Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Social Media on Saturday 12th March

The early days of social media were filled with hope - and even more hype. Social media gurus and experts started popping up everywhere, offering brands assistance based on shaky credentials. Catchphrases became commonplace: customers are in control! Focus on people, not technology! Listen first! You don't need a Facebook strategy!

Without a doubt, social "stuff" has the potential to change the way businesses engage with consumers, employees work together, and consumers communicate with each other. However, businesses that focus on the learnings of early social media will find themselves no better off than the early pioneers who found themselves with figurative consumer arrows in their backs.

This session will focus on what worked early on, why it doesn't work now, and what companies need to be thinking about now in order to create and capture value from social business.

LEVEL: Advanced

**This is a book reading**
In 2009 I presented my first book, "Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day." It was very well received (full room, Barnes & Noble sold out while I was speaking.) I've just released my second book, which covers social technology and collaboration at deeper levels in business. I'd love to present this on the Author's Stage at SXSW 2011.

See more about the new book here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obido...

LEVEL: Intermediate

Will 2011 be the year of the Universal Translator? As this science fiction dream teeters over the horizon, what can and should we do now to prepare for a time when the translation robot, not the search engine, becomes the single most important audience for your site? Will SEO give way to TEO? Does language need its own subtext markup? And when on Earth is Microsoft Word going to replace its 'Bold' button with a 'Strong' one? Lay aside your Google Goggles and iLingual apps (just for 60 minutes or so), and enjoy a session that's packed full of accessible translation theory, insight into the working processes of web copywriters, and more than the occasional riff on Douglas Adams.

most businesses (especially big ones) are on facebook, but not all businesses actively engage with their customers and fans on a regular basis. this panel will focus on which brands are having a conversation, how to have a conversation successfully, the pros and cons of interacting with every single post, and the tools that big businesses on facebook are using to manage the relationship with their customers, potential, former, and current.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Once upon a time there was traditional entertainment. And there was the Internet. Traditional entertainment was aimed at pleasing the masses with neutral programming, or incendiary programming if it was a sweeps week. The Internet was shaped by the masses creating their own content – a heavy use of irony captured on shaky flip cams. Until recently, they stayed in their respective corners, occasionally duking it out over rights and ownership.

As new technologies are introduced and our devices are getting smarter, more mobile, television and the Internet need to play nice. So what will come of this new allegiance? Will television and movies shift their focus to user-created content? Will LA executives check Twitalyzer before Nielsen? Will the Internet be able to maintain its Wild West ways or will content creators need to act more like Hollywood moguls with legions of lawyers and lunch meetings? And most importantly how can the rest of us take advantage of the burgeoning opportunities of this new media landscape?

This panel will be a discussion of the future of new media and entertainment by top-thinkers in all affected industries, from computer chip makers to the guy selling TV’s to regular folks. Each panelist will bring real-world examples and a vision of the future of entertainment.

LEVEL: Intermediate

This panel provides a unique perspective to the development and impact of social media tools in Mexico today. This panel features journalists from Mexico who will discuss how they use social media tools in their news organizations on a daily basis. In addition, they will discuss how Mexican citizens are using Twitter as a way to respond the lack of information in the newspapers that are under threat of drug traffickers. As news organizations have been forced to practice self-censorship after so many assassinations and kidnappings of journalists, citizens and even journalists have been using social media as the last resort to spread the news. In addition, Twitter has been used by the local Mexican government to inform the citizenry about dangerous areas because of drug trafficking. The journalists in this panel will discuss their own experience and use of social media, but also how society is using it.

LEVEL: Beginner

If there is one organization that should embrace social media, it's the United States Post Office. Instead, the USPS ignores social media, actively shunning it. In this session, the presenters looks at the USPS, offering suggestions how it, and other resistant organizations, can and should implement social media.

In this day and age, it's difficult to imagine any organization, much less one with 596,000 employees and revenues of $68 billion, not having a social media strategy. Yet the United States Post Office does not have a social media strategy. There is no Facebook page, no Twitter account. It doesn't engage with customers or listen and try to fix complaints. To inform people of the upcoming proposed postage increase, the USPS used only traditional media.

