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Christopher Poole, aka moot, debuted his new imagineering community Canv.as at SXSW this afternoon.
Almost immediately, Canv.as struck back with dozens of redubs of photos from his talk.
The ~18k people are at SXSWi this year are only .0000025% of the world’s population, but it seems some of the Internauts who are not in Austin feel lonely.
Or bitter.
The bad news: registration may be capped next year. Get in line now people.
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Packing for SXSW? Here’s a round-up of some of the best ‘tips for hipsters’ packages now proliferating online.
Michael Pusateri, cruftbox.com: How to prepare for SxSW, version 2011
With eight SXSWs notched, Michael Pusateri is a bona-fide SWexpert. He offers some of the best advice around, from the practical (“Always be Charging”) to the punctilious:
When asking a question in a session, don’t make a sales pitch – From time to time, people use the question time during sessions to pitch their own projects. No one cares.
Luke Garro, Antler: How to Prepare for SXSW 2011
Luke Garro taps into his experience performing at SXSW Music (as a member of the band Piebald) to offer 8 things to consider.
Be nimble. Don’t be too strict with your schedule if something better comes up last minute. Follow the energy and see where it takes you.
B. Bonin Bough, Forbes: A User’s Guide to SXSW 2011
PepsiCo’s Director of Social Media forecasts some trends at the “Davos of Digital,” including star treatment for photosharing:
Photo aggregation and sharing is one of those areas no one has quite gotten 100% right yet, but companies like Instagram, with their innovative use of hashtags, are certainly getting close, and I expect big things from them and other photosharing players at SXSW this year.
Britt Hayes, Yahoo! Movies: SXSW 2011: A Beginner’s Survival Guide
Britt Hayes covers 5 important topics, including the controversial “to badge or not to badge” issue:
Without a badge, you are nothing. This isn’t hyperbole: if you do not have a badge, you will look like a self-important jerk who thinks he’s too good to work his butt off for a badge like everyone else.
Alan Weinkrantz: Alan’s Guide To #SXSW 2011
Alan, an event speaker at SXSWi, offers 12 quick tips to first-time goers. Because, as any second-timer knows, there are just some things you forget to think about:
Wear good, very comfy shoes. And a easy to wear t-Shirt.
Barry Moltz: How to Prepare for SXSW
Barry admits you can never be 100% prepared for SXSW, but you can pretty much count on being overwhelmed. So…
Set up appointments with people I want to meet again and for the first time. SXSW is so huge, it is unlikely you will just run into them. I am setting up specific times and places.
Are you a jaded SXSW-goer or a nervous first-timer? Badge or no badge? How are you preparing for Austin?
With over a thousand events in less than a week, South by Southwest Interactive seems more like an avalanche than a conference.
So who’s gonna be my sherpa? I searched high and low for the most comprehensive expert guides on the subject. So while there are some good short-lists of ‘must-dos,’ it seems that there’s too much data for human curators to handle. To comprehend the totality of SXSW, we’re left to muddle through with scheduling apps and services that try to aggregate the opinions of SXSWi attendees.
Plancast: Unofficial SXSW 2011 Events Guide
With over 3200 participants RSVPing for SXSW Interactive (compared to 196 for music and 157 for film), Plancast seems to be the unofficial SXSWi planning app of record. The SXSWi guide’s clean home page breaks down events by useful overarching categories like “Keynotes,” “Education,” and perhaps the most important for you guerilla attendees, “Badgeless.” Below that, events are listed in order of popularity rather than by date. Plancast easily connects with Twitter to allow you to follow your friends and see what they’re plan(cast)ning for the conference. The social-ness, the wiki-like event editing, and the emphasis on event popularity make the crowd the SXSWi sherpas on Plancast.
Tip: Best for iPhone users, since it doesn’t have an Android app yet. Do your planning on your macbook, and download the app to take your plans with you.
