Here’s a good strategy for working a conference as unpredictable as South by Southwest Interactive. Give yourself an assignment, e.g. a resource you need to find or a topic you learn about, then refer back to it whenever there’s a choice to be made in your activity flow.

The Silent Majority: Facebook developers at SXSWi

Here are my two. First, I wanted to find out about Facebook and SXSW. Specifically, I wanted to follow up on my hypothesis that while it is a vast online community, people in the geek world don’t want to talk about Facebook because it runs on a proprietary platform. I started by putting up a #Facebook #sxsw hashtag search in TweetDeck and watching the traffic. Yep, not a lot of it. I did run across the Facebook Developer Garage off site event and spent a couple of hours there yesterday. Show of hands requested from the audience: how many of you are Facebook developers? (almost everybody) How many actually use Facebook? (quite a lot fewer.)

We all love Twitter because it’s an erector set, but meanwhile Facebook is Dad’s muscle car (or maybe Mom’s) idling in the driveway. You can’t ignore 400 million users indefinitely. Josh from Gowalla got cheers on the stage and everybody loves Josh/Gowalla and how they now have their Facebook Connect check-in. So what happens in a few months when Facebook introduces its own check-in feature?

Meanwhile, my second assignment was related to the fact that several folks have recently asked me about being a social media consultant for them. I’m not sure it’s a good fit because social media marketing requires constant attention (similar to good P.R.) and as a freelance copywriter I sometimes need to hole up for a couple of days at a time. So I wanted to find folks who actually are social media consultants and are good at it. Through the #facebook #sxsw tag I ran across the the folks at The KBuzz. I went to their mixer to meet them and talked to some of their clients and was impressed. Mallorie Rosenbluth is their Director of Small Business which is what most of my inquires would be; for $1000 they will design a Facebook page for you and do a detailed analysis of your business and your social media opportunities, then provide recommendations which you can execute on your own or through a monthly contract with them.

Check them out. UPDATE: Mallorie contacted me to say that if you use the code OTIS10 they’ll give you 10% off above pricing.

I did a workshop last week for the DMA on social media. It was called “I’m on Twitter and Facebook, now what? How to REALLY put social media to work for your business.” The premise is that a lot of businesses jumped into social media marketing in 2009 without really thinking through what it was all about, and 2010 is the year they’ll now get analytic and practical about it.

In fact, I found that a lot of attendees are using social media, especially Twitter, to promote their businesses. They are tweeting offers, news related to their products, and links of interest to their market. Yet few of these marketers said they regularly use Twitter themselves. I think you need to walk the walk: you can’t effectively use the medium unless you invest time in participating in the user experience by being a user.

Meanwhile, almost nobody including me was paying proper attention to Facebook. This is dangerously short sighted. Facebook is amazingly successful, approaching 400 active million users of whom 50% sign on every day. A single Facebook application, Farmville, has more users than Twitter. But Facebook seems so consumer focused that many of the business marketers in the room can’t take it seriously.

The other thing is that, while Twitter is easy to play around with, Facebook is very rigid in what you can and can’t do. Twitter is the PC (or maybe the Unix workstation), Facebook is the Mac. It’s their way or the highway. But the “page” tools (used to build what used to be a “fan page”) and Ad Manager are so easy to use it is a low time investment to try them out.

Nielsen reported that 13% of 2010 Winter Olympics viewers were online while watching the competitions, and of those 40% were “Facebooking”. That is a term I first heard during the Super Bowl when the hostess of the party we attended was disappointed my wife hadn’t brought her laptop so they could Facebook with their friends about what snacks were being served, how boring the game was etc. Of course your could do this on Twitter but why? On Facebook you’re among a cozy circle of friends and there’s no 140 cc limit.

The PowerPoint of my DMA workshop is available here. Look at it in slide view mode, because almost every image is a clickable hyperlink.

I’m wondering why I and so many others were so ga-ga about Twitter at SXSW earlier this year. Maybe it was the new TweetDeck app that allowed us to chirp back and forth about the session that was happening in front of us in the same room. But anyway, I was expecting Twitter to change my life and it hasn’t.

If you want to make money with Twitter, what marketers are realizing is that it’s a great platform for communicating with your EXISTING customers—the same discovery we all made about email. Example: the Korean taco truck telling followers where it will show up next. A company letting its best customers in on a “secret” sale. And an organization like Zappos which has discovered Twitter is an effective vehicle for internal communications. I guess this isn’t really making money per se… rather, you’re saving money or expanding your base with an efficient means of targeted communication.

Best way to make Twitter relevant in your own life: go through your tweets and ruthlessly unfollow anyone who tweets frequently with info that is not fantastically interesting. If you are disappointed with what you read in Twitter, do this immediately then replace the unfollowed by going to http://wefollow.com/ and following a few media sources or people that seem interesting. Repeat on a regular basis, unfollowing those who aren’t interesting after all. Yes, this is work, which is the antithesis of what Twitter is supposed to be.

