One thing that sucks about such a great conference is that hey, there are multiple things you wanted to go to happening at the same time. Fortunately, people like Roo Reynolds videotape them and stick them on teh intarwebs for me to see later. Merlin Mann’s pitch from Worst Website Ever is too good not to share. This panel basically pitched the worst possible website ideas to a VC, in which we all learn what not to do with those shiny new media ops.

His slides are here.You might know him from 43Folders.

The point is, even though they seem cool and everyone runs over there and jumps into the mix with new technologies, that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea for your business. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that most people don’t use or even know about so many of the things we web nerds use constantly. Even if it’s totally lame, you have to be where your customers are. If refrigerator magnets with your phone number are the way to go, then do it. When I want to order takeout, I don’t go visit your SecondLife location to put in an order for pad thai. HP doesn’t go trawling MySpace pages to find the hottest new nanochip technology for their gizmos.

I’m working from home today, nursing the cold/allergies/mystery SXSW bug that has attacked me (and, it would seem, a lot of others). I get a giant FAIL on the liveblogging of panels, but I *did* take notes. I’ll work through posting the ones that seem most relevant in the next couple of days. When the podcasts of all the sessions come out, I’ll post links to those with a downloadable copy of my notes for the panels I attended. If there’s a panel you were really interested in and want our thoughts, holler and I’ll listen and analyze it. Probably even go find better analysis than mine and point you to it… A lot of what I got out of the conference, aside from the euphoria at being with so many fellow nerds, is either applicable to RefreshWeb or specific clients of ours. Some of that will wind up gradually changing some things around here, so as to be more relevant to you guys. I took a few people out for dinner after one of Gary Vaynerchuck’s fantastic wine parties (yes, he is that awesome in RL). We were talking about what we’d gotten out of SXSW, and they could hardly wait to get back to work and start doing what they’d learned. As for me? I wanted to get back and do things too, but what I really wanted was about a week to sift through everything and figure out who it would help, how to do it. So that’s what I’m doing. I’ll post on the new tools I saw, what people were doing right and really wrong, and more.

Here’s my post on what I got out of Tom Parish’s SM Marketing Metrics panel. If you’re looking to read about the Meebo/Tweeter mini-revolt, it’s in posts below. Email me or drop a comment if you have any questions or want clarification on any of these points. I’m sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com.I’m here in the audience listening to experts discuss and debate social media strategies and metrics. I had always thought SM would be easier with bigger companies. They already have brand following and a huge number of users. If 1% of the Microsoft or Apple users create content and interact in meaningful ways, that’s a heck of a lot of people. Those are the kinds of things to look at and wish for when you’re approaching SM for a small or medium sized business. The audience size makes it easier. However, the giant gnarly corporate structure makes it incredibly hard to get things implemented–and you have a lot more pressure to prove the value of something. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are some things that hold true.

• You can’t start by hosting a fancy, new platform for interaction. You start small, build a reputation and experience. Then you can move into the next phase.
• Blogs are where to start. It’s not unusual for the page views of the blog to surpass those of the site. The buzz that a blog can generate may very well be the push the C-levels need to give the go-ahead to moving into further SM programs.
• The other way to go might be an internal effort. If people start interacting and being more productive through the ease of social media interactions, how much more valuable will the interaction be once it introduces feedback and input from customers? Internal, firewalled blogs like Dell’s are one option, but really anything where you get people from different departments able to be talking to each other is a good thing.
• Moving customers out of the marketing loop and into one for retention risks losing their customer evangelism to their friends because they stop being marketed to. The message becomes that you’re not as valuable anymore, when, in fact, these people are incredibly valuable assets that are seriously under-utilized. SM is a way o keep them in the marketing loop while giving them tools they need to evangelize to their friends.
• Regarding reputation and crisis management… A press release is not a platform. When these things happen, you have the opportunity to demonstrate how it could have been avoided and how you can fix it through social media. Companies that had been hesitant or resistant before are often suddenly very receptive once they understand how helpful using SM could have been.

The last question was awesome: Regarding the net gen who uses social media and networks constantly and in a totally integrated way, there are billions of dollars at stake going forward. What needs to be proved and how do you utilize these for marketing in an authentic and provable way? The panelists talked about creating things of lasting value that are actually useful–i.e., actual content and not ads. I agree, but what do you think?

I can feel the 60 cycle background hum from SXSW Interactive, with every blogger, pundit and SEM bandit in the interactive world downtown twitting and liveblogging. RefreshWeb’s social marketing maven Tom Parish’s session on social media marketing metrics is covered in Wired’s blog, from the perspective of Meebo chatters sniping away during the session. Learning about the how and why of metrics on social media would take my undivided attention, and I would probably be taking notes on my shiny new MacBook Pro instead of passing notes in the back of the class, but that’s me. I’m at work sending proposals and depositing checks, and the crew is sitting in panels…when they aren’t offsite showing off Austin’s finest bartenders.

From the Wired post: Here at SXSW this year, Meebo-sponsored chat rooms are a major part of the panel-going experience. They provide live feedback on panelists’ performance with all the decorum and kindness you associate with blog comments. Or, in the words of nancy: “Chat room snobbery: high; chat room maturity: low. chat room dorkiness: (through) the roof.”

The big news today is the audience mutiny against Sarah Lacy’s bumbling interview with Mark Zuckerberg, “who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site.” For a penetrating analysis of whassup with the whippersnappers and what it means to marketers, read Thomas Myer’s post: “These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.”

What’s up? I’m liveblogging from the first session @ SXSW 2008 Interactive Week. Thus far, it’s fabulous. I say that because I registered early, essentially without a line. The poor saps out there who waited are in a line that spans a city block and four floors. that left me time for a fabulous, long lunch at Moonshine and chatting with fellow marketing geeks. It reminds me of Where’s Waldo? in here. People that would stand out in the midwest are a dime a dozen in here. There are literally hundreds of people sitting around with their Mac laptops and edgy hair. My normal friends not in this industry, let alone this niche, would be overwhelmed at my liveblogging geekery. Here, it’s not just cool, but it would be cooler if I were doing it via my iPhone or crackberry, complete with podcast. This makes it probably the best place on earth at the moment, as far as I’m concerned. My tribe has converged! I gotta tell you, I’m already trying to think of a panel we could put together for one of these in the next year or two. I’m sure everyone else is, too. Our own Tom Parish has a panel tomorrow on Social Media Marketing Metrics. He will answer the question we all have–where are they? And now, I have to learn how to rock the next few days like the total ninja that I am.