It’s almost March and that means that for the tech community, the annual pilgrimage to Austin, Texas is upon many of us. Each year, thousands gather in the Texas capital to attend the South by Southwest Interactive conference (some even stay for music), but it’s basically five non-stop days and nights of learning, networking, and partying! And this year, the festivities kick off once again with the Techset party on Friday, March 9.

Hosted by Techset founders Brian Solis and Stephanie Agresta, this year is promising to be even bigger and better than last year. Make sure you mark it on your calendars to attend the 4th annual Techset party at The Parish from 8-11pm. This is the people’s party…a party catered to help make you feel like the celebrity that you are and to rock out like no one’s watching. Last year’s party at Enzo Austin certainly celebrated this and people definitely rocked out thanks to the amazing performance by Rana June, the world’s only iPad DJ. Who knows what surprises this year will have! But one thing’s for sure, as with all the Techset parties, “dress the part” will definitely be in full effect and get ready to kick off SXSW in style.

Stay tuned for more information on cool sponsors and event information – we’re only getting started!

To wet your appetite, here are some photos from last year’s Techset party:

Rana June performs an amazing set at the Techset party

TheNextWeb's Hermione Way interviews Techset founder Brian Solis

Yammer's Maria Ogneva, TheNextWeb's Brett Petersel, Trulia's Ginger Wilcox, and Andy Kaufman

Hubspot's Laura Fitton with Page.ly's Joshua Strebel & Sally Boldt-Strebel

The Techset party in full effect!

The startups that party together...

Who's got Klout?

Party on at the Techset party!

Yesterday, we bore witness to one of the greatest sporting events in the history of the modern age. A clash of titans, as it were…the New York Giants slugged it out against the New England Patriots and emerged to come out victorious in what is now being called the most-watched television program in US history and also the highest-rated Super Bowl in 26 years! Congratulations to the New York Giants!

But while we remember the game, let’s not forget all the other news that are happening around the Internet simultaneously as the big game. Not only was this the first time the Super Bowl was livestreamed on the Internet to mobile and tablet devices (leading to more viewership, I’m sure), there seemed to be a greater play on social media by not only the NFL and the NBC Network, but also advertisers too. Twitter reported today that the service set a record for the most tweets sent per second (TPS): 12,233 tweets! That’s an amazing amount since in 2008 during the Super Bowl, it was 27 TPS, and in 2011, it was 4,064 TPS. Of course, this massive record of tweets per second occurred during the last three minutes which is when Twitter says an average of 10,000 TPS were sent. But what does this all translate into? Well during the Super Bowl, there were 13.7 million related tweets sent out during the five hour game. These numbers are absolutely staggering!

And what about the other part of the game? The so-called “Brand Bowl”? Well some of them did very well in terms of the conversation, but it’s a bit of a mixed reaction. First, let’s see which of the brands succeeded in getting the most comments:
 In Advertising Age this morning, Bluefin Labs analyzed data of all the television commercials to see which one of them earned a spot in the top 10 highest rated spots with the most response. It should be noted that Bluefin only reviewed content pushed on two major networks: Twitter and Facebook. I wonder how these would be changed with Google+ or on social sporting networks like on OnShare?

Regardless, each ad was tracked for 45-minutes after it began to air and what’s surprising is that one of the first commercials to air during the game was the David Beckham H&M underwear commercial and received 108,914 comments – a sign that the first is the best? Either that, or sex sells…

Not surprising, Chrysler’s hit ad featuring Dirty Harry himself, actor/director Clint Eastwood in “It’s Halftime in America” was a rousing success with over 95,000 comments and came in second. It was definitely one of the big winners of the evening and people are STILL talking about it today! But nowhere on this list was the GoDaddy commercial – perhaps a sign that after years of the racy ads, the public is getting tired about ripping on them and decided there’s much more worthy commercials to talk about?

