The Social Media Blog - Methodical Madness

SXSW 2010 a bust for Twitter fans

 
Twitter unveils @anywhere, offering almost nothing new and avoiding the news everyone really wanted to hear

South by Southwest has become the launch pad of huge new social media services. Twitter and Foursquare both blew up after taking the city of Austin by storm. So this year, we were expecting some big news from Twitter. In particular, most of us were expecting to finally discover Twitter’s elusive plan on how they’ll monetize the service and make it a sustainable enterprise for the long term future.

But what we got was @anywhere. With @anywhere, you can easily follow people you read about on webpages and share articles or products you find with just a few clicks. You sign into the site you’re visiting with your Twitter ID and can then interact with Twitter without leaving the page. As Twitter CEO Evan Williams said during the unveiling at SXSW, “the big thing @anywhere does is reduce friction.” 

This should all sound very familiar since there were already loads of third party developers reducing the friction of using Twitter to almost zero. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, those “share through Twitter” and “follow me on Twitter” icons have been dotting thousands of websites for a long time and desktop applications have made it easy to share pics and links in a matter of seconds. A lot of people sitting in the packed auditorium durning Williams’ presentation thought it was familiar enough to walk out in the middle of the talk and Guy Kawasaki called out the presentation as “boring” during a later panel discussion. 

@Anywhere’s advantage is that it was created by Twitter itself, and as such may gain traction with more major sites than the third party apps, despite offering pretty much the same thing. And that, in turn, will expose Twitter to many new web surfers and potentially lead to a new surge in its user base. There are 13 heavy hitters partnering with Twitter so far though some, like YouTube, already offered Twitter integration: 

 

The service does add a minor improvement to integrating Twitter into the main content of websites and finding new people to follow you may have overlooked, and it may well lead to new innovations by third party developers who take it and find creative uses. But it’s a lot less than we’ve come to expect from the social media pioneer and leaves us looking toward the Twitter developer conference Chirp for the big news we’ve been waiting for. As there’s a presentation on Monetization scheduled, we’re thinking Chirp will be the big reveal that SXSW 2010 was not.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

Google hijacks your brand

  

Another landmark digital court verdict was announced this week and, big surprise, it involves Google.  The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled this week that Google could sell AdWords to anyone on any word. The issue at had was whether advertisers should be allowed to use the competition’s name as keywords.  Basically, if I own a Holiday Inn in Dallas, TX and someone else owns a cheap motel, they can buy ad words that are featured whenever someone searches for “Holiday Inn Dallas.” 

In this case, Holiday Inn is Louis Vuitton Malletier. The fashion giant sued Google in 2004 because companies selling knock off versions of their products were buying keywords that were trademarked by Louis Vuitton. They claim that Google not only allows people to freely trade on their brands, but also aids them in finding keywords to help knockoff brands infringe on their trademark. In effect, Google not only allows but facilitates people in hijacking of a brand for their own purposes. 

As YouTube videos, mock Twitter accounts, AdWords and Facebook fan pages become more popular, corporations are in danger of losing control of their brand and trademark. Incidents of brands being hijacked by others are growing. AMC ran into this problem with people creating character profiles for their series Mad Men. At first, AMC demanded that Twitter take down the accounts, but after heaps of bad publicity, they recanted and allowed the profiles to remain as long as they were working in the best interest of the series.

As the Louis Vuitton case demonstrates, trying to sue technology into submission isn’t going to work. But that isn’t to say there’s nothing you can do to protect your brand. Here are a few steps you can take to keep hijackers off your ship.

Register your brand/product name early on social media sites – Even if you never intend to use Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, it’s good to capture your brand’s name before others can. Most of these sites have a private function so you don’t have to make the account visible.

Track your brand buzz – Brand buzz has never been more important. Internet memes come and go so fast you have stay on top of what is being said constantly. It’s impossible to respond to brand jacking if you’re not aware that it’s happening. 

Conduct proper SEO for brand sites – Search engine optimization has become of the utmost importance not just for search engine ranking, but also preventing brand hijacking. If a website is on the first page of a search result, it’s less likely that third party sites can gain significant traction over the branded website as far fewer people click on the paid ads than the organic search results. But if your site doesn’t appear on the first page of results, you’re just asking for others to steal your traffic.