Creating buy-in for social media can be a difficult task. Like the Post Office, your company might be resistant to change or not see the value in social media. In this session the presenters will look at the USPS, examine why it may not be embracing social media, and outline a plan for the Post Office if it did want to start a social media program.

LEVEL: Advanced

Join two New York Times reporters as they discuss the role of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, mobile, and citizen journalists during the popular uprisings that have swept through North Africa and the Middle East. What worked? What are some of the opportunities and potential pitfalls moving forward for human rights activists using social media tools?

Culture is becoming ever more social as social media continues to explode. There’s been a casualty however. How much we trust other peoples’ opinions has massively dropped. We’ll examine the reasons it’s happened, dissect dimensions of trust and posit a way brands can be strategic and focused in how they earn back what’s been lost in this social age.

Research on the NBA is vast. Research on social media is growing. But research on the intersection of the NBA and social media is very limited. I conducted research on how NBA fans use social media (specifically Facebook and Twitter) to support their favorite NBA teams, and results will be discussed. This presentation will also show how social media is changing the way NBA fans connect and keep up with their favorite teams, how teams are reaching out to fans, and how teams can improve their social media presence. Examples of how teams are using social media to connect with fans, as well as suggestions on how teams of all sports and sports leagues can make better use of social media to engage their fans will also be discussed.

LEVEL: Intermediate

The social web is now a teenager –awkward, arrogant, snarky, fearless, experimental and open. She is shaking things up and having a major impact on our culture, social dynamics and etiquette. What are the new social dynamics and cultural impacts of all these tools and technologies?

This session will explore the emerging etiquette issues of our participatory hyper-connected world. What are the new rules? How are our relationships, culture and business assumptions changing? Do we understand the impact of this new relationship persistance?

- Do I have to ask before I post a photo of a friend online? Who has editorial approval?

- Am I required to respond to every inbound communication I receive or is “ignoring” an accepted response?

- Where is the line between encouraging participation and being just plain annoying?

- What are you doing mucking up my activity stream?

- What the heck is a “friend” anyway?

How do we design, build and manage these new spaces? What are the new rules of the online commons and the associated appropriate etiquette? This participatory session will ask attendees to contribute their own real world examples and will lay out a new framework for a new social contract. It’s our job to decide what we want our web teenager to be when she is all grown-up.

LEVEL: Intermediate

While controversy surrounds teenage behavior online, the fact is today's 13-17 year old audience has grown up in the midst of the social media evolution and represents the next big opportunity on the social web. Understanding the impact of the Web on their worldview, communication style and relationship expectations is to be determined, but the opportunities for social media innovators to identify ways to engage and monetize their unique behavior are countless. What's interesting is considering the use of many social media platforms by an audience largely not considered in their development. This panel will bring together a varied group of experts on social media, teenage culture, privacy and safety, entertainment and psychology to discuss the fascinating ways this generation is being shaped by the social web. The panel will discuss best practices at managing the audience as well as what's next with the industry's ability to not only appropriately engage and educate, but innovate for this audience's unique demands.

LEVEL: Beginner

What if we got it all wrong? What if we've been going about marketing strategy completely the wrong way? During this session, Joseph Jaffe, Chief Interruptor at Powered, a social media marketing agency, will outline how retention can become the new acquisition for businesses today and in doing so, transform the way companies go to market and establish a critical competitive edge and advantage. Using his “flipped funnel” methodology, Jaffe will outline the notion of customer experience, introduce the 10 new rules of customer service and present a social media-driven customer activation model that harnesses the true potential and impact of customer-generated word of mouth reviews and referrals.

To build a Social Media Experience that drives value, you must focus on addressing seven strategic questions. In this session Colin Shaw, author of 3 best-selling books on Customer Experience, reveals that over 50% of a Social Media Experience is about emotions, how a customer feels. Emotions are at the heart of driving human behavior, however most organizations ignore this fact. Organizations are too caught up in the rational aspects of the online experience rather than the emotional side.

