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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Recap of Day 5 at SXSW Interactive

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Happy Pi Day !!! And here we come… to the end of my first SXSW Interactive. After a long week of sessions, meetings, meet ups, tweet ups, and the like, it's time to return to reality. Today is a travel day, so as I can, I'll be posting and sharing more insights on what I learned at SXSW Interactive.

Yesterday, Tuesday, was the fifth and last day of SXSW Interactive. Now, it's time for the music part of the festival. I started the day by doing a sales talk with Suzanne Livingston where we talked about how to use communities to meet various use cases and needs that most customers have.

After the sales talk was done, I headed over to the OMNI hotel to start the day of SXSW sessions. I was only able to make it to 2 sessions. Both of them were directed at community managers. The first was a panel of various community managers were they talked about lessons learned as part of their roles. My favorite panelist was @annabelleblue who offered some tremendous advice and one-liners! What I really like about these sessions is the tips and lessons learned being shared. Often we forget about some common sense behaviors that are reinforced here. For example, if you are representing a luxury brand, don't use "4" as an abbreviation of the word "for". As usual, I find that the best way to summarize the session is to highlight the most notable tweets. Here are the tidbits I liked the most in that session:

The second session was also for community managers, only this tam it was focused on those providing customer service via Facebook. My favorite comment on this session was near the beginning as one of the panelists described Content is Queen and Customer Service is King. He continued metaphor and explained: "In Chess, the Queen is the most powerful piece and can move and do whatever. However, you lose the King, you lose the game" ! Love it!!! Here are some notable tweets from that session:

And here are some notable tweets as captured by the moderator:

Something that I found interesting is that in none of the panels / sessions that I attended over the week was there any mention of leveraging your employees to be your brand voice. For example, a while ago the Social Media Examiner talked about how at IBM social media management is not centralized. Instead, it's decentralized. Instead of having a team of 10 (or so) people as our social media managers, IBM encourages its employees to be the voice of IBM (following a set of guidelines, of course). As such, there are thousands of IBMers in Twitter and thousands of external bloggers as well.

What do you think about that approach? Is it good to let employees be the voice of your product/brand/company?

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