Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Twitter on Monday 14th March

At kids soccer games around the country, hyperconnected Dads tweet about trivia to pass the time. Meanwhile, as you walk into a supposedly social event, people all around you pull out their devices to "check in" on Foursquare or Gowalla. Through the night, people continue sharing their real feelings and thoughts not with the person in front of them but to their audience of "followers" on Twitter, making a real life social event feel decidedly ANTI-social. Sound familiar? As technology allows us to share every moment instantaneously online, are we missing out on what is right in front us? And if so, is the only solution to turn our gadgets off, or is there some imaginary line of balance that we can strike? This session will explore those questions, and the anti-social path that our always-connectedness may be leading us towards. Most importantly, we’ll try to uncover how you might fight back and reclaim your humanity from the social media bubble around you.

LEVEL: Beginner

2011 will mark the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.

Since that day, the world has changed in significant ways socially, politically and technologically. Consider recent natural and man-made disasters - earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Iceland's volcanic ash cloud - as well as politically divisive events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt.

Facts, opinions and speculation for each new event spread faster than the last, through online social networks. More and more people are getting news of current events from sources like Twitter, and network and cable news outlets are sourcing material from tweets and Facebook updates.

This panel will explore the emerging and historic role of social networks in disseminating news and information during disasters and other significant events. It will also attempt to assess how differently historical events such as 9/11 would have been reported if Twitter and Facebook had been introduced to the world ten years earlier.

With smartphones and handheld video cameras in the hands of thousands of people on the scene, would conspiracy theories and unanswered questions still swirl around Ground Zero? Would the events have changed at all, or their aftermath be different? In the context of these and other questions, we will speculate on how future disasters will be reported.

LEVEL: Intermediate

When organizations use Twitter to promote themselves, it's largely about playing a role. The person tweeting is tasked to be on message as the voice of the organization while creating a unique and engaging personality to draw an audience in. At the theater, we gladly accept this fake-me-out, but in social media where do we draw the line between being the playwright and playing a character?

Imagine, if you will, that Shakespeare was on Twitter. Would he tweet as his organizational-self, or as one of the many "voices" he created? Would the context of his 140 characters be different depending on "who" says it, even if the source is literally the same? And how could his underlying message consistently reflect the goals for tweeting in the first place? Welcome to the murky world of defining organizational identity with social media.

During this (overly) dramatic session, we will pick the brains of people who live this challenge daily in the non-profit sector, and learn what the Bard's immortal words can teach us all about brand, messaging and creating a compelling voice on Twitter.

Be not afraid of greatness - don't miss this panel! Quill optional.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Twitter has proven to be an invaluable tool for communication during intense periods of political unrest and social suppression. When thousands of people tweet about oppressive regimes and violence against protesters, the outside world gets a chance to understand events on the ground.

But what if none of those thousands of people were real, and the events never happened?

Previous research has shown that Twitter bots can build up a following, garnering hundreds of emotionally invested followers who are fooled into believing the bots are real. A single puppetmaster could create hundreds of Twitter bots, letting them live perfectly normal and believable lives for months while they build up followers. Then one day, a careful crafted false story unfolds on the stage of social media, played out by a single director with hundreds of actors. Incidents like Balloon Boy demonstrate that powerful stories can become widespread before there is time for fact checking. Before anyone realizes all the TwitPics of the massacre are faked, the fake event will have made international headlines.

This presentation will discuss the technical feasibility of such an attack on the global media infrastructure and discuss the implications of a news system that trusts "recent" over "reputable".

LEVEL: Beginner

Our goal is to present how we use the “huge data” collected by using open APIs of Twitter and other online services to empirically test and improve existing models in social sciences such as economics and sociology. Bringing together natural language processing and macroeconomics, on top of the troves of machine-generated data, we also propose building innovative applications to track consumer sentiment and industry dynamics.

LEVEL: Beginner

In today's age of social media, real-time communication and multi-platform flirting, do the old rules of finding love apply? What are the major faux pas? How can you ensure that you portray the awesome catch that you really are?

This panel will explore finding love on Twitter, the intricacies of going from public communication to the first date, common sense tips for being the you that you want the other person, etc.

We will also have fun with stories of Twitter DM fails, how social media dating can fail and whether or not it's ever, ever appropriate to demand sex on a first date (hint: it's not!).

LEVEL: Beginner

The goal of this panel is to uncover new and exciting ways to use social media as a means for social change. This session will go beyond the basics—sending targeted action alerts and creating online petitions—and discover fresh and innovative virtual campaigning techniques for real results.

When NASA public affairs specialist Stephanie Schierholz was speaking on a customer service panel at TWTRCON, PETA asked monkey-loving supporters to hijack the #TWTRCON hashtag with messages of about NASA's plan to fund cruel experiments in which dozens of squirrel monkeys would be blasted with harmful space radiation. Tweets about NASA's radiation experiments began appearing on the conference’s large projectors meant to display tweets about the event.

In another example of a non-profit getting the upper-hand online, Greenpeace created a parody YouTube video, calling into question Nestlé’s methods for acquiring palm oil, which spread rapidly through online community channels and eventually caused Nestlé to meet their demands within just a few weeks of the campaign's start. Mainstream media covered the video and Nestles failure to manage dissent on their Facebook page.