Buy misspellings of you brand name – People misspell words all the time online. So wouldn’t it be great if when someone misspelled your product’s URL, it still took them to the correct site? Purchasing common misspellings of your brand’s url and redirecting them to the correct URL will increase web traffic and make it much easier to get your site to the top of multiple search engine results.

Google’s pledge to “do no evil” has drawn a lot of skepticism over the past months, with the company pulling some self-serving moves. In their haste to make a buck/provide content/facilitate information, I don’t believe they are sitting on top of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin wringing their hands and contemplating on how they can make more money by screwing everyone over. That would put them on the level of a James Bond villain bent on world domination. Google is just capitalizing on the new possibilities of social media to connect people with the content they want in new ways, and new communication channels always involve some growing pains. They’ve certainly made some missteps and pushed the boundaries of infringing on people’s rights, but they’re no more good or evil than other big corporations.

The French case reminds us that when it comes to your brand, Google and social media have made due-diligence more important than ever. Corporations have to learn how to become nimble and adjust to the new online paradigm instead of sitting back, calling Google evil, and wondering why the world is passing them by.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

The top 10 advertising pros to follow on Twitter

You’d think advertising people would be some of the most interesting, clever folks to follow on Twitter. And you’d be right. It was good fun narrowing down my list of my ten favorite ad people on Twitter this week. While social media experts and marketing professionals are at best a hit and miss bunch, advertising connoisseurs tend to be more free with their personality and great at getting conversations started. Check out my top ten and feel free to add your own favorites (or plug yourself, if you think you’re worthy).

 

@AdAge 

It may not be the most personal Twitter account, but AdAge has their finger on the pulse of hot new developments in advertising. A great way to get the latest ad news delivered to you, including major hires, fires, acquisitions and op/ed pieces. 

@agencyspy 

You can rely on the agencyspy for ad news with sharp, honest commentary. A good follow for both interesting news and a lot of laughs.  

@BBHLabs

A nicely balanced account, featuring links to useful articles, their own commentary and interaction with other tweeple.

@RickM

Rick Myers, CEO/founder of TalentZoo, focuses on advertising through social media and isn’t afraid to contribute his two cents. Some of the most consistently interesting tweets around.  

@Adland 

Advertising commentary with a big dose of personality. Another well-balanced account.  

@edwardboches 

Lots of interesting opinions from the Chief Social Media Officer for Mullen. One of the better users at getting a conversation going.

@MediaAsia 

Gives you a slice of the Asia/Pacific adworld through Twitter. Nearly all the ad-focused Twitter users are Western based, so this account is worth a follow if you’re interested in how things look on the other side of the world. 

@eproulx 

A peek inside the life of an advertising entrepreneur. Really interesting insight on the challenges one faces trying to be a professional adman and a good family man at the same time. 

@bastholm 

Lars Bastholm gives you an intimate look inside the life of the Chief Digital Creative Officer at Ogilvy in New York. 

@rorysutherland 

The self-designated “Fat bloke at Ogilvy” is one of Twitter’s great ad voices, always refreshingly  scathing. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

 

Top 10 Social Media Fails

and what we learned from them

There has been no textbook for social media. Most of what The Duffy Agency is doing for our clients in social media has never been done before. That means sometimes things will take an unexpected turn. Having launched several social media campaigns over the last few years, we’d like to share what we have learned. While most of these projects have been successful, they were not without their lessons to be learned. If you want to sharpen your skills in social media, the best way to improve is to learn from your mistakes. Or, in this case, ours. 

Don't be fooled by the “gurus” who talk as if they have been practicing social media since birth. Social media is new to all marketers and all marketers are grappling to come to terms with it. When faced with your first social media campaign, it is natural to apply strategies and tactics form traditional marketing. What we have discovered is that many of these tried and tested approaches fall flat when applied to social media. I outline here 10 of the most common social media fails we have encountered and how they can be remedied. 

So that we may discuss these projects frankly, we won’t identify the clients or brands involved. All projects were global in scope. In each case, it was the client’s first social media project. Deadlines were tight on all but one of the projects. 