Perhaps the biggest stumble in the “Brand Bowl” this year was the use of the hashtag in commercials. In light of the McDonald’s hashtag debacle, it might not have seemed good to throw out a hashtag unless you were 100% sure that your commercial would ellicit the response you were hoping for. Some had a pretty good chance at positive reactions, like the Audi vampire commercial (#solongvampires) and the Bud Light Platinum (#MakeItPlatinum), but then there were others like GE’s commercial with the hashtag #whatworks — a friend of mine said that he would tweet out “#whatworks not this commercial”. Hashtags were genuinely a gamble for advertisers in an attempt to get into the social scene.

But did advertisers really embrace the role of social media this Super Bowl? According to the Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Solis, maybe not and they’ve discovered five interesting trends out of the 87 advertisements:

• Brands heavily invested in promoting their traditional websites
• Many did not promote a call-to-action
• Only a sixth of ads explicitly promoted social media
• Hashtag marketing emerged to stimulate continual engagement
• Cutting edge marketers teased with new marketing tactics, including Shazam

So while I think that the hashtag attempt on commercials was a fumble, it’s a trend of the Super Bowl nevertheless. But is anyone still surprised at any of these trends? The website is here to stay and advertisers will continue to push people to them just like they asked them to call their 800 numbers for several decades. There are a few risky marketers who will ask people to tweet at them using the hashtag, but if anything, the Super Bowl is showing us that advertisers are starting to be a slightly bit more innovative in how they reach people, especially on television. Just take a look at this breakdown from the Altimeter Group:

Maybe the 32% of brands during the Super Bowl were airing ads more as brand promotion, but the question is why aren’t you giving your customers something more to take away from it? Even those commercials that asked viewers to use Shazam were giving them a song that would forever be associated with their commercial (lasting branding) and also invited them to rate their commercial (feedback), but by not doing anything like that leaves much to be desired.

So I leave you with this fascinating tip from the Altimeter Group report: promoting traditional websites still king with brands while social integration is “nascent”. Yes, that’s right…brands seem to be gun-shy at using social media to help converse with their customers and the viewers. If anything, the most successful commercials from last night will become viral and people will be talking about it. But will the brands actually be listening?

Photo Credit: Football field by Juggernautco/Flickr

One of the biggest parties to start of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference has typically been the TechSet Party and this year, it’s coming back. Last year’s event at the Speakeasy was a packed event with both badged attendees and those without badges co-mingling and getting to know each other or reconnect after a year apart. This year, TechSet founders, Brian Solis and Steph Agresta, are bringing the party to Enzo Austin and you’re not going to want to miss this.

Everyone that attends SXSW wants to feel special and treated like royalty, right? Well this year, OnStar and Chevrolet are joining the TechSet crew to put on the 2011 SXSW edition of the TechSet party where you’ll hopefully get the celebrity treatment and get to meet all your favorite friends, Internet personalities and get to meet some really great people! As with all TechSet parties, the “dress the part” clause will be in effect and according to their site, you’re expected to show how you’re “living rock stardom”.

Tickets are available now on the TechSet party Eventbrite page so don’t miss out on this great opportunity. This is not one you’re going to want to miss if you’re looking to start your SXSW experience off right!

Here are some photos from last year’s TechSet party at SXSW:

Mashable’s Brett Petersel & DeviantArt’s Nicole Jordan

Live music at the TechSet party

Guess they’re all living rock stardom, huh?

Stefanie Michaels & Jim “TechFrog” Alden

Bing’s Betsy Aoki, Derek Overbey, Andy Kaufman, Krystyl Baldwin & Mashable’s Adam Hirsch

American Eagle’s Jess Berlin, TECHcocktail’s Frank Gruber & Jen Consalvo

Celebrating the SXSW experience

More photos from last year’s TechSet party are on my Flickr photostream that you can find here.

