Day’s Web series “The Guild,” a comedy about the lives of online gamers, began with Day’s own interest in gaming. With fans of Joss Whedon’s work on her side, she shot a pilot episode, calling on favors from friends for equipment and resources and filming on cost alone. Her team released subsequent episodes one at a time on a monthly basis, building a loyal fan base who began to donate to the production of more content.

Creating content for the Web: Aim with a sniper rifle, not a shotgun

After five seasons and sponsorships from Microsoft and AT&T (all while still maintaining full ownership of the project), Day maintains the reason for her success was targeting a niche audience from the start. She used a gaming analogy to explain: “aim with a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun” — by focusing on a community that at the time had not often been represented in mainstream media, Day gave a vote to gamers, and those gamers responded. In its first season alone, The Guild was viewed more than 80 million times.

Quality niche over mass appeal

Day urged big business to move some of their efforts away from casting a wide net with television advertising and other traditional buys. Instead, she suggested, spend on creating quality web content for a niche audience (or pay a team that’s already successfully doing it.) Not only might companies get in front of brand new potential customers, they would support independently created content and build reputation as a more savvy brand.

The power of social media

As of this post, more than 1.8 million Twitter users follow @feliciaday, and that’s not something she takes lightly. She explained her strategy with reaching out to her fan base on her blog and on Twitter as “a long-term relationship.” Rarely would Day tell her followers about something (or ask for their help) if it didn’t strike her as useful or interesting to others. She also urged celebrities to use their power on the Web to shine light on causes that could use more attention. On the heels of Christopher Poole’s keynote the previous afternoon, Day also expressed concern for the future of anonymity and creativity on the Web, urging the audience to seek to protect their right to create and consume original content online.

Want to read more on what’s caught our attention at South by Southwest Interactive? Learn about:

• 4chan’s Christopher ‘moot’ Poole on the benefits of anonymity online (Day Three)
• SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch on the decade of the game layer (Day Two)
• O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly on the future of the Web, government and great brands (Day One)

Image courtesy Lan Bui on Flickr / Creative Commons.

Disclaimer: Because some of the content on 4chan.org is of a considerably adult or crude nature, I’ve chosen not to link directly to the site. For the sensitive souls in the bunch, I’d advise doing some additional reading on 4chan before deciding to visit. -J.

What makes an online community grow, evolve and thrive? Christopher “moot” Poole, founder of the web forum and community 4chan, believes that a large part of this success is providing its users the choice of anonymity. While Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, pushes for the use of a single, real online identity that carries throughout the user’s life, Poole believes this not only restricts what users feel comfortable saying, it also constricts the creative process itself.

Riffing for the LOLs

Christopher Poole started 4chan as a community for anime culture, which over the past several years has gained reputation for everything but — if you’ve seen a cartoon spread like wildfire among your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or even in an e-mail (a LOLcat, for example), chances are fair that it originated on 4chan. How can one community generate much of internet culture’s most pervasive humor? Poole attributes it to the ability to fail. Like musicians riffing, users on 4chan build on an image to distort or remix it, until ultimately the funniest among the bunch spread virally in a digital version of “survival of the fittest.” In the creation of any good meme, Poole views the process to be just as significant as the final product.

Does anonymity make us more creative?

When given the opportunity to post anonymously (combined with 4chan’s lack of an archive — the turnover in some sections is faster than a few hours), members feel more free to contribute, even if what they add doesn’t ultimately spread. When they are not tied to their prior mistakes, members feel encouraged to continue contributing, much in the way a child can choose to reinvent himself at a new school, leaving his old identity behind. Anonymity also puts emphasis on “content over creator” — without “experts,” much like other forums promote, anyone can be the funniest or most creative member of the day.

Combining Facebook Connect and fluid identity: A new chapter in 4chan’s history

Since rolling out 4chan in 2003, the forum “has not changed very much in function, form and aesthetic.” To encourage more everyday visitors to create content, Poole has introduced a new community called Canv.as, complete with in-site tools to remix pictures and add text. The new site, much unlike its bigger brother, requires the use of Facebook Connect to create an account (to better weed out trolls and other abusive posters, Poole reasons). However, once logged in, the option to post anonymously still exists, continuing the ability to play, make mistakes, and create shared experiences online.