Fail #1:  Runway Fail

The biggest difference between traditional media campaigns and social campaigns is the amount of ramp-up time needed. Traditional campaigns can start and have effect almost instantly, like a rocket shooting straight into the sky. Social campaigns need time to build an audience and credibility to gain altitude, like a glider. Every social media project we have started has been starved for time. Our clients have planned them as they would a traditional campaign. As a result, we were tasked with accomplishing in weeks what should be given months. 

This certainly hurts the outcome and can damage brands who appear to be pushing too hard in the social space. In several instances, we needed to hit very ambitious numbers in a very short period of time. We surpassed our numbers, but it meant we needed to push the conversation harder than we were comfortable with and got some push back from the community who felt at times they were being spammed by our “conversation.” 

 

The Fix: Plan a long runway for your social media project. If, for example, you want to use social media for a launch and do not have a social media following today, plan at least six to nine months to build a following before your launch. Better still, start building your social presence now so that you will be ready. 

Fail #2: Approval Fail 

It's hard to sign off on a project when you don’t really know what you are buying. This is the situation many marketers find themselves in. As a result they sit on proposals. This bogs down the project from the start, frays nerves and eats into time schedules. This is a double whammy as most social media projects are initiated with insufficient time to start with.  

The Fix: Since social media is new for most marketers, we often conduct workshops with our client’s management team to help them understand social media campaigns and how they work. This way, they understand what they are investing in. The companies that took the workshop were able to get the estimates approved quickly. Three clients did not. In each case, the approval process dragged on for months (over 3 months in one case). These delays would wind up creating further obstacles down the road. 

Fail #3: Campaign Management Fail

With traditional media, most of the work comes before the campaign is launched. You develop promotional items like an ad, TV spot or brochure. You tweak them to perfection then launch it into the market. Once it is published, broadcast or distributed there isn’t much you can do, so you move on. With social media, the real work begins after launch. We find this takes many, many clients by surprise as they aren't used to allocating time or resources to this post-launch phase and fumble the projects, despite the campaigns being successful.  

The Fix: Prepare for success. Once you start a conversation in social media, you must be prepared to a) fuel it with new content on a regular basis that adds value to the community, b) address criticism and concerns in near real-time, c) address sales leads and enquiries in near real-time and, d) access the right people at every level of the organization to participate if needed. 

Fail #4: Adaptability Fail

Social media campaigns give us the ability to measure the results of our efforts in near real-time. That's the source of one of the true powers of these campaigns. We never had this capability before. With traditional media, we would take our best shot and conduct research after the fact to see how well the campaign succeeded. Today, we can see how things are going instantly and, better yet, we can make course corrections while the campaign is running.

Being able to monitor a campaign's success in real-time means you see what works and what does not immediately. If you aren't set-up to act on this information and make course corrections, your campaign will suffer.

 

The Fix: Adopt a new mindset when it comes to campaign management. Nothing is locked in place. Look at your campaign plan as a hypothesis and be ready to adjust it to reality. For instance, finding how your target wants to be engaged in social media is the key and it sometimes takes a little trial and error to find it. So be ready to adapt your brilliant strategy at any moment. 

Fail #5: Reflex Fail

As a consequence of getting real-time feedback and interaction, social media campaigns require swift reflexes and much quicker reaction times than traditional media campaigns. This often conflicts with a company’s approval processes. All our clients understood that social media required swift response. They prepared their organizations for fast-track approvals. However, this usually meant reducing approval times from several weeks to several days. What was really needed were approvals in a matter of hours and in some cases minutes or seconds. 

The Fix: Adopt a real-time based time frame and then adjust existing creation and approval processes accordingly. In most cases, it will mean your approval people need to speak on behalf of the brand, as opposed to approving individual statements as such. This is new for many companies and places more responsibility in the hands of the people at the end of the communication chain. It also makes the need for clear brand values and brand training more essential than they have ever been before. 

Fail #6: Employee Engagement Fail 

Social media assets need to be populated to attract your target. They require a certain critical mass of people in order for them to function properly. Once they function properly, they produce value for participants. This attracts lots more users, which adds to the value etc. If your campaign is under a tight timeline, like these programs were, achieving critical mass quickly is essential to success. Your employees can be the key to this - if they participate. Do not assume they will. 