Twitter founder Biz Stone calls it “curating” your tweets, as if we all had a roomful of Hundertwassers instead of inane tweets about needing to go to the gym. Okay…

A good writer quickly learns the importance of developing a voice for his or her writing. Readers get more involved when they feel like a real person is writing to them. And over time you know what that voice is for a particular genre or publication and you fall into it like an actor playing a familiar part.

The author of otisregrets, for example, is somewhat professorial, a bit stuffy, yet tries hard to be approachable and takes extra care to explain what he means if it’s not immediately clear. While Otis M writing on Yelp is very different. That author is about 10 years younger and something of a wise guy. He uses catch phrases and occasional puns and enjoys going off on tangents in his reviews.

I know both these writers well and so do my readers. These voices haven’t always been there, as you can see from reading some early posts in either forum. I didn’t set out to be that person, but rather evolved into it over time.

All of which is my preamble to a theory on why I haven’t developed a habit of Tweeting frequently: I can’t find a way to develop a voice in 140 characters (which I try to keep to 120 for retweetability). By the time I say the bare minimum I have to say, I’m close to the limit.

After I realized this I started looking at other people’s tweets to see who had a voice I can recognize. @the_real_shaq has a voice, but he’s one of a kind. (Shaq’s eulogy for former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, who was shot to death yesterday: “Rip steve mcnair Roo roo q dog”) @broylesa has a voice, but she is nearly always writing about food in the Austin area… maybe very specific subject matter is a key.

Everyone else in my tweetstream is sticking to the facts, unless it’s personal. Here’s @heatheranne who works in advertising which is probably why we follow each other: “Trying to get glass out of my now-jammed garbarator. Oh my…” Now that is good writing, a vivid word picture plus a made up word and comment that makes you feel what she is feeling. I am going to go for adjectives and a personal aside next time I tweet and see what happens.

What’s so different about Twitter? And how do you use it to best advantage? One wonderful SXSWi panel, featuring rhetoric professors from the University of Texas, answered these questions by going back to Aristotle, the original documentarian of the use of words as a persuasive medium.

The original rhetoric, as Aristotle described it in 330 BC, was temporal: arguments were oral and words could only be processed in the order they were spoken. Once the written word came along, texts could be read in any order but there was a new limitation, spatiality: once words were put on paper, the printed information itself could not be moved. The web has made possible easily movable written information and Twitter carries this to the logical extreme with a constantly moving stream which is in essence a personal newspaper with an audience of one. (Here I am brutally paraphrasing the segment of Prof. John Jones which can be seen on ZDnet.)

No two people will ever see the same Twitter stream, and you yourself will never see your stream in exactly the same way twice. Yet it is very easy to control and edit your personal newspaper through the people you choose to follow. My experience is that if you start with a few people you find inherently interesting, like @guykawasaki or @broylesa (the terrific food columnist for the Austin Statesman, who stokes my interest in eating and makes me feel like I’m still at SXSW) and then check out @ tags in their tweets to see who THEY correspond with, you will soon build a fascinating stream. And if you’re interested in a topic, whether news or personal curiosity, a # search takes you in another satisfying direction.

Back to the panel, they said the best way to write your own tweets is to take into account the possibility of modularity and reuse. Prof. Jim Brown observed that every tweet has both an intended audience (the person you identify with an @ tag at the beginning, plus your known followers) and an unintended audience (everybody else, now or in the future.) A corollary of this is that the often-levied charge of Twitter narcissism is bogus. “Narcissism isn’t in the status update, it’s in the person annoyed by the update. If you’re annoyed by the tweet, it wasn’t meant for you.”

Apparently last year was the year of Facebook at SXSWi, and 2009 was the year of Twitter. Many of the sessions were specifically about Twitter, and everybody everywhere was twittering away on the new TweetDeck desktop application. We SXSWiers seem to like Twitter very much. Savant and trendsetter Guy Kawasaki was asked in a session to confirm, “If they charged for Twitter you’d probably pay whatever they asked” and he responded “that’s right.”

During the last World Cup commentators often referred to the “samba wave” or “samba style” of the Brazil team…. the idea being they were carried along by an undulating wave that propelled them forward and confused their opponents. I never did understand this as it related to soccer, but it’s a perfect metaphor for SXSW Interactive. Here are a few thoughts in closing.

The attendees:

• Unlike the typical tech or marketing conference, everybody is here because they want to be here. This makes them more engaged and passionate.
• Everybody I met is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. It’s like graduating as high school valedictorian (not that I was) and going to a college where everybody is a valedictorian.
• As a corollary, everybody is curious and wants to talk to you because they assume you’re as smart as they are. If you’re not, you get the benefit of the doubt. That’s a good thing.