Want to read more on what’s caught our attention at South by Southwest Interactive? Learn about:

• SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch on the decade of the game layer (Day Two)
• O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly on the future of the Web, government and great brands (Day One)

Image courtesy Red Maxwell on Flickr / Creative Commons.

Gaming in education

Priebatsch used education as a prime example of a “game that’s broken.” Schools are nearly perfect game ecosystems because they have motivated players, rules, rewards, levels, and incentives/disincentives, among many other characteristics that fit the profile of a good game. The problem, he theorizes, is that the real rewards of education (learning for learning’s sake) have been replaced with fake rewards (grades), and once that switch occurs, the real incentives can no longer be seen as valuable (even if the false rewards are removed). Between lack of student engagement and the issue of cheating, Priebatsch sees a game worthy of and in need of fixing.

One of the main themes Priebatsch returns to as a solution is the shift of power from those in charge to the students themselves — community managers would refer to this as a “self-regulating community.” To allow for this, the rules themselves must be changed. Princeton’s honor code, consisting of simple rules that make complicity as punishable as cheating itself, significantly reducing Princeton’s annual reported violations as compared to other institutions.

Customer acquisition

Groupon was presented as a prime example of using game mechanics for customer acquisition. By combining “free lunch” with communal gameplay (a complex problem can be solved by a large decentralized group of people if the rules are clear) and a countdown (limiting time in which a deal can be acted on), Groupon has taken an e-mail list and made it incredibly profitable.

Creating loyalty to businesses in the real world

Priebatsch took this portion of the presentation as an opportunity to preview SCVNGR’s new LevelUp program, which is currently testing in Boston and Philadelphia. It operates on the notion that games work best when they include multiple levels that can be unlocked by performing particular actions. He also differentiated between location-based tools that operate on “inclusive ownership” (ex. Whrrl and their creation of societies) and those that operate on “exclusive ownership” (think: Foursquare mayor specials).

Moving location-based services to the mainstream

Though we’d like to think location-based services are the “next big thing” for marketing on the web, the reality is that just four percent of internet users are using them — and just eight percent of online adults 18-29 (Pew Internet). How do we move LBS into mainstream use? Priebatsch suggests a multi-pronged approach, involving partnering with big brands (think: Pepsi’s partnership with Foursquare). He also suggests that we loosen the rules a bit, to allow more than just strictly present individuals to interact with a place. “Will be visiting later” or “want to visit here” should also count as valid interactions in location-based networks, and provides more opportunities for businesses to connect with their customers.

Are early adopters spoiled?

One of the “moral hazards” Priebatsch pointed out to early adopters of LBS is the conditioned expectation of receiving a reward for every check-in. Should users expect to get a discount or special recognition every time they check in to a location on Foursquare? Will SCVNGR users participate in treks only for the prizes, or simply for the fun of it? This is something builders of location-based tools should be mindful of.

Playing games to save the world

By addressing impossibly large world problems with game mechanics, Priebatsch believes we’re poised to help solve them. By participating in a game that contributes to a real-world cause, we derive “epic meaning” — feeling part of something bigger than ourselves, and feeling more productive in a large group than we could be on our own.

Want to learn more?

SCVNGR has posted on their blag on Seth’s keynote coverage in the media. You can also view Seth’s keynote slides here.

Notecard image courtesy Dennis Crowley on Flickr / Creative Commons.

In this first post, I’d like to share some thoughts from the fireside chat between Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, and Jason Calacanis. Tim O’Reilly is someone I’ve followed for several years as a thought leader in technology and Web innovation, and I was fortunate enough to grab a front row seat to his talk.

O’Reilly’s beginnings

Though some may not know this, O’Reilly Media didn’t begin with the intention of being a publishing company. In what Tim O’Reilly describes as “a series of happy accidents that came from ignorance,” O’Reilly launched as a technology documentation consulting company, and with the decline of the industry in the 1980′s, transformed its business model to print its own manuals. At the time, writing tech manuals in the second person was considered outlandish, but ultimately O’Reilly Media’s style and distinctive cover design (many of us are now familiar with the wild animals that grace their manual covers) helped to differentiate the brand and give it a personality.

“Great brands have a core — they mean something.”

O’Reilly kept returning to the characteristics of great brands (some examples he gave: Microsoft, Google, Facebook). He emphasized the need for brands to have clear missions that extend beyond their own walls. Products do not only belong to the companies that create them, but to the people who use them.