The Fix: Getting employees to participate should be treated as a campaign in its own right with a well thought through campaign strategy. Ad-hock efforts won’t cut it. A couple of the clients we worked with have in excess of 100,000 employees. Just 1% participation would have skyrocketed their campaigns. That didn’t happen. Smaller companies tended to do a much better job at persuading employees to participate with participation in excess of 50% common. And, by all means, review your company's policies with regard to firewalls and access to social media by employees. System security and access to social media are not mutually exclusive (no matter what any well-intentioned IT department tells you). 

Fail #7: Etiquette Fail 

While each social media tool has its own subtle etiquette, they all abide by one golden rule: Do not bore people by talking only about yourself. Marketers are used to talking about their brands. For decades we have used traditional media to push our message out onto the world. That is a strategy that is destined to fail in social media. In fact, we saw a very clear pattern across all our campaigns: the less we talked about ourselves, the more people listened and interacted with the brand. Want to drive people away? Just start pushing your marketing and PR messages out through your social media channels. 

The Fix:  Zip it, stop selling and start listening. This can be a hard pill to swallow for many marketers. Just remember that all the rules of polite conversation hold true in social media, chief among them do not talk about yourself incessantly. Focus the conversation on the parties you are conversing with.

Fail #8: Conversation Fail 

Traditional campaigns are events with defined start and end points, usually over a few months. A social media campaign is an ongoing process that has no defined end point. In several cases, we have built substantial communities for clients who thanked us for doing such a great job and asked us to pull the plug and end the campaign. This means shutting down websites, Twitter streams, Facebook pages, YouTube channels LinkedIn dialogue, etc... They did this because that’s how they have always run campaigns – as independent events. They did not understand the power in having a community and developing it. Neither did their bosses. So they asked us to disband it.  

 

The Fix: Building communities is the single most important commercial objective of social media. If you do not regard a community as a tangible, measurable asset, then you are wasting your time engaging in social media. If you have amassed a community of several thousand people, you cannot simply shut them off, especially if you ever want to interact with them again. Understand the nature of social media campaigns before you embark on one. This requires long-term planning and a community-building mindset. 

This is not to say that all social media activities are run forever. We divide our social media campaigns into baseline activities and special campaign activities. Baseline activities may, for example, include a constant presence and interaction via a blog, Twitter, Facebook and buzz monitoring. During campaign periods, we may add to this with special contests, campaign sites, videos, activities, forums etc. that we will stop at the end of the particular campaign. But our baseline activities to build and nurture a community are a 24/7/365 activity and need to be planned and resourced accordingly. 

Fail #9: Generosity Fail 

Generosity of spirit goes a long way in social media. This includes honesty, transparency, the ability to accept criticism of your brand and to acknowledge achievements of competing brands. Wishing anyone ill, including your competitors, will not help your cause in social media. Far from it. On several occasions, we have been asked to delete comments in forums that have mentioned our clients' competitors in a positive light. Or we have been asked to inject unjustified digs at our clients' competitors. If you indulge yourself in this manner, it will only serve to make your band look bad. 

The Fix:  Do not be mean-spirited in social media. Of course, if there is misinformation about you or your competitors, you should clarify. But in all cases, remain balanced, positive and objective. Do not seek out opportunities to make your competitors look bad. Why? Because they are not considered “competitors” by the people you are conversing with. More often than not, they will be considered valued resources by your community. If you really want to compete, focus instead on being of more value to the community than your competitors are.    

Fail #10: Budget Fail 

If you have read the previous nine Social Media Fails, you can see that a social media campaign is fundamentally different from conventional marketing campaigns. It needs to be budgeted as such. One of the biggest snags for companies entering this arena is having no basis on which to plan budgets for social media. In most cases this leaves the social media campaigns under-resourced and dysfunctional. 

 

The Fix: Budget for long-term engagement, not one-off events. Read through the nine social media fails above and, based on this, have a frank discussion with your social media advisors about your marketing objectives and how you see social media contributing to those objectives. Sketch out a 12-month program with measurable objectives and then talk price. Finally, nine months into the program begin planning for the next 12-months. 

You may have noticed that most of these fails stemmed from two common causes. First, the application of traditional marketing tactics to social media. And second, inadequate lead time.   The good news is that in both cases these barriers to social media brilliance are easy to overcome. If you feel you need some help getting on the right track, contact grant@theduffyagency.com to see how we can apply what we've learned to your next social media campaign. 

