Blogs | Social Signal

Twitter has helped move my attention from the soapbox side of social media ("Here I am blogging about the Important Idea I want to convey") towards its conversational side ("What do you think about my Important Idea?") The short message length and rapid-fire pace of Twitter, combined with the panoramic view of my friends that I get from my Tweetdeck setup , fosters a more conversational online relationship with my friends and colleagues.

I was picking my daughter up from her first day of school, and I was so excited to hear how it went that got there a few minutes early. I could go in and spend a few extra minutes observing her class....or I could sneak one last peek at the day's e-mail. Sure enough, I pulled out my iPhone, only to experience that little ping of disappointment when the hoped-for e-mail from a prospective client had yet to arrive. I headed into my daughter's classroom, my excitement about the first day of school now dulled, ever so slightly, by the disappointment of that missing e-mail.

South by Southwest Interactive is coming next March, and Social Signal has three panels in the mix. We'd love to see at least one of them happen - and that's where you come in.

Your vote on the SXSW PanelPicker (in a world of obscure application names, that one comes as something of a relief) will make a big difference in how the conference organizers shape the agenda. Now, with voting closing tomorrow Monday, we're down to the wire.

Twitter is home to many recurrent motifs, but one of the most reliable is the mass finger wag. Unlike the single finger wag, which takes aim at a specific individual or company ("Airline X lost my luggage!" "So tired of @username's whining!"), the mass finger-wag -- let's call it the hand-wag -- tackles an entire category of twitter users, an entire genre of twitter usage, or a swath of the offline population. Tweets like:

Not another Snow Leopard tweet! We've heard enough about your OS upgrade for one night.

It can happen so quickly: a few misplaced tweets, an ill-considered blog post, and suddenly an organization is at the center of an online firestorm. They're called spammers and liars, and tagged with the Hashtag o' Doom, #FAIL. And the worst thing of all is they had no idea what was happening.

Where, oh where, did it all go so wrong?

Probably somewhere around the moment they decided to outsource their social media marketing.

As causes go, you can't get much closer to our hearts than with a children's hospital. The thought of having to take one of our kids there is wrenching, and I'm sobered by the fact that thousands upon thousands of children - and their parents - go through that every day.

We want those kids to get the care they need swiftly and effectively. We want our best medical knowledge brought to bear, and we want clean, quality facilities that promote good health as well as healing sickness.

So we jumped at the chance to work with the BC Children's Hospital Foundation, helping them chart a social media strategy for engaging their audiences and raising money.

The panel picker for next year's South By Southwest Interactive conference has just gone live, and zowee! there are some great choices. We're especially thrilled to see so many great social media panels proposed by interesting women speakers, promising a SXSW in which we get to hear some sopranos and altos mixed in with the basses and baritones that dominate so many tech events.

Here are some of the women panelists we're excited about (in no particular order). Some of them are women who have dazzled us at past events; others are new discoveries we made while digging through the wealth of awesome-sounding panel proposals.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote my most hypocritical tweet ever:

Follows are not love. You are as lovable with 5 followers as with 50,000. You are not your Twitter feed.

One of our favourite things about working in this field is the chance to pass on what we know, to see what happens when people start to grasp the potential of social media... and to see what they do when they run with it.

So I'm delighted to announce we'll be teaching an introductory course in social media this September at the University of British Columbia. The course runs for three Wednesday evenings at UBC's downtown Robson Square campus, from Sept. 9 to 23. Tuition is $375 plus GST.