Lanyard offers Plancast the stiffest competition in terms of popularity with the Interactive set, with almost 3000 participants marked as attending SXSWi. The front page of the SXSW section is very guide-like, with lots of metadata, lots of photos and a link to the the all-encompassing coverage tracker. There are lots of topic tags, too, so you can get fairly specific looking for panels that interest you. The events are highly editable and taggable, and allow slideshows and supplemental material, so much like Plancast, you can rely on the wisdom of the crowd to steer you to the right places at the right times. But, hey no commenting?
Tip: Build your calendar here then export to iCal or Outlook.
SCHED*: Unofficial SXSW 2011 Schedule
Although Sched lacks OAuth/Twitter integration, its SXSW Guide is colorful and chronological, and shows you everything that is happening on any given day. And I do mean everything. Scroll down the home page and you’ll see that Austin is going to be busy. Signing up isn’t as easy as I would have liked, but once you’re registered, you can start building out your schedule by clicking check boxes. Check a few boxes off and soon you’re profile page will look more like a calendar.
Tip: View the schedule in “detail” view to see more info, and to link out to official RSVP pages without clicking into each event. This will make the already-long page even longer, but a simple CTRL+F search for keywords you’re interested in will help you navigate the days’ events.
Ning: The Unofficial SXSW Insider’s Guide
Visually beautiful, and using the phrase “insider’s guide” in the masthead give the Ning site the most “official guide” look and feel of the bunch. Even more insider-y, it only lists a few events on the home page. But once you click through to the main events page, you realize that those are the “featured” events, and to see more you need to either search for them or create them yourselves. It seems that the insiders here are you and I, and it’s up to us to populate this site. In a few more clicks, you’ll find this site to be rather sprawling and unintuitive, less guide, more haphazard social network. And I couldn’t help but think of MySpace when I got my first spam comment almost immediately after signing up.
Tip: Go straight to the forum for inside tips on the conference and Austin.
To be fair, SitBy.Us doesn’t purport to be a guide. I just had to mention it, though, because it’s the site that I anticipate using the most this year. This “micro check-in” app was built and released especially for SXSW 2011. Logging in with Twitter, you can indicate the events you are interested in, and literally tell your followers when you find your seat. Like a couple of the other “guides,” the descriptive info for all of the events comes straight from the SXSW guide — the “official” one — but with the added knowledge that someone you follow definitely checked into an event, well, maybe there’s your sherpa.
Tip: The app-iest of all of these site, definitely use this on your phone.
I will be letting the Plancast and Lanyard crowds be my sherpas on SXSW Everest, but since neither render very nicely on my Android, I am going to carry around my “official” schedule and refer to SitBy.Us. Follow me (@NickBlogads) in Austin, and sit by me to see if I’ve made the right choice.
If you’re looking for my colleagues at the conference, follow @hc, @katiebrauer, @blogadsdevin, @RachelBlogads, and @djmooney.
And finally, be sure to bookmark Blogads founder Henry’s panel Tuesday AM with the guys from Prezi about innovation in Hungary. You can also find it on Plancast, Lanyrd, Sched*, Ning, and SitBy.Us.
Reviewing the advertising campaign our team put together for Trident on PerezHilton.com, Clickz said:
This Oscar campaign demonstrates the value of good cultural timing, a good media match, and a Web publisher that’s willing to get creative…in order to get the gold.
We’re definitely blushing.
Here’s a list of overused words in Twitter bios that fail by telling rather than showing.
Expert or Maven (33,209)
It’s up to your peers, not you, to declare you an expert. Too often, seeing “expert” in a bio sends us running in the opposite direction. Kinda like being a self-described “winner.”
Guru(14,309)
Nothing shouts “leader of a cult with one member” more than a self-titled “guru.” Unless you’re a yogi or a certified leader of Eastern religion, leave the Guru-ing to, you know, Gurus.
Social Media (44,518)
If you’re a “social media” strategist, chances are that your intended audience is full of other “social media” types. And they don’t call it social media, they just call it “work.”