Using inventive tactics to leverage social media for good means creating the possibility for millions of passionate people to band together and create tangible change, wherever, whenever, whoever they are.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Online services tread a narrow line between enabling free speech and preventing abuse of members. Offline, harassment is often determined contextually; unfortunately, website owners and operators often lack the time, insight, and ability to determine the context surrounding a given behavior. Additionally, the speech itself may not be directly abusive; thus, identifying other vectors for abuse is becoming increasingly important. As a result, Del Harvey, the Director of Twitter's Trust and Safety department, has spent a significant amount of the past two years working to develop objective litmus tests for evaluating potentially abusive behavior in the absence of context. This presentation will draw upon the work done at Twitter as well as Del's previous background working with online safety advocates to provide practical and doable policies and suggestions for sites to utilize with a minimum of engineering investment and personnel needs.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Twitter is redefining the way information is reported, spread, interacted with, and absorbed. Each individual on Twitter can fluidly act as a primary source, a filter, an information catalyst, and a consumer. Taken collectively, the information preferences expressed by Twitter users provide a valuable signal indicating the relevance of information and information sources across Twitter and the web as a whole. In this talk we consider the information ecosystem of Twitter through the lenses of lists, top tweets, and trending topics, exploring the emergence and value of transparently communicated information preferences.

LEVEL: Beginner

Too many customers are sitting listening to hold music waiting for their problem to get resolved. Instead of stewing privately they are now airing their grievances publicly. To anyone and everyone that will listen. The BP oil spill and Toyota recalls have showed us how people are using social media tools to give pissed off customers a new voice – and it’s a megaphone. Knowing your customer and understanding how to address everything from a crisis to the everyday question quickly and effectively is critical.

Learn about some of the biggest flubs from 2010, how the ball was dropped and what could have been done differently. Don’t make the same mistakes they did. Learn how not to mess up.

LEVEL: Intermediate

The most dead-on social commentary of the BP gulf oil spill came in the form of a parody Twitter account—who would have thought? Much has been made of the potential for social media to promote brands, but what if you don't have one? Many folks haven't let that stop them, either inventing or taking on the persona of an existing company or public figure. What's the point? The panelists will discuss exactly that.

LEVEL: Beginner

The New York Times called tweeted recipes quite possibly the “first great recipe innovation in 200 years”—then crowned Maureen Evans, aka @cookbook, the queen of the genre. This talented home cook and poet has a knack for boiling down recipes to their essence: every single step and ingredient is condensed to Twitter’s maximum of 140 characters or fewer, and not a single keystroke more. Eat Tweet—the first ever Twitter book of recipes—is like a shorthand sous-chef. Part of the fun lies in decoding the author’s clever recipe tweets, each one a model of clarity and usefulness. But this one-stop compendium of curated recipes and food ideas is so much more. There are recipes from around the world, from Kashgar noodles to Biscotti, as well as homey favorites like Garlic Chicken and Chocolate Ice Cream. It’s like a shelf of cookbooks in one tasty volume. Come, listen, chat and chew!

The conversations on Twitter and other social media add value to the common discourse, but even as the conversations happen we miss massive pieces, and afterward they become very difficult to find.

The reliance on #hashtags and lack of intelligent searching and filters on most twitter clients complicates this conversation gap resulting in a balkanization of the Twitter-sphere. At the last #140Conf in NY during the course of one hour over 75% of the tweets on topic about the conference would not have shown up in a search for "#140conf" which is the main way for outsiders to get in on the conversation.

My company is collecting comprehensive conversations from events like the #140conf events in LA and Boston, major sporting events, television premieres and political events like the Presidential State of the Union Address. We will be collecting as much of the complete conversation from these events as we can using smart searching techniques, special filtering techniques, and good old fashioned human processing. Over the next year we will be harvesting the tweets from these events and will demonstrate how content producers and audiences can recapture lost conversations.

At SXSWi 2011 we will compare what parts of these conversations are most talked about and demonstrate what the audience has been missing, providing insights and techniques to bring more people into the public conversations.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Information aggregation mechanisms are designed explicitly for collecting and aggregating dispersed information. A best example of utilizing such kind of "the wisdom of crowds" is prediction market. The purpose of our project is to suggest that carefully designed market mechanisms can elicit dispersed information, which will improve our prediction. In a prediction market, payoffs are tied to the outcomes of future events and one typically trades a security that pays $1 if a specified event occurs. Generally speaking, participants are compensated for accuracy in forecasting. Many business examples share the following characteristic: small bits and pieces of relevant information exists in the opinions and intuition of diverse individuals. The prediction markets will produce reliable forecasts about sales, financial and accounting results by gathering small pieces of  individual information. The development of the Internet provides us with a twitter based technology to design prediction markets. The information propagation in twitter community is a complex social network, and will  improve people's predictions in prediction markets.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Could you save a life in 140 characters? That was the challenge put to the development team at Zemoga, a leading interactive agency. Using the Twitter API they created Follow Me, a Twitter app that connects patients, doctors and caregivers. While many pharma and healthcare companies have grappled with how best to use social media, firms like Zemoga have taken it to the next level by focusing on the patient first. Follow Me lets disease state sufferers update physicians, family members and other caregivers on their health states as easily as tweeting about Justin Bieber or last night's baseball game. An easy to use interface let's them select an emotional or physical state and it's sent out to a private Twitter network made up of followers that have been authorized by the patient. Doctors can view all of their patients statuses through a customized dashboard and follow up with the ones who've expressed a negative emotional or physical state. They can ask questions about physical conditions, compliance with drug prescriptions, and other highly relevant and personal subjects. Family members and caregivers can also check in, monitoring conditions and sending reminders to patients about diet, compliance or other healthcare related matters. While a Follow Me demo will form the heart of the presentation, we want to encourage a discussion about how pharma/healthcare can move beyond the current "mass market" approach to patient communication and engage individuals using social media.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Maureen Evans will be stopping by the SX Bookstore to greet interested registrants and sign copies of her book, Eat Tweet.