An interesting discussion that came out of the South by Southwest experience was the question of whether or not altruism exists, specifically in regard to social media. That is, does someone ever truly participate in an online discussion, or comment on a blog, or link to someone’s website from their own without having some sort of ulterior motive? It’s a bit of a slippery slope, especially for those of us who do ultimately have a product or service to sell.
It’s also an issue I’ve thought a lot about over the past year as we’ve built and launched BatchBook. There’s much animosity in the blogging world against anyone deemed “inauthentic” or who is obviously pitching their wares without adding any value to a discussion. I find this somewhat ironic, because some of the bloggers who rail the hardest against being “pitched” to are in fact pitching themselves as consultants/subject matter experts via their blogs and public speaking engagements.
It was refreshing to hear a voice of reason in the form of Deborah Schultz at the panel “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing”. Like me, Deborah is a communicator who has been working in technology for a mighty long time. Her core customer philosophy (below) mirrors mine:
-It’s about the customer
-Respect your customer
-Ask your customer
-Involve your customer
-Listen to your customer
-Good products sell themselves
-Be agile and flexible
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Tags: Customer Service, Social Media, SXSW, SXSW08, SXSWi
I just returned from the South by Southwest conference (the “Interactive” portion), which is held each year in Austin, Texas. I’d heard about it for years, but this is the first time I’ve been lucky enough to attend. It’s an amazing scene: lots of interesting panels and discussions, great parties and food, and, perhaps most important from a small business angle, tons of networking opportunites. Here are a few pictures from the week’s events and activities.
Adam attended the year before, and I found him to be a most excellent companion. He has an almost freakish ability to remember names, faces, and professional history. I guess that’s not all that surprising, since he is also a baseball geek. This combined with my freakish gregariousness enabled us to meet and hang out with some really amazing folks. The fabulous boys of Freshbooks wined and dined us (I’ve mentioned before that we’re customers as well as big fans, and they take their customers out to dinner — how cool is that?) We hung out with fellow Providence techies from FuseCal.com, met up with Chris and Kate from the excellent site patientslikeme.com, made a new BatchBlue “Best Friend Forever” in John Eckman (who is as funny as his shuffleboard game is weak) and debated the concept of altruism with Josh Porter until, after several hours, we decided that we all just needed to get along.
But perhaps the best thing of all was meeting information architect and Web guru Thomas Vander Wal and telling him about our new SuperTags feature. He said it sounded like an interesting idea that he hadn’t heard of before, which thrilled us. Our whole team has been working almost non-stop for the past two years on getting BatchBook out there, and to receive such supportive feedback from someone we so admired made us feel like we were on the right track. He even wants us to send him a t-shirt!
Since returning home, I’ve been using BatchBook to log all of my contacts from the conference and I’ve got to say, it’s pretty sweet especially now that we have SuperTags. I created a SuperTag called “sxsw2008″ and added three fields: where did we meet, did we send a follow-up mail, and is there an action item as a result of the meeting. So much more helpful than wrapping a rubber band around all the business cards and tossing them into a box like I used to do.
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Tags: freshbooks, supertag, SXSW, SXSW08, SXSWi