Enthusiast, (39,237)
Enthusiast sounds sweeter and less pompous than guru or expert. It’s just that, well, lots of other people are enthusiastic about being an enthusiast. How about “fan?” Or, if you’re just trying to say it with more syllables, try “aficionado.”
Nerd (31,052)
Back in the day, “nerd” was an inflammatory word that conjured up images of taped-together glasses and greasy hair. Today, “nerd” can be synonymous with “enthusiast,” both in meaning and frequency of use on the internet.
Geek (68,754)
The debate has raged over the differences between nerds and geeks since Sputnik. This venn diagram indicates a geek is a nerd with social skills. There are a lot of networked nerds out there.
Human or Person (128,109)
It may feel sensitive to finish off your bio with “human” or “person.” But your writing should prove you’re not a robot. If your bio says “father, skateboarder, guitarist, social media guru, cyborg,” THEN we’re excited.
2.0 (13,711), Interactive (12,179), and Online (103,349)
Do you add “Earth” to your mailing address?
Don’t despair if you’re using some of these words or phrases. But if you’re using two at once — for example Social Media Enthusiasts (2791) or Expert Gurus (470) — do some pruning.
And if you’re using three — Online Mavens of Geekdom — hire a human.
Bonus: There are 8901 ninjas on twitter. Who’s minding the dojo?
For more fun with buzzword (ab)use, check out LinkedIn’s most overused profile buzzwords.
See also @scottgould‘s post about Twitter bio uniqueness.
A lot of pixels have been sprayed since the New York Times story headlined “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter.”
The essential data: “The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”
Does this spell the end of blogging? In fact, the decline in blogs as a place for random musings and trivia is wonderful news for blogs and their readers. We already had WAY too much noise. Now with Twitter and Facebook siphoning off the trivia and momentary mind-burps, blogs are increasingly the safe-harbor for deeper dives into a topic, whether that topic is books or gossip or politics.
Clive Thompson captured the new blogging ecosystem perfectly a few weeks back in Wired:
When something newsworthy happens today — Brett Favre losing to the Jets, news of a new iPhone, a Brazilian election runoff — you get a sudden blizzard of status updates. These are just short takes, and they’re often half-baked or gossipy and may not even be entirely true. But that’s OK; they’re not intended to be carefully constructed. Society is just chewing over what happened, forming a quick impression of What It All Means.The long take is the opposite: It’s a deeply considered report and analysis, and it often takes weeks, months, or years to produce. It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take. But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning big blog essays, Dexter fans writing 5,000-word exegeses of the show, and nonprofits like the Pew Charitable Trusts producing exhaustively researched reports on American life.
And Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress also noted that the data isn’t actually that dire. Fewer people may be blogging, but the number of people reading blogs is growing.
The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global “unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,” meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)
Join Clive Thompson, Lenore Skenazy, Steven B. Johnson, and Maud Newton as they discuss how social media is transforming the experience of writing and reading books — and what the changes may mean for authors, readers and publishers.
From Social Media Week 2011.
SOCIAL READING
0:16 – Clive describes the primal “social book”
1:37 – Will Maud respond to comments within the text of her book?
2:35 – Steven reacts to Kindle’s “Popular Highlights”
4:51 – Clive watches the “margins of the unpopular”
6:19 – Steven describes Findings.com, his new social reading project
SOCIAL WRITING
8:38 – Clive discusses blogging and the writing process
9:26 – Lenore uses her blog for source material
10:14 – Steven maintains a private relationship with the reader
INTERACTING
11:08 – Maud creates new connections on Twitter
12:27 – Steven on responding to criticism online
13:15 – Can Lenore turn comments into a book?
THE FUTURE
13:50 – Clive: we can’t imagine books ten years from now
Photo via JellyBeanBoom.com
The reviews are in. Blogads’ SUXORZ panel — with panelists Brian Clark, BL Ochman, Jessica Amason, Brian Morrissey, moderator (Blogads CEO) Henry Copeland and Social Media DJ Jon Accarino — last Thursday night was an unFAIL.