The Internet as an OS

If you ask O’Reilly what his talents are, he’ll tell you that he only has one: pattern recognition. In the infancy of personal computers, he recognized a shift in emphasis on hardware advancements to software and operating system advancements (think: Microsoft Windows). Now, he sees the Internet as yet another iteration of the operating system — our activity is no longer tethered to a particular device, but is portable because of web applications and social networking.

Tim O’Reilly for President?

“I’m not terribly interested in politics,” O’Reilly said, “I’m interested in government and how we can make it better.” He believes we’re too focused on the image of a “vending machine government,” wherein we believe that if we put in our money (in the form of taxes) we’ll get what we want out of it. In reality, O’Reilly believes, we have to be instrumental in the way the system operates. Through policy (think: Regan moving to open GPS technology, previously only intended for military use, to the public), major changes in industry and technology can occur (Garmin, smartphones, Foursquare have all benefited). Governments should be mindful that they are catalysts of this change and act accordingly. Additionally, with projects like Code for America (think: City Year for geeks), tech-savvy individuals can not only help bring local government up to speed with the latest in technology and open-source government initiatives, but can teach them how manageable and beneficial it actually is.

“Web 3.0″ vs. “Web 2.0″ — what it actually means

“Web 2.0″ was originally interpreted by O’Reilly as a way to describe the buiding of databases based on user contribution. Google’s indexing of the world’s information and Pandora’s Music Genome Project come to mind. This drives the question: what is “Web 3.0″ supposed to describe? O’Reilly argues that Web 3.0 will come when the data is mainly generated not by people typing on keyboards, but by sensor-driven applications driving collective intelligence. (what he calls “web squared”).

Stay tuned for more takeaways from day one, and more from South by Southwest Interactive 2011.

Images courtesy inUse Pictures on Flickr / Creative Commons.

I’ve just arrived in Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive 2011 (SXSWi) on one of the the fondly named “Nerd Bird” flights — an airplane packed almost completely with SXSW attendees. There is already a lot of activity going on here with the conference beginning tomorrow, but I want to take a moment to let you in on the action. I’ll be writing a post at the end of each day with key talk highlights and session takeaways, so that you can learn about the latest and greatest right along with me. In the next several days, I’m looking forward to hearing from:

• Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR on the new decade of gaming (watch Seth’s TEDxBoston Talk on game layers)
• Blake Mycoskie of TOMS Shoes on social awareness
• Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights panel
• Fireside Chat with Tim O’Reilly (Founder/CEO, O’Reilly Media)

Of course, this only the tip of the iceberg. Mashable has compiled a list of 80 must-see events over the course of the next several days, which still only covers some of what’s unfolding here in Austin.

Veteran attendees have given me (a SXSWi first-timer) some feedback on how to get the most out of my time at South by Southwest. Some tips I’ve received so far:

• Wear comfortable shoes, because you’ll be walking a LOT — the Austin Convention Center alone spans six city blocks, and sessions are occurring in hotels all over the downtown area.
• Barbecue in Austin is a must. Glad I’m hoofing it!
• Get to the headliner sessions early, because they will fill up quickly. Choose your top priorities each day and arrive well ahead of schedule.
• If you have an extension cord and a power strip, you’ll make friends fast.
• There may be up to 20 talks occurring at one time all over the downtown area, so plan accordingly. However, don’t be heartbroken if you have to change your schedule. Be flexible.
• Try to make friends with those around you. Networking is one of the most valuable aspects of SXSW, and you never know who you could end up talking with.

I’ve already learned the value of the last point; my Nerd Bird seat mate Ruthie (@unruthless on Twitter) is a developer and a fellow Terrier — she’s been both a student and an employee at BU. I asked her some questions about learning how to code — something on my Bucket List this year — and she had some great suggestions. I told her about my idea for a Twitter app and we scratched it out on paper. She’s now building out the framework on her laptop (sorry, I can’t tell you too much about it yet!)

“This, essentially, is SXSW,” she says — meeting up, talking shop and bringing ideas to life. If this is the flavor of the conference, I’m excited to get started.

Join me here tomorrow for a recap of day one at South by Southwest Interactive. If you’re in Austin and want to meet to talk about social media and technology in higher ed (or anything else) you can reach me on Twitter at @JennyMack.

SXSW crowd image courtesy Jennifer Conley / Flickr Creative Commons