, the cashier has an obligation to act on the response. Too often, my reply that no, I didn’t find something I needed is met with a look of mild surprise and a mumbled “Oh.” These cashiers then proceed to scan the items I did manage to locate.

When the cashier is responsive, it can be a very soothing thing. At various times, I’ve had managers summoned, free shipping vouchers procured, or other locations called. Even if the end result is the same (no item), I feel like the best has been done and that my disappointment has been recognized in a productive way. But when I get back blankness or disregard, I’m even more annoyed than when I started out.

So why would any cashier ask or be instructed to ask such a question if they aren’t impowered or motivated to be problem-solvers? It takes what could be a constructive and caring initiative and shows it to be nothing more than a hollow script. (I have a small confession to make about scripts: For three days in the mid-90s, I worked as a telemarketer for the symphony. I couldn’t stay on-script to save my life. At one point I sang a line of Der Hölle Rache for a lady, and it astonished me that she didn’t hang up then and there.)

OK, back to my point. Who likes being spoken to according to a script? That’s not to say companies shouldn’t work out basic responses for messaging consistency or work through scenarios to manage risk, but talking to someone with no autonomy to respond on a personal level is deeply aggravating.