SXSW Sunday

The problem with conferences like South by Southwest (SXSW) is that you need 36 hours in a day. When Shawn Morton, Richard McInnis and I got on the elevator last night with Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica, Smorty very eloquently pointed out we needed to account for daylight savings time and spring forward. You could see the last threads of enthusiasm sputtering out of Scoble’s body. The guy was exhausted and that additional hour of sleep would have done us all good.

And, for the record, I dig Scoble but am here to declare that while cool and all, he’s not the star of the show. Rocky is where it’s at. The dude’s just cool. I’d bet Robert would agree.

Sunday was slow going, mostly because of the Frog Design party the night before. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com was there and I could have sworn Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters was standing in front of me at one point. Twittering that wasn’t the best idea because many folks demanded I introduce them to him, as if I knew him personally. Of course, they all came to the party, partly for that reason, so it was a kickin’ time. (For the record, it probably wasn’t Dave Grohl, but if it wasn’t, it was damn close.) Who needs Dave Grohl. Pete Cashmore was hanging with us. That’s pretty cool.

Off to the presentations we trod. Charlene Li’s Social Media Revolutionaries session was great. The SlideShare is below. The reason Forrester presenters are so good, aside from the fact they’re always pretty freakin’ brilliant, is that they give case studies, which I’m finding are the most oft-requested stories from people interested in social media. Look through the slides and see the information about Blendtec, Ernst & Young, Dell and more. Plus you’ll get the top-level Forrester approach to social media which I’ve written about before.

Click here to see the slide show from SlideShare.net in a new window. I don’t have the plugin and my FTP wasn’t working well.

And the magic of Twitter is continuing to rear its blessed head. Shortly after Charlene’s presentation, in which she talked about Lionel Menchaca from Dell, he started following me there. I’ve insinuated that he’s an impostor and that the real Lionel wouldn’t follow me in a playful attempt to get him to do something cool like email me … or give me a free laptop. I’ll keep you updated.

I spent the majority of the day trying to collect more social media tools and case study examples to share with you via SME-TV in the coming days. And then there was the networking, of course. There are simply too many people to link to, talk about, brag that I met and so forth. Even writing this is tough because Jeremiah Owyang just walked in and is rocking the Bloghaus room. As of this writing, Kami Huyse is nowhere to be found and I haven’t synched with Connie Reece yet, but if you run down the list of cool bloggers I wanted to meet, or for that matter my Twitter followers, I can check off a ton of them.

Tonight’s parties will produce more fun and frolic. My hope is to somehow catalog all the people I met at some point. Linky links are what it’s all about in building and growing your blog. But the signal-to-noise ratio is mind-boggling and while I’ve found a couple cool tools that you’ll learn more about in the coming week or so that will semantically analyze your posts and apply links to relevant terms, they aren’t smart enough yet to link, say, Kami’s name to her blog.

More to come …

[tags]SXSW, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, social media, networking[/tags]