I’m leaving tomorrow morning for SAS Global Forum, our annual user conference, held this year in Seattle. Last year was my first Global Forum. More than three thousand people came to learn more about SAS and to hang out with other like-minded souls. It’s quite an experience. I’ve heard it
Here, not a moment too soon, is a more-or-less random recollection of the big ideas and trends I witnessed at South by Southwest Interactive. Location-based applications were predicted to have the biggest hype, and that was borne out. These are applications, primarily for mobile devices, that let you "check in"
My notes from the Customer Support in a 140-Character World panel. Panelists were Frank Eliason from Comcast (@ComcastCares), Lois Townsend (@ltownsend) from HP, Toby Richards (@TobyRichards) from Microsoft and Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) from Altimeter. The moderator was Caroline McCarthy (@Caro) from CNET News. Caroline: Is social media the most effective
I arrived in Austin mid-afternoon and got to the convention center in time for the first session on my list, "Do Cool Kids Leave When the Suits Arrive?" The discussion was led by John Biehler and Chris Heuer. I arrived a bit late for this session, having experienced what I'm
Freaky-smart marketing ninja Christopher S. Penn (co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast) had a great blog post recently entitled "Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words." More and more companies are listening in social media, but are they doing it in a way that provides real bottom-line value? Many listen
It's been one year since I took on the job of social media manager at SAS. I've spent a lot of that time working on nuts and bolts, addressing concerns and objections and sitting in meetings (some productive and some less so). My biggest satisfaction in this role has been
Sometimes people don't want to hear that social media takes time and effort. I made this short video after seeing the "social media guru" video on YouTube done with the same tool from Xtranormal. Please note: If I work with you and you see any resemblance to any conversation we've
This morning The Mrs and I took The Boy to the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (as I was required to write it when I was a reporter) for the North Carolina Literary Festival. The two of them went to listen to children's book authors
Six months or so ago I created a FriendFeed account, because lots of people were saying it was better than Twitter. I set it up to pull in all my accounts, including my Netflix queue (why?), then pretty much left it alone. Earlier this week I set up a Posterous
I got a lot of positive comments on my Four Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media. It reminded me that people are at all different levels of knowledge and interest in social media. When you spend all day thinking about it and using it, it's easy to forget