Colin will reveal ground- breaking research from his new book in Fall 2010: Customer Experience: Future Trends & Insights, which looks at Social Media as a key strategic trend. Colin also reveals the discovery of a subconscious experience that has a massive effect on a Social Media Experience. He will disclose new ground-breaking psychological research which has uncovered what drives or destroys value in a Social Media Experience. Finally he puts this all in the context of seven key strategic questions an organization needs to answer, and the specific actions they need to take to build a Social Media Experience (SMx) that drives value.

You will learn:

• Seven key strategic questions for building a great Social Media Experience (SMx)
• How to design and build an emotionally engaging SMx
• What Customers really want from a SMx
• The attributes of a SMx that drive & destroy value
• Explore case studies to learn from other organizations

As individuals and companies across the world rely more and more heavily on social media, data visualization has become sine qua non in not only displaying analytics and metrics, but also in understanding macro and micro trends by platform, network and individual.

This panel will explore information design, data visualization, relationship mapping and statistics -- and how they all fit together to create compelling infographics, data visualizations and dynamic dashboards in hot pursuit of the holy grail of information design: make it more digestible and more human. Proposed by well-known data visualization firm JESS3 (see especially: The Conversation Prism and The State of the Internet), the panel will not only share insights into what makes a good infographic or social media data visualization, but also seek to explore the significance of these graphics in relation to the expanding reach and uses of social media as not just tellers of social media stories, but part of larger content-based communications strategies.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Speakers: Sudha Jamthe (Social Media strategist, PayPal bio here http://mashable.com/author/sudha...) and Dave Peck (bio her http://thedavepeck.com/about-2/)

Detail:
Come to find out how to spread influence in 10 steps or less. You have influencers and evangelists in your community, how do you know who is who; how do you stick to the spirit of social media to listen to customers and make your community rock!

This session will teach you what works in real corporate communities, how to make sense of your social media metrics reports to make it work to build influence in your community.

Dave and Sudha will bring real world best practice of what works and what doesn't from Intuit, AOL, PayPal, Coco Cola, Wells Fargo, The Grammys, and NPR.

LEVEL: Intermediate

This presentation is a high-level explication of contemporary memes. Through entertaining examples, the following topics will be addressed in a fast paced, throughly visual, entertaining and academic presentation:

How does a viral video become a meme?
Distribution factors.
What is the categorical ceiling of a meme's reach?
Quantifying the value of transmitters.
The boundaries of legal gray areas.
Forced memes (i.e. How does one force or identify a forced meme?)
The psychological effects of exposure to a global audience.
Tactics vs. Strategies for extinguishing memes.
The qualities of timeless memes vs memes of yesterday.
Life cycles of memes.
Aggregating realtime statistics for predicting.
Predicting memes.
Memes in the future.

The presentation will be organized according to several larger threads that play through almost all memes. While the definition of a meme can include the extremities of logic from the micro to the macro, this presentation will assume a definition related to today's internet culture, as described by the Know Your Meme Internet Meme Database.

LEVEL: Advanced

Access to information, people, and movements via the internet has changed the way we behave, but has it fundamentally changed how we think?

What's your klout score?

How many people follow you on Twitter?

What’s your authority on Peerindex?

How are peers rating you on Honestly?

What’s your rank in Quora?

The answers all equate to a market harbinger that’s both alarming and telling, how much is your digital persona worth in today’s social economy…

If Google ranks the quality of web pages using PageRank, new services such as Klout and PeerIndex are developing a human algorithm that could best be described as PeopleRank. Whether you like or not, we live in a social hierarchy where your every move is indexed and calculated into a score that represents your stature in a digital society. Complain all you want, but the truth is that you’re already categorized into one of two groups, the have or have nots. For those who are among the fortunate, they are sought after by brands and other personalities to reward them for their social mastery. They become the new @CharlieSheen. They’re winners! As we see with new media talent agencies such as Ad.ly (the company that got Charlie on Twitter), celebs such as Kim Kardashian, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Paris Hilton, as well as the new era of web celebs and the Internet Famous are cashing in on their fame in new media channels. Twitter is the new vehicle for celebrity endorsements and as a result, Tweets are worth money and brands are lining up. And here’s the crazy part, they’re working and followers love them.

