From Guy Kawasaki’s Twit­ter addic­tion to Evan Williams’ keynote

I’ve learned long ago the chal­lenge of cov­er­ing South by South­west Inter­ac­tive, which hums along at its own idio­syn­cratic pace com­pared to more lin­ear con­fer­ences. Thus, I spent last year and this year doing less blog­ging, con­duct­ing more inter­views (which I’ll roll out in the com­ing weeks), tak­ing more pho­tos and doing much more networking.

I returned home from my fourth SXSW last night after 74 exhaust­ing but sat­is­fy­ing hours. Here are 54 pho­tos from the event I just uploaded to Flickr.

Before I return to real-world mode, here are some snip­pets from the South by South­west 2010:

A few ran­dom bits from SXSW

Exchange between Guy Kawasaki and Laura Fit­ton at the last panel I caught on top Twit­ter tools. Kawasaki: “There are two types of Twit­ter users: Those who want as many fol­low­ers as pos­si­ble, and those who are lying.” (I’ve heard Guy repeat­edly trot out this chestnut.)

Fit­ton: “Bull­shit, Guy, you have to find the right followers.”

I’m with Laura on this one. I could have hit 50,000 fol­low­ers long ago through manip­u­la­tion rather than attract­ing the 10,000 high-signal fol­low­ers I have now. Twit­ter is about con­nect­ing with the right peo­ple, not cre­at­ing another broad­cast sta­tion, though I see how Guy has made good use of his large following.

• If there was ever a doubt that Twit­ter co-founder Evan Williams is a tech rock star, his keynote chat made that clear. The main exhibit hall and two ball­rooms were packed to capac­ity. I like the mod­est new Twit­ter pro­gram @anywhere, which lets users fol­low a writer straight from her byline or tagline on a blog or news story with­out hav­ing to go to the Twit­ter site. As Ev says, “It reduces friction.”

• Williams: “Open­ness is a sur­vival tech­nique, because some of your core assump­tions are prob­a­bly wrong.”

• More Ev Williams: “it’s been impor­tant to us for Twit­ter to reach the weak­est sig­nals in the world. SMS can reach all these peo­ple. It’s actu­ally pro­found in the right sit­u­a­tions.” Those of us who rely each day on the Inter­net for­get that bil­lions of peo­ple still don’t have Inter­net access, though many of them do have cell phones. Twit­ter has agree­ments with 65 car­ri­ers in world, and peo­ple in the devel­op­ing world are dis­cov­er­ing the ben­e­fits of using Twit­ter via mobile car­rier. “We take that [Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity] for granted, that any­one can com­mu­ni­cate with each other,” Williams said. “For Chilean farm­ers who hear there’ll be a down­pour in a few days, it can be a life-changing event.”

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With serendip­ity and human­ity we’re able to con­nect people’s dig­i­tal souls

At SXSW, I bumped into Jeff Pul­ver and asked him to talk about his pas­sion around his 140 Con­fer­ence. It’s not a con­fer­ence about Twit­ter. It’s a con­fer­ence about how the real-time con­ver­sa­tions are moti­vat­ing behav­iors and telling indus­tries what they can and can’t do. Jeff Pul­ver is insanely pas­sion­ate, and he gives a fan­tas­tic rant on how the speed of real-time infor­ma­tion is chang­ing all ecosystems.

Watch the video over on Tweet­share. This is one of many videos I’ve been shoot­ing for Tweet­share at SXSW. Browse through the entire SXSW col­lec­tion. And please also read my report (if you haven’t already) “Search and dis­cov­ery of the real-time web.“

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Joe Jaffe explains how our desire to game with each other can be a use­ful mar­ket­ing tool

At the Dig­gna­tion party at South by South­west Inter­ac­tive, I caught up with author and social media maven, Joe Jaffe of Jaf­fe­juice and Jaffejuice.tv. Joe had actu­ally inter­viewed me a year and a half ago regard­ing an arti­cle I had writ­ten for Mash­able about social media mis­takes made by social media gurus. Fri­day night was our first meet­ing in person.

I asked Joe to return the favor and let me inter­view him, and we talked about the rise of cause mar­ket­ing. Specif­i­cally, he focused cause marketing’s suc­cess not pulling at our emo­tions but through the fun of chal­lenges. Our desire to game and our com­pet­i­tive­ness alone can be a strong moti­vat­ing fac­tor. It works for finan­cial gain, and if archi­tected well it can also sup­port a greater good.