Rebecca Leib, AdAge:
New York’s Social Media Week featured wall-to-wall sessions on how marketers can do social media right, but nothing can hold a candle to the sheer Schdenfreude of watching the brands and agencies that are doing it wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Rachel Conforti, definition6:
Last night at the SUXORZ awards, we celebrated schadenfreude at its best, taking a look back at poorly executed social media initiatives.
Jesse Stanchak, SmartBlog on Social Media:
We must punish failure as well as praise excellence. Or, at least, that was the mood at the fourth annual Suxorz Awards event at Social Media Week on Thursday night.
Bea Villamor, Cake New York:
I try not to take myself too seriously, so it’s nice to do the same with the work that we do (PR, not ER!).
Amanda McCormick, Jellybean Boom:
Total irreverence was enjoyed by all last night at the #Suxorz panel at the Gershwin Hotel (pictured above), where we parsed the delicacies of the year’s most flat-footed and tone deaf social media campaigns.
Ron Casalotti, Bottom of the Food Chain:
Just because your PR team makes you do social media doesn’t mean you get it.
Esther Surden, NYConvergence:
Of the week’s events, this one was the one that pointed out what good social media practitioners should not do.
Already got ideas for next year’s SUXORZ? Log your nominees here.
Social Media Week got a little rowdy last night, as a crowd of 150 gathered at the Gershwin Hotel to join our panelists in taking on the worst social media campaigns of the last year. If you weren’t able to be there, you can relive the night via the #SUXORZ11 tag.
Many thanks to Brian Clark, BL Ochman, Jessica Amason, and Brian Morrissey for lending their expertise and good humor, and to Social DJ Jon Accarrino for running A/V and keeping the crowd laughing. And of course, thanks to the audience, our Greek Chorus, who helped us pick our Grand SUXORZ.
Without further ado, here’s a recap of our nominees and winners — or rather, losers — by category.
MEME PURGATORY
This is where Internet memes go to die. These nominees took established memes and, rather than running with them, put them to sleep.
Winner: Cisco: Ted From Accounting
Perhaps an attempt to keep up with the Old Spice Guy, Cisco introduced us to Ted From Accounting. And who is he? Well, no one seemed to notice him, so we may never really know.
Runners Up:
MISSED CONNECTIONS
When it comes to social media, some companies just don’t get it. This category recognizes such companies.
Winner: Denny’s Twitter Fail
It’s great that Denny’s wants to connect with its customers on Twitter. Unfortunately, the Twitter handle they published in their menu was already taken by a man in Taiwan.
Runners up:
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
When given a chance, people are innately cruel. Here we looked at Social Media Meanness
Winner: Price Chopper Tries to Get Customer Fired
In a bizarre incident in the Syracuse area, a representative from the grocery store Price Chopper contacted an tweeter’s boss to try to get him fired.
Runners up:
YOU’RE SO VAIN
In our final round, we examined celebrities and pseudo-celebs getting all tangled up in the Social Web.
Winner: Digital Death
It seemed so noble. Celebrities would stop using twitter until their fans could raise a million dollars for AIDS in Africa. Only problem was no one really wanted them to come back.
Runners up:
In the final round, we pitted all four winners against each other, and in near-landslide fashion, Price Chopper took the Grand Suxor prize.
Perhaps the ultimate lesson of last night is this simple: be nice and don’t hurt people.
Lots of other practices in social media can get you in trouble — polluting the Tweet stream (Mercedes), taking yourself too seriously (Digital Death, Nestle), doing unviral videos (Dell, Cisco), letting people insert their words in your mouth (Dr. Pepper.)
But, at least in the wisdom of THIS crowd, no social media crime is worse than when a big company comes down on an individual.
Update: Jesse Stanchak gives a great blow by blow of the evening.
