The air was filed with digital innovation as Mirrorball’s Michael Blatter and I arrived in Austin - and SXSW hadn’t even started yet.  The entrepreneur who rented us our share-house used his iPhone to order and to pay for a pedicab with an app called Uber.  The pedi-cabist got his order via iPhone mounted in front of him and tapped it to accept payment.  OK!

At SouthBy, itself hundreds upon hundreds of hip young inventors, pioneers and visionaries teemed and thronged about dozens and dozens of great presentations and panels.

Everywhere we went, digital luminaries and celebrities of all kinds were making understated appearances.  “Look, there’s Pete Cashmore—isn’t that Robert Greenberg he’s talking with?”  “Did you hear—Mike Tyson is here promoting his new game!”  “OMG, that’s Ellen Paige, isn’t it?”

But, as we got our “monkey minds” quieted down and back to the business at hand of collecting as many new nuggets of insight and wisdom as we could, two big themes emerged: 1) business performance and 2) brand emotion. 

Yes, that’s right: Two of the oldest ideas in the business success playbook. 

Deliver the numbers.

And make people feel good.

Truth is, in all the whirl of excitement that digital innovation creates, what the digital innovators in corporations around the world are learning is that, unless you take care of these simplest of needs of your stakeholders and your consumers, all you’ve got is innovation – but no business.

So, to begin with, a lot of the talk at this year’s SXSW centered on this point: you’ve got to connect your innovations back to what your company already cares about – not some new techie-thing most of your management doesn’t understand.  This was a theme in almost single presentation being given by digital/social managers for big companies that are, really, just beginning to learn how to navigate the constantly-changing digital space.

Don’t go to your management saying, “Look at the Klout score of our corporate Twitter.”  You’re going to lose them with stuff with this.  Session after session, whether it was Humana, Pfizer, Schwab, Fidelity, P&G or Pepsi, this was a mantra of SXSW:  Make sure you know what your management really, really cares about it and hitch your innovation wagon to that star.  Are you trying to reduce customer contact costs?  Then zero in on that like a bird dog and form partnerships with everyone involved.  Make digital a servant of your company mandates, not a turf-building silo that speaks in its own language.

When it comes to managing online conversations with customers, one thing that many digital pioneers are beginning to realize they can do to advance the ball is go their customer service playbooks and help introduce contact protocols that pursue the same strategy.  If a customer calls your call center to complain about something, how do you already handle that?  Why not simply do the same thing if they post a comment on your website?

One of the talks had dozens of CPG marketing types all converging on making the Net Promoter Score (NPS) the key metric for all new digital initiatives.  Why?  First, it’s simple and easy to execute (hey, if you make your research complicated in the digital space, you’re already in trouble!).  Second, it’s well understood and mostly accepted by management.  Very few people argue with it.

OK, second big theme: make people feel good.

 Right?  Because it’s the emotional connection that ultimately drives your brand.  So be very clear on what your desired emotion is and then make sure you deliver it.

One of the most powerful emotions that drives loyalty: feeling valued, respected, important, cared about.

Do something that offers this emotional reward and you’ve got something important going.

Comcast and Best Buy’s Twelp force remain gold-standard case histories of how powerful it can be when customers feel they have been heard and responded to.

“I didn’t get my prize.”  “Where are my coupons?”  “I can’t find the style I like.”  These are all opportunities to quickly and efficiently (compared to the call center) turn around a customer’s feelings about the brand and, for example, bump up that Net Promoter Score.

It makes you think: what if we looked at coupons as expressions of being valued by the brand?

What can we do that underscores the emotion of the transaction?  That says, “you are important to us and we appreciate your business?”

Another thing that makes people feel good is earning rewards by doing something for you.  New platforms are exploding that tap into people’s desire to advance, to collect points, to earn their own self-generated recogntion.  Click on this.  Post that.  Comment on this.  Get points.  Get points and you get coupons.  “You’re important to us.  Thank you.”

Another way into the emotional connection.  Literally give people new ways to emote.  It doesn’t have to be done with a Facebook-like interface.  It can be anonymous as it’s currently being done on the notorious 4Chan and its founder’s latest start-up, Canvas.  Or it can be local as NBC affiliates are doing with KickApps social software where local audiences register their moods about top-rated stories on a daily basis.  Or it can be like the brand new Crickets.TV which gives you a kind of remote control with four emoticons for laugh, applause, groan and boo.  You hold it as you watch online live stand-up comedy and register your response along with everyone else doing the same thing.

Connect with your company’s biggest and most important performance measures.  Deliver the emotional impact that will most advance the brand.

As digital pioneers get over the raw excitement of innovation and seek to harness the business relevance of their tools, everything old is new again.  The business basics of good strategy are back for those who are thinking clearly.

In this very spirit, Ogilvy added value to this year’s SXSW by hiring six artists to make old-fashioned ink-on-paper visual notes of some of the better presentations and put these up as exhibits in the convention halls.  You can peruse them all on http://www.ogilvynotes.com.

Here are links to some of the best SXSWi recaps.

Have you heard of GroupMe, Beluga, Bump, Whrrl, NeighborGoods, Chomp, Crowdtap or Wantlet?  Chances are you will.  Here’s Ad Age’s review of the eight SXSW start-ups worth knowing about.

What about HeyTell, YoBongo and Hashable?  Haven’t heard of them either?  Be sure to read Mashable’s review of the hot new mobile apps coming out of this year’s SXSW.

Blogger Jason Steinberg on the “game layer” of social media, the convergence of touch screens and AR - and the enduring importance of location and community.

Gary Vaynerchuk made a brilliant presentation in support of the launch of his new book, The Thank You Economy (download a free chapter here).   Gary Vee doesn’t just get social media; he gets the true heart and soul of real marketing. Think of your company and brand like an old-fashioned neighborhood store back in the day.  You got involved in the life of the community.  You made countless connections and friends.  You loved your customers and you were always finding news to show them your appreciation.  The Internet makes the whole world your neighborhood.  Stop hiding, come out and learn to care again and you’ll do just fine! 

So who’s the next Mark Zuckerberg?  Maybe it’s SXSW’s 22-year-old keynote speaker Seth Priebatsch.  Many of us hadn’t heard of him before this year’s conference.  Strange-looking and strange-sounding, this founder of Scvngr nonetheless gave a brilliant presentation on how the last decade was the decade of the social layer and how this decade will be the decade of the “game layer.”  Read Mashable’s perceptive interview with him.  

Or is the next great digital wunderkind Christopher Poole, the 23-year old founder of the notorious 4chan (NSFW) and now launching Canvas.com?  Here’s the New York Times article on his launch.