Sheraton NCAA Wave: Instant Social Network Case Study?

Want to witness the launch of a huge, corporate Social Network -building effort as it happens?

Social media maven Shiv Singh from Avenue A/Razorfish advises you to stayed tuned this week for Sheraton Hotel's massive promotion.

Their goal is to get involvment by letting the online community build a sports "wave" for the March Madness NCAA basketball tournament. (You know, like "The Wave" at a real stadium).

A few of Singh's bullet points on Social Influence Marketing:

• Become your consumer - get closer to them, be like them.
  


• Aggregate information for your consumer.
  


• Articulate product benefits better.
  
  
• Amplify favorite business stories.
  
  
• Participate where your comsumers are.
  
  
• Don't do it all at once.

You can no longer leave the conversation to marketing!

Zuckerberg / Lacy Meltdown at SXSW: Twitter, Meebo to "Blame"?

Gosh, maybe some of the speakers at SXSW should have read my post last week on managing Live Conference presentations in the new "Age of Meebo".

Grumblings from one session I attended (and was Meebo-ing myself) are now making the rounds as "SXSW Interactive Day 2: Audience Revolt at the Metrics Panel."

And on a much larger scale, things really fell apart in a big way at yesterday's jam-packed Sarah Lacy interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. While Lacy fiddled on stage, Rome was burning in the audience via Twitter and Meebo.

Documentation of the meltdown is spreading like wildfire, a testament to the power of both Meebo and the Blogosphere.

How to Read Your Audience's Mind with Meebo

Taking http://www.sched.org/ a step further, Meebo allows all the attendees in a conference session to chat online amongst themselves.

This could actually be most useful for the speaker. Have an assistant monitoring the conversations and giving you feedback via an earpiece.

"You're losing them... may want to cut this short..."

"You hit a nerve here, they want more info, keep talking..."

Could be horribly distracting for a speaker - but might work if done right.

What do you think? Good idea or no?

Is Twitter for Twits?

BTW, notice I specifically did NOT recommend using Twitter.

Here's what becoming a Twitter-head can say about you...

"I'm an idiot who doesn't have control of my own life. I want other people to control it via interruptions, where they tell me what to do."

It's almost as crazy as the circa-1997 desktop "push" programming movement.

Sure - be a supplicant to someone else's agenda. That's cool, right?

No - Get a life!!! (your own)!!!

I couldn't agree more with Tim Ferriss and Michael Masterson on ignoring the so-called "urgent" issues and sticking with the "important" ones.

Next post has some photos I took walking around Austin tonight... uninterrupted...

It is quite a town.

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UPDATE MARCH 14 2008...

I may have to change my thinking on this a bit.

Twitter could be handy in exactly the situation of being at a conference with a group of like-minded people. Then, shut it down until the next event.

More later...

Some Leading Edge Social Time Management Tools

There are some very nice new tools out there for coordinating your time/schedule at busy (aka multi-track) conferences.

Just got out of an opening roundtable at SXSW featuring an "Internet Star" lineup...

* Tim Ferriss (Four Hour Work Week)

* Ian Lloyd (http://www.accessify.com/ - Web accessability tools)

* Rannie Turnigan (http://www.photojunkie.ca/ )

* Jason Toney (Disney Online Developer http://jasontoney.com/ )

* Matt Mullenneg (WordPress founder) @ http://www.ma.tt/

* And the entertaining "Internet bon vivant" Min Jung Kim (http://www.minjungkim.com/)

Some of the cool new things they mentioned...

Every complex multitrack event going forward should have a nice online feature like this:

http://www.sched.org/. Go ahead a play around with it even if you're not at the conference!

Mobile social software Dodgeball (http://www.dodgeball.com/) can also come in handy as a sort of less annoying and more managable Twitter if you're trying to stay in touch with a group of friends or colleagues in a particular major US city.

Sending an “@ location” message (where the location is a restaurant, venue, bar, etc) to Dodgeball will forward your current location to your entire list. If your friend doesn't know where that place is, he can ask the system “location?” and it will ping the person back with an address.

Ian Lloyd produced an interesting site just for the event - it's a list of the"fun social events" - using an upcoming technology called Microformats - which cutting edge SEO folks and bloggers might want to keep an eye on.

http://www.austin.adactio.com/

Techies may want to do View Source on the html.

More from Austin tomorrow. It's Friday evening and time for some serious BBQ.