Recommended Reading:

An excellent post by Brett Nicholson on DigitalOZ blog “99 Social Media Mistakes, Complaints & Failures.”

The 5 best ways to find people to follow on Twitter

You’ve followed your friends and co-workers, but who do you follow next?

I’ve been using Twitter for almost 3 years and I’m always looking for new people to follow and converse with. Even after all this time, it can still be hard to separate the spammers from the worthwhile people. There are scores of websites that have popped up over the past couple of years to help solve this problem. Here are the five best sites we’ve used for finding the most relevant people to follow on Twitter.
 

Twellow is one of the best of the Twitter directories. It’s easy to use and search. You can add yourself to their directory and search through more than 17 million Twitter profiles. The site is organized by categories, which makes it even easier to find new people to follow. It also allows new people to find you.

 WeFollow is my favorite of the Twitter directories. Organized by self identified hashtags, WeFollow allows you to find not only the most popular people in a category, but the most relevant as well. Since spammers can often be the most popular, it’s good know who people are actually listening to and talking with.

Twubble is a bit different. It recommends people for you to follow based on the people you are already following, recommending users that they’re following. This site works pretty well if you only have a few followers and want to get more, but if you have several thousand followers, it doesn’t work as well.

 Who Should I Follow looks at who you follow and makes recommendations based on popularity and location. You can adjust a slider to focus the results. The results were filled with people I would be interested in following and I ended up finding some great new contacts. 

It’s hard to recommend a Twitter people search site since Twitter severly limits bio information, but Tweepz does a great job of dealing with those limitations. Do a search of a keyword, location or a name and Tweepz pulls in the results. You can refine your search by the number of followers, following, language or additional keywords. 
 

Which directories are you using?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

The essential Twitter toolkit

All the apps you need to successfully use and maintain your Twitter profile

Using Twitter is easy. Using Twitter successfully is much more difficult. You need a collection of tools to help you monitor, analyze, automate and share content. After reviewing Twitter apps and sites for the past seven months, we decided to put together one definitive toolkit that covers all your needs.

Desktop/mobile client

TweetDeck is our go to tool for Twitter monitoring and mobile access. It is an all-in-one tool that greatly simplifies using Twitter. Not only limited to Twitter, TweetDeck allows you to follow and update Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as monitor keywords around your brand or industry. You can even view pictures and YouTube videos within TweetDeck and it auto-shortens urls. Best of all, you can access your account from multiple computers, which is great if you use separate computers at work and home.

Networking

When looking for new people to follow, We Follow is the best place to start. This straightforward site allows you to label your account with the keywords that best define your Twitter stream. Then you can search We Follow’s keyword database to find the most relevant and interesting people to follow. This is always the first place we start when helping a client identify key people of interest.

Media Sharing

Odds are you’re going to want to share photos from your smartphone, and there is no better way to do that than with Twitpic. Setup and use are a snap. It doesn’t even require you to create a new account – after logging in with your Twitter account you’re ready to start sharing pics from wherever you are.

Tweet Scheduler

You can’t tweet 24 hours a day (if you can, seek help), but you can schedule tweets to go out around the clock. The best way we found to do this is through Twaitter. Odds are, your Twitter audience isn’t just in your time zone, so it’s important to reach people when they are most likely to be online. Twaitter allows you to schedule tweets so when you’re asleep, you can still send your links out. They’ve recently added recurring tweets and the ability to add your RSS feed, so now your Twitter feed doesn’t have to miss a beat.

Analytics

After you’ve got a hoard of followers and have your stream going strong and steady, you need to be able to judge how effective your campaign is. Twitter analyzer does just that. This one site allows you to see how quickly your Twitter account is growing, how far your reach extends, who is following you and lots more.  

There are more tools you can use to enhance your account, but if you master these five, you’ll be a Twitter God before you know it. What's in your toolkit?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

Attack of the disgruntled employee: Nation1 vs. Ramsey MacFarlane

What happens when you don’t practice good business policies.

From Motrin Moms to Vermonster, social media is a great way to lash out against perceived wrong doing. This time former Nation1 employee Ramsey MacFarlane has chosen to air his displeasure with his former employer by launching a microsite and using Twitter. 