Photo credit: All photos featured here were taken by Kenneth Yeung

By Julie Blaustein

Social Media Week is being held the week of February 7-11, 2010 in San Francisco. It kicked off with over 46 events! Monday’s opening night’s event was held at the newly opened, posh office of PeopleBrowsr in the hub of SOMA on Bryant Street. PeopleBrowsr provides research, social analytics and brand engagement. They recently unrolled their ReSearch.ly platform that provides analytics and search from 1,000 days of Twitter data while Twitter only goes back 30 days. The event also launched their SF Social Media Command Center with a panel discussion and social hour with food and beverages sponsored by Bear Republic Brewing Co, Vintage Wine Estates and Magic Curry Kart.

Chris Heuer, Founder of the Social Media Club and members Katherine Webster, Renee Blogdett, Ben Wan and Brian Zisk

The panel titled The Evolution of Listening: From Monitoring to the Collective Intelligence included Social Media Expert Brian Solis as moderator, People Browsr’s CEO, Jodee Rich, Tim O’Reilly, the Founder O’Reilly Media and the genius behind all those industry books and conferences you love to attend and Susan Etlinger who is a consultant at the Altimeter Group.

Solis opened up the panel with a few words about the listening tool known as the Conversation Prism. If you are not familiar with the Conversation Prism, Solis provides great detail about it in his best selling book Engage. The idea behind it is to listen, to “observe, analyze, dissect, and present the dynamics of conversations, how and where they transpired.” Solis provided a “secret” to the Social Web, that in every network there is a search box and through the results you can gain access to a list of keywords that will provide insights into your company, brands, competitors and other social networks.

The conversation then moved to Rich who talked passionately of the Interest Graph where your the network is made up of people who share interests with you, but who you don’t necessarily know personally. He sees it now an important business channel. He spoke of how “the world is evolving from a Social Graph to an Interest Graph. What ‘s very exciting for me, and I say this to my kids, what turns me on is, this the 1st. time I think in human history that we have something that is actually catalyzing our generous side and our generous side is about sharing…”

O’Reilly stressed the importance of listening, “Who should be paying attention? Everyone should be paying attention.” He talked of the Clue Train Manifesto that seeks to put the human touch back in the corporate world through technology and compared that to the use of social monitoring tools in corporations today. He believes we are moving away from the old model of studying Business Intelligence reports to building, learning from and tweaking algorithms to make improvements. He cited Google as a company that is successfully embracing algorithms as a way of doing business.

Etlinger is currently working on two research reports focused on mobile commerce and social business measurement. She is also considered an expert on all the social monitoring tools available at this time. She feels there are now very few tools and processes in place to get the right information to the right management. But she does see that there will be a convergence of the Social graph and the Interest graph. Rich though reiterated again how he sees the focus of social media as moving more towards an Interest Graph.

O’Reilly provided this key insight to consider, that with all the tools, artificial intelligence and technology, its the humans that are most important at the last mile.

A great way to learn more about listening and enjoy a few laughs, go to Ken Yeung’s coverage of the panel discussion posted on YouTube. And check out what has been happening with Social Media Week at #SMWSF.

Jodee Rich

Brian Solis

Susan Etlinger

Social Media Week Panel at PeopleBrowsr

By Julie Blaustein

The Social Email Marketing Conference held in San Francisco, brought together marketing experts, email companies and brands to discuss integrated email and social media campaigns. It was a packed one-day conference held at Hotel Nikko.

A number of great speakers offered expertise including Brian Solis of Future Works, author of Engage! and founder of our very own Bub.blicio.us who talked about the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications and publishing. In other words, Brian spoke about how to be social while reaching out and influencing people. Tyler Willis of Involver who spoke about the differences between email marketing & social marketing and how you can experience social marketing success along with Mark Schmulen of Constant Contact who spoke about email and how it is the hub on one’s social media interactions. There were a number of additional great speakers who spoke on topics such as CRM and other tools to use in social media, Trust and Privacy issues, the power of A/B testing and more. But truly you need to attend the conference to not only hear from the experts but to meet them in an intimate setting where you can have real, in-depth conversations and make real-life connections.