Watch the video over on Tweet­share. This is one of many videos I’ve been shoot­ing for Tweet­share at SXSW. Browse through the entire SXSW col­lec­tion.

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Set fire to a house and you too could grow up to be a top pod­cast host

After Alex Albrecht’s rock­ing per­for­mance at the live Dig­gna­tion show at South by South­west, I asked his mom, Cathy Albrecht, if she could dish up any good embar­rass­ing sto­ries about her son. She tells a story of him set­ting a fire to the neighbor’s house, and then Alex jumps in, fesses up to that and also get­ting doused with milk. Watch the video on Tweet­share.

I’m shoot­ing tons of videos at SXSW for Tweet­share. Catch all of the videos on the SXSW fan page on Tweet­share. If you like a video, please com­ment and join in the con­ver­sa­tion. Each time you leave a com­ment, it gets retweeted out to your fol­low­ers. And you can keep com­ing back to the page to fol­low the discussion.

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Launch­ing today, Tweet­share lets you have Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tions around any piece of content

The annoy­ing aspect of Twit­ter is that it’s really dif­fi­cult to fol­low con­ver­sa­tions. There’s noth­ing inher­ent to Twit­ter that makes it easy for you to back­track a con­ver­sa­tion. What many peo­ple use for con­ver­sa­tion track­ing is hash­tags, and then search­ing on the hash­tags. Prob­lem with hash­tags is they’re not threaded so you can’t see specif­i­cally how one per­son responded to another. Nor can you see the begin­ning of the conversation.

One ser­vice I’ve used before that’s a good solu­tion is Twitoaster, which allows you to fol­low con­ver­sa­tions that you ini­ti­ate, or some­one else ini­ti­ates. It’s pretty good if you ask a ques­tion and you want to fol­low everyone’s answer to it, but it’s hard to back track a tweet up to its source.

Fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tions is nec­es­sary because so many peo­ple send out tweets that don’t ref­er­ence what they’re talk­ing about beyond the @ reply.

Launch­ing today is a new ser­vice called Tweet­share, which allows you to have Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tions around any piece of con­tent, whether it’s an HD video, pic­ture, Word doc­u­ment, or any­thing else. Load the con­tent, and then tweet it out from Tweet­share. The auto­mat­i­cally included link takes read­ers of your tweet back to the Tweet­share space where the con­tent resides. Each response you give includes that Tweet­share space link, allow­ing every­one to be in the same space talk­ing about the piece of con­tent. As you would with a blog or web­site, you can cre­ate a branded Tweet­share page to post all your tweet­able content.

Tweet­share is also a brand new client of mine, and I’ll be attend­ing SXSW next week shoot­ing videos for Tweet­share and post­ing them to their tweet­able zones. I invite all of you to par­tic­i­pate then, but feel free to try out the ser­vice now. All you need to do is log in with your Twit­ter account.

But I’m inter­ested in know­ing what ser­vices you use to fol­low Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tions. Do you use any, or do you just use search? Or do you don’t even bother because it’s far too complicated?

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Whet­her you’re look­ing to get hired, or you’re look­ing for A+ tal­ent, you want to be seen as or want to be look­ing for super users.

This 14-minute live pre­sen­ta­tion was given at the Dice event at The Com­puter His­tory Museum in Moun­tain View, Calif. In the pre­sen­ta­tion I explain the super user model and give exam­ples of how com­pa­nies have found, built rela­tion­ships with, and hired super users.

What do you think? Do you think the 8 ½ x 11 paper resume has any future in the age of social media? If you want to get hired, become a super user. Attach your­self to a brand and/or indus­try. Cre­ate, share, and build rela­tion­ships with indus­try mem­bers and other super users. And if you’re a com­pany look­ing for tal­ent, look to super users. They’re highly vis­i­ble and pas­sion­ate. You’ll find they’re an excel­lent source for mar­ket­ing, staffing, and busi­ness development.

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At the RSA Con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco, I inter­viewed Andrew Hay (@andrewsmhay), a secu­rity blog­ger and Infor­ma­tion Secu­rity Ana­lyst at the Uni­ver­sity Leth­bridge in Alberta, Canada. Hay had keynoted the hip­per side secu­rity con­fer­ence known as Secu­rity B-Sides ear­lier this week.

One of the issues Hay talked about at B-Sides was that secu­rity blog­gers were becom­ing the voice of the secu­rity indus­try, and as a result, they had a respon­si­bil­ity to the indus­try. Hay said that secu­rity blog­ging first respon­si­bil­ity is to be edu­cat­ing every­one else and help­ing oth­ers under­stand the chal­lenges of secu­rity. Part of that involves engag­ing oth­ers on how to solve secu­rity prob­lems collaboratively.

