Last night’s SMC Seattle event at Swedish was one for the history books, or one for the future books, depending on how you look at things. The social media Twitterati were out in force, yet again, to sell out another SMC Seattle event which featured Gartner analyst Adam Sarner. Sarner’s talk focused on how the Web will look in the future as it relates to CRM – definitely an intriguing topic given the crowd on hand.

Basing the majority of his talk on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Sarner wove a tale of a Web-filled future where Personabots (automated, personality infused, self-learning, self-replicating, virtual representatives that will be used as a tool for facilitating life events) do our bidding in the virtual world, thus enhancing our actual lives in the meat space. Sound a little like the Matrix? My favorite example was a person sending out 10,000 Personabots on 10,000 speed dates to find women that the man would be compatible with.  Sign me up— that’ll cut my bar tabs significantly.

If you can get past the actual thought of thousands of Rons running around the virtual world, the leap to a future where online personas become testing and learning grounds for not only how we as humans live, but how businesses and brands interact in that future environment the possibilities open right up. Sarner spoke a bit about how brands would interact with Personabots in these virtual environments and take on characteristics of those Personabots they come in contact with by using the example of someone noticing a tennis racket in the back of someone’s car and using that as a conversation starter. Much in the same way, Sarner sees these virtual brand ambassadors taking stock of traits, likes, and dislikes in Personabots and using those characteristics to communicate in the virtual world. When you think about it, it’s basically what Facebook is doing when serving you ads already except it’s you, not your Personabot who sees the ads.

We try not to make wide-sweeping generalizations about what we think the future of computing and the Web will look like (we’ll leave that to Gartner), but you can bet we’re pretty excited to send our Personabots out into the wild virtual world to go skydiving.

Also, for those of you born in at Swedish (or have had a child there), you can join the Swedish Facebook page just for you: http://www.facebook.com/swedishbabies. Our very own Aaron Graham is a Swedish baby, so you’ll soon see him sporting his t-shirt.

Again, and we can’t say it enough, a big thanks to the SMC Board and Swedish for making this happen.  After getting a chance to try out the Da Vinci robot, we’re trying to write a business case for buying one for the SCG offices. We’ll let you know how that goes.

For a snark-free look at the talk, check out Veronica Sopher’s post Jeramy Rich’s post on the SMC Seattle site.

Local company PM Photobooth was on hand to take wacky pictures – Aaron obliged.

After a long day at work and your evening commute, would you be more likely to take the stairs or an escalator?  What if those stairs were a giant, fully-functional piano?

Would you recycle more if it were more fun? Litter less?

Volkswagen explored these questions in their “Fun Theory” campaign, a series of videos capturing regular people reacting to mundane tasks made fun. Piano stairs, a trashcan with cartoon-like sound effects, and a recycling receptacle arcade game all aimed to encourage better behavior among the people who encountered them. The findings were heartening: added fun made 66% more people use the Piano Stairs than normally choose the stairs over the escalator.

There have been over 10 million views of “Piano Stairs” and around one million each for “The World’s Deepest Bin” and “Bottle Bank Arcade.” These videos went viral because they’re fresh, happy, and well-executed without being overdone.

While no one can guarantee that a video campaign will spread like a virus, there are certainly things to be done right and things that can go wrong. VW successfully avoided the latter (unexpected negative brand associations, coming off as condescending or cliché, selling a product instead of a brand, etc.) and capitalized on the former. By capturing moments of joy, wonder, and helpfulness, VW created strong associations between the brand and purely positive things. Who doesn’t love seeing the look of surprise and delight on another person’s face? These moments of fun and good citizenry caught by cameras simply itched to be shared—and shared they were.

We at SCG especially like that the videos are tactfully transparent about being by VW. The brand logo shows up with the words, “An Initiative of Volkswagen” at the end of each video for a few seconds. The campaign isn’t about VW—it’s about fun. This shows a greater level of respect for the consumer than many commercials or viral video campaigns tend to. Volkswagen acknowledges that their viewers don’t want to have to tune out another sales pitch. Instead, the videos provide a lovely little boost to anyone’s mood, courtesy of Volkswagen.

Now we’d just like to see how VW can make doing our taxes fun…