San Francisco was the kick-off for a series of packed one-day conferences scheduled in major cities throughout the US, UK and in Europe. The series of conferences focusing on Social Media including Monitoring, Marketing, Emailing and Advertising will be held in not only San Francisco, Miami, Boston, New York City, and in London and Paris too through December. Murray Newlands and Luke Brynley-Jones are the Co-founders of Influence People and the force behind them. They advise companies and individuals in the UK and USA on how to utilize social media and to connect with people and deliver value. Great people to know and to meet on-hand at their conferences.

And don’t miss the first San Francisco Blog Club Meeting for FREE hosted by Influencer People on October 19th. from 6:30-10:0o pm at 111 Minna Gallery. Hurry and sign up as there are only a few spots left!

Pictures from the Conference below and more here:

The Social Media Email Marketing Conference Audience

Brian Solis signing for his new book, Engage! after his presentation.

Mark Scmulen, General Manager of Social Media, Constant Contact

Tyler Willis, Head of Brand Management of Involver

Chase McMichael, Co-Founder and CEO of Infinigraph and Murray Newlnads, Co Founder of Influence People

This past weekend, I flew up to Seattle, Washington to attend what was being billed as the last instance of Gnomedex taking place…ever. I found that hard to believe, but sadly it slowly became true. Its founder and organizer, Chris Pirillo, declared on stage that this would be the last one (although I think secretly there’s a bet on when Gnomedex 11 will take place).

Nevertheless, Gnomedex 10 was sure to beat all expectations and IF this was to be its last show, it would go out with a bang – and we weren’t disappointed. The festivities began on Thursday night with a pre-party at the Bell Harbor conference center which got people to mingle with each other, conduct interviews and just have a great time. Then, Friday morning came and we moved into the real fun…with an opening keynote given by Brian Solis and then a series of speakers talking about technology – no, not social media, email marketing, or how to build an application, but how did THEY user technology in their lives to make an impact. If you haven’t been to a Gnomedex conference, I consider it a technology version of a TED conference where people present their case studies and how they have been innovative to create some really cool stuff.

As Pirillo puts it, Gnomedex is all about the “Human Circuitry” – influence, ideation illumination, inspiration, interaction and illustration. It’s the passing along of ideas and showing how technology can change the world beyond just a simple “check in” or tweet.

Some of the highlights from this year’s conference includes having the Chief Technology Officer of the city of Seattle speak and talk about what they’ve been doing with their government data & how they are trying to open it up for more innovation. Melissa Pierce, producer of the upcoming movie Life in Perpetual Beta, gave an inspiring speech about human kindness & her travels; Trish Millines Dziko spoke about how to improve public education through technology; Shauna Causey & Melody Biringer spoke about creating an organization to support women in technology; and perhaps the most inspiring was the rousing speech given by Violet Blue about human sexuality, technology, awareness and censorship – by the time she was finished, the crowd gave her a standing ovation.

AUTHOR NOTE: Fun fact about Gnomedex…in its 10 years of existence, there have only been three (3) standing ovations. Last year, Drew Olanoff received one for his talk about #blamedrewscancer & now Violet Blue for her talk about human sexuality.

By the time the conference ended, it was a bittersweet moment…people headed home to live out their lives once again, but never to return to Seattle for the Gnomedex conference. Will we see another version of Gnomedex take place and what will Chris Pirillo do next?

Only time will tell…

Here are some photos from the conference:

Chris Pirillo

Dave Delaney

Robert Scoble talking to the kids from OmniTechNews

Chris Pirillo with Robert Scoble

Ben Metcalfe, Violet Blue & Kris Krug

Kenji Onozowa

Brian Solis

Trish Millines Dziko

Steve Fisher & Michael Dougherty – producers of Browncoats: Redemption

Betsy Aoki and Chris Pirillo

Bill Schrier, the CTO of Seattle, WA

The women of Tech Mavens

Melissa Pierce – producer of Life in Perpetual Beta

Violet Blue

All photos shown here were taken by Kenneth Yeung. You can view more photos from Gnomedex on Flickr by clicking here.

One often wonders if they are getting the most out of social media. I’m sure Jason Calacanis wondered the same thing when he considered Facebook suicide out loud and then announced he would quit Facebook this Friday at 1pm Pacific.