Given that blog­gers are not beholden to an edi­tor or a pub­lisher, the secu­rity blog­ging com­mu­nity self-polices each other and hap­pily jump down each other’s back when they make mis­takes. Sure they’re in secu­rity, but they’re only human, so they do make mistakes.

Lastly, I asked Hay what’s the best way to com­mu­ni­cate with a secu­rity blog­ger if they say some­thing for which you don’t agree. He gave the most com­mon, and I believe cor­rect response, and that’s to not air your argu­ment out pub­licly online. Pick up the phone and have a con­ver­sa­tion. Find out what the core of the dis­pute is. Hay’s seen a lot of anger quelled by a sim­ple phone call.

Check out more of Tripwire’s cov­er­age from the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence in San Francisco.

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I’m at the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence here in San Fran­cisco this week report­ing for Trip­wire.

Before the expo floor opened, I sneaked in (yes, seri­ously, at the secu­rity con­fer­ence), and got a pre­view of Sophos’ pre­sen­ta­tion on pro­tect­ing your­self from social net­work­ing mal­ware. After his prepara­tory run through, I asked “media tart” (his words, not mine) Gra­ham Clu­ley (@gcluley) if I could inter­view him on how to pro­tect your­self and your com­pany from mal­ware over social net­works. He pro­vided some good tips. Some of them I’m sure you’ve heard before, but do you actu­ally adhere to them all? Here’s a sum­mary of his recommendations:

• Get an anti-virus pro­gram that scans every link you click on.
• Just because some­one who says they’re you’re friend, they’re not necessarily.
• To pro­tect your­self from what’s behind a short URL, add a plu­gin to your browser that gives you a pre­view of what the long URL is. As a Fire­fox user, Clu­ley rec­om­mends Long URL Please.
• Use dif­fer­ent pass­words for dif­fer­ent sites. Clu­ley says 33% of peo­ple use the same pass­word for every sin­gle site. I per­son­ally use Roboform2Go for pass­word memorization.
• Don’t use a dic­tio­nary word as your pass­word. Pick some­thing dif­fi­cult that com­bines let­ters and numbers.
• The scam­mers are always out to get you. Make sure you’re aware of the threats by read­ing secu­rity blogs. He highly sug­gested you fan the offi­cial secu­rity page on Face­book.

Read more of Graham’s tips on secu­rity on his blog. And please check out more of Tripwire’s cov­er­age from the 2010 RSA Con­fer­ence in San Francisco.

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Here’s our roundup of social media, tech and mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences and events sched­uled for the month of March. For the full year, see: Cal­en­dar of 2010 social media, tech and mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences.

Note that we’ve pub­lished a cal­en­dar of 2010 social change con­fer­ences on our sis­ter site, Socialbrite.

We’ll pub­lish a list of note­wor­thy con­fer­ences and events on the first of each month dur­ing the year. Hope to see you at some of these. If you know of other must-attend events, please add them by post­ing in the com­ments at the bot­tom and I’ll add them as I can.

