The Oatmeal at SXSW

While the majority of sessions that I'm attending here at SXSW are related to my work as a product manager, there were a couple sessions I wanted to attend for purely personal reasons. #1 on my list was Viral Marketing with the Oatmeal. Matthew Inman, aka The Oatmeal has been churning out hilarious, relevant and very relatable comics on his web site since 2009. His session at SXSW dealt with the history of his website as well as some of the tips and tricks he's used to expand his creative empire. Inman is hilarious in person and getting the back story on some of the comics and quizzes he's done was phenomenal. Here are the highlights:

-The name. "The Oatmeal" was a direct result of the first person shooter "Quake." When the game debuted, Inman was a huge fan of the multiplayer experience and his handle was "Quaker Oatmeal." He later shortened it to Oatmeal and that has been his go-to handle/screen name/avatar ever since.
-The quizzes. Ever done "How Many Hungry Weasels Could Your Body Feed?" or "Are Your Loved Ones Plotting to Eat You?" These, and the many other delightfully-named quizzes featured on the Oatmeal aren't just goofy diversions, they're actually a highly effective guerilla SEO technique. Inman's first solo venture was an online dating site which he eventually sold to a larger competitor. To drive search engine traffic to the site, Inman created quizzes like "How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?" On the results page of each quiz Inman placed a small link to his dating site at the bottom. As well as a snippet to embed the results page on Facebook, a blog, etc. The quizzes went viral and were enormously popular, so the link to the dating site spread like wildfire. By determining how long you would last in a zombie apocalypse and then sharing your score with your friends you were inadvertently boosting the the rank of Inman's dating site in search engine results. Pretty smart.
-PETA. A few years ago, PETA kicked off a campaign to try and convince the general public that fish were "sea kittens." Most people are opposed to eating kittens. So PETA figured that if people starting thinking of fish as cuddly, they wouldn't be so eager to catch and consume them. Inman immediately responded with his own site promoting the consumption of "Sea Bacon." PETA was not amused. Last year, Inman did a comic extolling the 5 Reasons Pigs Are More Awesome Than You (#1 reason - Pigs experience a 30 minute orgasm). PETA was so impressed with the comic (and apparently forgot about Sea Bacon), that they linked the comic on their website. When Inman saw the influx of traffic to the site from PETA's domain, he inserted some code to redirect hits from that domain to a new comic advocating the eating of horses. It took PETA 8 hours to catch the redirect and update their link.
-Bieber. Inman's friends have urged him for some time to do a comic skewering Justin Bieber. But after taking some time to research what exactly a Bieber was, Inman decided he was merely another reason to feel bad for humanity as a species and not worthy of a comic. He did create a quiz called "How Many Justin Biebers Could You Take In A Fight?" Recognizing that many quiz takers would post their results to twitter, Inman added Bieber's twitter tag to the automated Twitter export. So every time someone Tweets their Bieber bashing score, the Biebs himself gets a heads up.

SXSW Session: Dork Intervention - Bringing Design to Agile

One of the sessions I was really looking forward during SXSW was Dork Intervention: Bringing Design to Agile. In the past year Info Directions has adopted an agile development model for some of our new software features. The advantages to our development and testing processes are obvious. But as the product owner/designer, it has been a challenge figuring out how to communicate my design/system requirements to the other members of the team. I am accustomed to developing in a waterfall environment, where we spend as much time as needed hammering out the design and requirements before a developer or tester ever begins work. Now, we are expected to design concurrently with dev and test activities. So this session with Karl Nieberding and Kris Corzine of eBay, looked like it had massive potential.

Agile is Broken

The presenters discussed a case study from their experience at eBay. Specifically, how could they reduce the time necessary to post a listing on the auction site from an average of 45 minutes, to 3 minutes or less? The presentation was less about the solution (using bar code scanning software to rapidly input items with a web cam) than the process that got them to the solution. The presenters went through the pros and cons of the various models of incorporating design into agile: Waterfall, mini waterfall, just in time and exclusive design sprints. Ultimately, the presenters decided on a new approach they called Fused Innovation. Unfortunately, their explanation of Fused Innovation was pretty vague. I got the impression that they continued to mash up the first four methods until they found a hybrid that was comfortable and then ran with it. But it was tough to discern exactly how Fused Innovation could be duplicated. They wrapped up with a list of 7 rules of engagement. But these rules were par for the agile course. Nothing earth shattering.

Overall, I was really hoping for a great takeaway to bring back to IDI. So the Dork Intervention was a mild disappointment.