But the opportunities you earn in the social web are just as important as the opportunities you will never see.

Our avatars carry a number, a value and to the outside world that is our credit score, it is our net worth, it is a representation of our level of influence or lack thereof. But what the hell is influence anyway and why did I not have an opportunity to opt out of any of this? And, if you had the option, would you opt out?

At this very moment, influence is harboring feelings of either recognition or resentment. It is what it is. So the question is, what are you going to do about it? Will it inspire you to push back or does it evoke aspiration and focus to change how you engage in social networks to improve your score.

P.S. -- It’s now a tradition, three years in a row, three books debuted at SXSW.

Brian will also take a moment to talk about his new book Engage: Revised and Updated.

Genre communities particularly the horror-themed ones are increasing seen by the entertainment industry as an important audience segment to market to. The success of 2009's Paranormal Activity can be attributed to this loyal and vocal community that used social media tools to share their passions with everyone else. Because of this additional marketing focus by the entertainment industry, there are even more opportunities now for horror genre community sites to get a piece of the marketing dollars. But then, which comes first, the community or the revenue? The panelists will describe how their companies found their target audience and what they did to generate revenue while keeping true to their audience, hence maintaining their loyalty. While the panelist will be talking from their experiences in the horror genre, the same methods can replicated to foster loyal communities in other genres and to make money there too.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Learn to future-proof your social media efforts so they don’t go the way of MySpace. The right social networking content, contests, features, news, etc, works across multiple platforms so that if you lose a follower on Twitter, you gain a fan on Facebook. This panel will give you social media secrets and tips to build an audience on every platform and create content that doesn’t rely on any of them.

LEVEL: Beginner

Social media has become a global phenomenon: 72% of the global internet population is now active on social networks and 75% of Facebook users are outside of the USA. Research shows that Social Media users interact locally, in their real life. The global phenomenon is in fact a collection of local phenomena where culture, language and politics play a role. The Indonesians use Facebook in Indonesian interacting with other Indonesians, the Germans use Facebook in German interacting with other Germans, etc… there are variances that global brands should know/use/leverage when designing global marketing social media campaigns. Should you skew your campaign toward more content creation when targeting audience in China or South Korea? Should you avoid requesting Europeans to formally join a group? Should you expect Japanese to be more likely silent readers of your content?... The conversation will explore the need for multinational brands to recognize that not all social media users are like US, and that social media campaigns should be properly localized to maximize return.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Free beer! Free kittens! Free software! We all love to get something for free, especially when budgets are tight. We dream of the free product that will, like magic, solve our problems without costing a cent. (If you aren't, your boss probably is.) But free things almost always come with hidden costs, and free software is no different. It won't give you a hangover, or get fleas, but it could eat up your staff time, control your data, or change the rules on you without notice. This was spectacularly clear when Ning eliminated free accounts, leaving users with the choice of paying up, or losing years of hard work. Or when Facebook suddenly turned fans into "likers," forcing page administrators to change their outreach strategy. But not all free software is created equal, and it's not just about open source vs. closed source. Some tools give you great power - but you have to know how to use it. Others limit your options, or ignore what you really need. But some may be just what you're looking for. We'll explore the ins and outs of free and low-cost software, and ask: what does free software really cost?

LEVEL: Intermediate

Fear holds many people back in business. There is fear of not having enough to offer, fear of not knowing what to say, fear of rejection. This session is about how the game is changing and how to build quality relationships out of nothing while not being afraid.

Business is about relationships and using technology to foster those relationships by growing social spheres of influence and creating a network of contacts of friends, acquaintances, and business partners. Also to be covered will be the advanced tips and tricks for making a cold connection a warm one, how to make a great impression, follow-up like a rock-star and how to complete deals that are not typical deals.

Social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook have changed the way business is done. When should you add someone on Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Facebook? How do you avoid being ignored? What about instant messenger? Is the IM agreement the new term sheet? All these questions will be explored in the session that covers the best methods for being successful in business even if your main function in your organization is not business.

LEVEL: Advanced