Day Two
Saturday, day two, not so laid back as yesterday. The crowds have grown and it’s all too easy to get trampled under foot if you’re spending your time glancing down at your shiny new iPhone. Since my schedule, my email, my Facebook, my Twitter and my camera all now all reside on this miracle device I’m walking around with in my hand, I’m finding that it’s very easy to collide with the masses. I’m adapting though, it takes skill and a bit of experience to walk through the real world with one of these powerful devices distracting you at all moments of the day.

Socialnomics
I made my way to the Day Stage Cafe area of the Convention Center to hear Erik Qualman speaking on Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. A great talk which started with a truly inspiring video of statistical data that can be viewed here! It really sums up many of the reasons businesses need to be tapping into this new market. Check it Out!!
For a humourous take on what social media means to customer service these days check out this video from a frustrated musician whom made in his grievances with United Airlines public via the social media of youtube! Over 8 Million plays to date! United Breaks Guitars. I hear United did offer to pay for his guitar afterall. Imagine that.

The next panel I wanted to see I couldn’t get into due to the massive swarm of humanity that was ahead of me. So instead, I hung out a bit, had some free bacon on the street courtesy of freshbooks.com and shot the walk through video at the top of this blog. Afterwards, I made my way into the trade show and gave it a quick once over.
A couple of the booths that caught my eye first were Bandize, a site geared towards organizing the planning aspects of a touring band, good stuff for a guy like me with goals of touring the band someday soon. The second booth that immediately caught my eye was a booth for imagespacemedia.com, with a keg of Shiner Bock front and center and free hotdogs. Hell Yeah bro! I had to see who was behind this. It was there were I met CMO Tad Davis (A former Austinite, hence the Shiner) and a truly nice guy to chat with. I immediately envisioned a way for a band website like my own to possibly start pulling in some revenue from more major advertisers and I’ll certainly be going back to chat with Tad again more. Especially since, for some reason, I left the house today without any business cards! Ooops.

Madmen
After a long lunch break, I made my way to a panel called “Rules of Brand Fiction from Twittering Madmen”. Essentially a panel led by the creative advertising director and the Technical Director for the AMC series Madmen. A hugely creative and succesful way of approaching social media using fictional characters. If you’re up on Twitter at all, you witnessed a bit of this, for those of you that aren’t, essentially the creative department for the show created Twitter accounts for all of the characters of the show and began tweeting “in character” to the twitter universe via 1963. I won’t go into all the ways they engaged the world of Twitter but it’s safe to say the campaign they pulled off brought many new viewers to the show. Many people who had never watched the show, wanted to check it out after following the fictional banter the characters added to the experience of Twitter. A brilliantly creative way of taking social media and engaging an audience of fans that are thirsting for more on a whole new level.

Support Group?
My last panel of the day, I have to admit felt more like an AA meeting than anything else. Entitled “Keeping Sane While Working From Home”. I swear it was like “Hello my name is John and I work from home.” I was amazed that the room was full for this one as well, another sure sign of the times. While I have my own reasons for attending this panel I truly did get some good ideas for helping out with the monotony of day-to-day life while working mostly from the house.

Well we’re almost half way through the conference and I’m sure the next few days will have more surprises in store.
More to come indeed! – John