Con­fer­ence	Date	Place
March
Global Ignite Week	March 1–4	World­wide
Ignite, started in 2006, brings together geeks to do 5-minute talks in front of small audi­ences — with slides that rotate every 15 sec­onds. Global Ignite Week fea­tures 500 talks in 40 cities, includ­ing New York, LA, the Bay Area, Boston, Madrid, Manila, Paris and Sydney.
SMX West	March 2–4	Santa Clara, Calif.
SMX West fea­tures three days of ses­sions, keynotes and access to the lead­ing ven­dors in search mar­ket­ing. Ses­sions will focus on SEO, PPC, social media, local & mobile search and more. Other SMX events: Toronto (April 8–9), Syd­ney (April 22–23), Lon­don (May 17–18), Seat­tle (June 8–9), New York (Oct. 4–6).
The Co-Alignment of the Cor­po­rate and Per­sonal Brand	March 4–5	Chicago
You’ll develop your copy of “The Draft,” SOHO’s 16-page social com­mu­ni­ca­tions pol­icy work­book for busi­nesses and cor­po­ra­tions. The focus in 2010 is co-aligning the cor­po­rate brand with inter­nal and exter­nal communications.
Search­Fest	March 9	Port­land, Ore.
Search­Fest is ded­i­cated to search mar­ket­ing edu­ca­tion and net­work­ing. Indus­try experts and thought lead­ers from around the coun­try are sched­uled to deliver in-depth pre­sen­ta­tions. This year will be the most com­pre­hen­sive Search­Fest ever with top­ics like Social Media Mar­ket­ing, Advanced Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, Local Search, Ana­lyt­ics, Paid Search Mar­ket­ing and more.
We Media Miami	March 9–11	Miami
Here you can meet the Game Chang­ers, watch the PitchIt! finals, be a part of a live global broad­cast by The BBC and exchange ideas with a group of inno­va­tors, thinkers, vision­ar­ies, investors and entrepreneurs.
Media Sum­mit	March 10–11	New York City
Hun­dreds of the country’s top media, enter­tain­ment and tech­nol­ogy exec­u­tives are expected to attend this gath­er­ing to dis­cuss broad­band, wire­less, adver­tis­ing, TV, film, cable, satel­lite, pub­lish­ing, news and other media.
South by South­west*	March 12–21	Austin
This year’s SXSW sched­ule: Inter­ac­tive March 12–16, Film March 12–20, Music March 17–21. Coun­ter­cul­ture meets geek techies, indie film­mak­ers and alt bands.
Social Net­work­ing World Forum — Europe	March 15–16	Lon­don
The con­fer­ence bills itself as Europe’s lead­ing social media event. The event fea­tures con­fer­ence streams and work­shops on enter­prise social media, mobile, social TV and more. A date for the World Forum — North Amer­ica in the fall has not been announced
MIX10	March 15–17	Las Vegas
Now in its fifth year, Microsoft’s MIX con­fer­ence is a gath­er­ing of design­ers and devel­op­ers who are build­ing the world’s most inno­v­a­tive websites.
ad:tech	March 16–17	Syd­ney
ad:tech is the event for dig­i­tal mar­keters, with lots of hands-on ses­sions with prac­ti­cal tips and case stud­ies. Other ad:tech events are in San Fran­cisco (April 19–21), Sin­ga­pore (June 3–4), Lon­don (Sept. 21–22), Shang­hai (Oct.), Tokyo (Oct. 28–29), Bei­jing (Nov. 17–18) and New York (Nov. 3–5).
OMMA Global	March 17–18	San Fran­cisco
This bian­nual con­fer­ence and trade show for the busi­ness of Online Media, Mar­ket­ing and Adver­tis­ing attracts about 4,000 peo­ple. This year’s theme is Cut­ting The Cord: The End Of Online.
DEMO spring	March 21–23	Palm Desert, Calif.
More than 20,000 inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies have been reviewed and 1,500 com­pa­nies selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 19 years. How­ever, the start-ups pay a steep fee to do so.
Opti­miza­tion Summits	March 23–24	Dal­las
At the Dal­las 2010 Opti­miza­tion Sum­mits, you’ll expe­ri­ence learn­ing by doing. You’ll build your own two-day cur­ricu­lum on top­ics rang­ing from social media to rev­enue management.
Social Media Strate­gies for Travel	March 24–25	San Fran­cisco
Social media is chang­ing the way we com­mu­ni­cate with our cus­tomers. Get the low-down on how travel com­pa­nies are cap­i­tal­iz­ing on social media and take home prac­ti­cal advice on how to drive real return from your social media initiatives.
Social­Tech	March 25	San Jose, Calif.
Social­Tech 2010 brings together the vision­ar­ies and experts who are using the power of social media to trans­form the way that B2B tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies mar­ket their prod­ucts and services.
The Freemium Sum­mit — The Busi­ness of Free	March 26	San Fran­cisco
The first Freemium Sum­mit is a one-day event focused on explor­ing what it takes to suc­ceed under the freemium busi­ness model.
Where 2.0	Mar 30-Apr 1	San Jose, Calif.
Sit­u­a­tional aware­ness has become one of the essen­tial ana­lyt­ics for our lives and our busi­ness. Where 2.0 looks at mon­e­ti­za­tion strate­gies, emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and how new com­pa­nies are jump­ing in to change the rules.

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Keep­ing your Social Web accounts up to date can seem over­whelm­ing, but there are ways to make the process more pain­less. This pre­sen­ta­tion on Slideshare out­lines two sam­ple inte­gra­tion plans you can imple­ment to help stream­line your Social Web presence.

Let’s say that you have a blog as well as accounts on Face­book, LinkedIn, Twit­ter, Flickr and YouTube. Using either plan, you’ll want to stream­line such tasks as updat­ing your sta­tus updates, dis­trib­ut­ing your images and dis­trib­ut­ing your video clips.

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