Top social media consultant in the UK and the US, Murray Newlands, is having an interactive workshop on June 17th across the big pond to dive deeply into the issues that matter:

• Insights into the Latest High Profile Viral Marketing Campaigns
• The Psychology of Persuasion: Next Generation Marketing
• How to use Social Networking Theory to Tune your Campaigns
• Innovations in Location-Based Marketing (Foursquare & beyond)
• Tweets that Travel: The Essential Skill of Viral Writing
• Using B2B Social Media to Connect with C-level Execs
• Creating a Bespoke Community vs Starting a Group

Speakers include our very own Brian Solis, along with Chris Brogan, Mat Morrison, and more.

Bub.blicio.us readers get a 10% discount with the discount code “bub” at checkout.

Get all the details here.

Foto: Chris Heuer

Social + Cash was the theme of the sixth edition of Swedish social media conference held last week by Annika Lidne, CEO of Disruptive Media. She has been organizing social media conferences in Sweden since 2007, attracting international guests and keynote speakers like Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd, Steve Rubel, Natasha Friis Saxberg, Henriette Weber, Jyri Engeström, Neville Hobson, and Peter Parkes. (See videos from all six conferenses and read Brian’s thoughts on his previous visit).

The one day conference has from the start been streamed live free of charge, having twice as many simultanious online viewers as the 200 attendees on site. The conversations on the live video chat and on Twitter have become the natural ingredient and trademark of the conference.

To quote the keynote speaker Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club:

“I really love Sweden and a big part of it is the experience I have at Annika’s conferences. There is just a different energy there, you can tell she really gets it, and wants to help others understand why this media is disruptive, too.”

Swedish State Of The Internet

A few figures from the state of the Internet in Sweden might be interesting to put the conference in context. 62% of the population of 9,3 M uses the Internet on daily bases, and according to recent report, the number of sold Iphones “in the home of Sony Ericsson” reaches up to 500 000. 5 % of the people blog, 27% read blogs, nearly 40% have a Facebook account, and Sweden is holding the 19th place on the list of unique Twitter users in the world. Sweden also holds the top position in the Nordics with highest number of blogs among listed corporations (17,9% Nov -08), thus higher than among Fortune 500 companies (15.8% Dec -09).

There’re also good efforts being made to identify and measure corporate social media, particularly Twitter, usage in Sweden.

So, how does the social capital that individuals and brands earn by engaging on the social web convert to ROI, return on investment? Does it, and if so, can it be measured?

Chris Heuer opened up the conference by urging us to move the lence of focus to delivering the promise of social media by changing from management to leadership, as by finding new success stories like clubs on Sunset Strip instead of the good old Dell story. Since free is not free, it costs time, money and attention, and the time being our most valuable resource, there should be a balance between what one gives and takes. Chris warned us from being selfish cookie monsters. Everybody needs to get paid, as one can’t live of Whuffie alone. He also talked about consious capitalism, where in the light of social media transparency, only individuals and companies who want to do good and make good products, without exploitative profit plans, will survive, thus profiting from social media. Watch the entire keynote and presentation on Slideshare.

The day offered many good examples of ROI, e.g. how an author, by releasing her book for free on the Pirate Bay, instead made money through donations, or how by engaging influential fashion bloggers in a transparent and trustworthy way with help of Bloglovin’ (Browser based blog reader with 96% female users and 5,5 M visits/month), Modcloth sold out clothes within 24 hours, or how the satisfied bank customers are the ones doing all the selling by discussing and commenting on the CEO’s blog. (All presentations in Swedish.)

To my liking, the day also highlighted the importance of ambassadors, how there simply is no universal social media strategy to be implemented, and how creating relationships and trust takes as long time online as it takes offline.

Catch up the whole conference in English and in just 53 min! with key takeaways summed up directly from stage by Chris Heuer, Annika Lidne and myself, moderated by Joakim Nyström, host of the Sweet Sunday Web Crunch, Swedish weekly live podcast show with everything Internet.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com