The conference:

• There’s no way to predict whether a session will be good or not or even whether it will be about the topic in the program. So sit on the end of the row and don’t be shy about getting up and leaving if it doesn’t work out.
• Best events for me were the brilliant “Did Aristotle Twitter?” rhetoric panel with U Texas profs, the two food panels for personal interest, and most anything on Twitter including of course the now infamous #tweethall which wasn’t an event at all.
• Core conversations are painful. You will be stuffed into a room like sardines and sit on the floor. Go to these only if you have a passionate interest in the subject discussed.
• PowerPoints are over. With a couple of exceptions even the most visually brilliant presenters had basically no ppts at all, just a few text slides they barely referred to.

The venue:

• The Austin Convention Center was designed by a lunatic, in a U-shaped configuration with the tips of the U 100 yards from each other as the crow flies but a 15 minute walk on the ground. And the SXSW management,with gentle humor, tended to put interactive events at the very outside with the film events in between.
• When you go to the parties, pay attention to the music. You are likely to hear something seriously good. This is Austin, after all.

I hope to be back next year.

At the SXSW Web Awards on March 15, the Adobe presenter gave a shout out to “all the social media gurus in the audience” and a titter ran through the crowd. The reason it’s funny is that, certain people’s business cards notwithstanding, this whole business is simply too new for anybody to be an expert. Everybody is figuring it out as they go.

Here are a couple of examples of companies that are figuring it out. They’ll do as best practices until something better comes along, and they’re also good illustrations of why companies are so fascinated by the potential of social media.

1. Everybody in the US knows about the Oscar Mayer WienerMobile: a funky vehicle shaped like a hot dog that tours America and shows up in the oddest places. In years past, someone who saw the WienerMobile might have told a few friends about it. Now, they’re likely to Twitter to a much larger audience… and Oscar Mayer’s PR folks are regularly searching the subject #wienermobile so they can respond to these posters, thank them for their interest and offer a coupon or just a continuing relationship through mutual following. (This illustration was presented by their PR consultant in one of the SXSW Core Conversations. Didn’t catch his name.)

2. Steve Barnes writes Table Hopping, a lively restaurant blog on the Albany Times Union website. When he reported that Red Lobster was going to offer flame broiled fish, skeptical readers commented that installing a flame broiler is very expensive and they were probably going to just sear it with a poker. But then the Red Lobster president himself found the thread and commented that indeed they were going to install flame broilers with a plausible explanation.

Not only did this defuse the negativity in the comment thread, but it got a new post from Steve Barnes himself: “Check out comment No. 18 on the post below about Red Lobster. It’s from the company’s president — yep, the top guy of a 680-location chain — and it’s not a canned reply but one that addresses specific comments made by Table Hopping readers.”

That’s good PR you can’t buy, but you have to work for it. And what is happening here is that Red Lobster is monitoring comments throughout the social media space using a tool like radian6 or boorah, both previously mentioned on Otisregrets, to keep track of comments so they can be responded to.

I was looking forward to the session called “Twitter for Marketers: Is It Still Social Media?” but so were lots of other folks, and when we arrived at the stroke of 5:00 pm the doors were closed. So about 50 of us migrated down the hall to the Panel Green Room area where we conducted our own  discussion that gave most of us exactly the shared perspective we were craving.

This discussion continues at #tweethall (do a search for that subject on Twitter) plus you can find a fabulous post at La Luna Blanca which documents the event in detail including a number of best practices. Thank you @lunablanca !

One question that did not quite get answered in the tweethall was how do you manage Twitter in a large organization where individuals are encouraged to tweet but you also have a corporate voice you want to maintain. Those who commented, including some folks from very  big companies, said essentially that they do it ad hoc. You keep track of who is talking about your company with a #yourcompany hashtag (a subject search with your company’s name substituted for yourcompany) and try to coordinate efforts without stifling enthusiasm.

The session prior to this one, though, had an answer that made sense, maybe because it came from journalists who are used to communicating with their public. Presenters were @robquig and @dan360man from @statesman and @coloneltribune. For an example with lots of best practices, check out @statesman or @broylesa … the general blogging guy and the food writer respectively … and then click the links to both of their websites.

These bloggers know what their audience wants to hear about: insider tips on what’s going on around Austin plus late breaking relevant news as well as, since they are inside SXSW, their immediate take on the day’s events. None of this “wish I got more sleep last night” personal bloviation. Then, when you click through to the web pages, you’ll find an aggregate of other tweeters at the same organization with links to their own handles or blogs.

I think this model should make good sense for companies too. Anyone is encouraged to tweet, but they always include a link back to a corporate page that organizes the tweeters. Make sense?