Nation1 is a music publicity and marketing company that has just expanded into London from Glasgow. The complaint site appeared on March 2nd and has garnered national attention within Scotland, even becoming the #1 trending topic for the country. A newspaper called The Drum has written two stories about the situation and the drama has struck a cord within the advertising and marketing community in the country.

Nation1 owner Andrew Grant responded through a blog post on March 5th. In his response, Grant raises some valid points, but misses the point altogether in other areas. Grant is very impressed at how quickly the microsite gained a following and how quickly Twitter spread the word. He’s right in his views about monitoring conversations, knowing your legal rights as a business and changing your passwords when employees leave if they have access to sensitive information.  

Sadly, he misses the core point of the issue at hand. He fails to propose how to address the complaint via social media. Instead, he uses an example in the post where a person complains that a home builder hasn’t completed his house on time and how Nation1 actively worked to bury the blog so it wouldn’t rank high on Google. He also recommends adding Non-disparagement clauses to employment contracts. These are all methods to silence and condemn open conversation. Not once does Grant suggest addressing the problem and making a change if necessary.

Instead of trying to hide a blog, it would create a more positive position for the home builder if they opened a conversation with the complaining parties and worked to solve their problem. Then when someone searched for their company and saw the blog post, they would see how the problem was rectified rather than just one person’s complaint of terrible service. 

In the case of the Motrin Moms and Vermonster, both Motrin and Monster Energy drinks opened a dialogue with their attackers and became heroes in the social media marketing world for addressing the problem. Andrew Grant’s strategy appears to be to circle the wagon’s and shut down any complaint as soon as possible, as though the act of finding fault with his company is blasphemy.

If you own a business, at some point you’re going to rub people the wrong way. It happens to the best of companies. It’s how you deal with complaints that makes all the difference. I have no way of knowing if Ramsey MacFarlane is telling the truth. He has 23 comments so far and many people have echoed his complaint. Grant has said he plans to sue MacFarlane and others in order to recoup losses. At the end of the day, Andrew Grant is impressed with social media’s power, but fails to grasp how to use it. As it stands now, Nation1 is a cautionary tale of how not to handle a situation.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

How to get the most out of SXSW

 What started as a small music event showcasing unsigned musical artists is now a mega event that encompasses music, technology and film. For ten days in March each year, all eyes turn to the capital of Texas to find out what bands we should be on the lookout for, which films are truly groundbreaking and what’s on the forefront of web technology and video games. Past bombshells have included the breaking out of Twitter and Foursquare, the US debut of The Hurt Locker, and performances from the likes of Vampire Weekend, Yo La Tengo and Dolly Parton. With over 2,000 bands, 250 films and AOL, Chevy, Pepsi, and SoBe presenting the latest in technology in social media, how do you make sense of it all and keep track of what’s happening?

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep up to date on events, news and schedules. 

My.SXSW.com is the festival’s official planning tool. It lets you create a schedule and join groups. It’s a great way to keep track of what you’re doing. It also has an iPhone app that provides additional features like maps, news, and the ability to share information with other attendees.

After the success of last year’s Zeitgeist, PepsiCo re-enters the fray with SXSW Play. It allows you to listen to the MP3s of featured artists, watch trailers, listen to podcasts, navigate through the SXSW lineup, follow the buzz through the “Zeitgeist” button and more. This appears to be the one iPhone app to rule them all while attending SXSW. This is a great way to follow what's going on without being there.

AOL is working hard to become relevant again with their Lifestream app. Lifestream allows you to bring your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and AIM accounts together to better stay in touch with others attending the festival. While My.SXSW and SXSW Play keep you up to date with what’s happening, this app allows you to get in touch with people on the ground and to follow along if you can't attend.

Eventbrite has 51 events listed and lets you RSVP to events. This is a great way to connect to people before SXSW kicks off and can help you find events that you might miss otherwise.

Mashable has teamed up with Sony and Cliqset to bring you Austin Real Time. This is a database of people attending SXSW with links to their social media accounts. It’s easy to sign up and get connected with people via your Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Foursqare, Gowala, YouTube, Vimeo and Plancast accounts.

Don’t get lost in the shuffle of SXSW. With a little planning and forethought, you can be sure to not miss a hot event or fail to make important new connections. 

Ten social media experts worth your follow

 Yes, we know, everyone and their sister is calling themselves a social media guru these days. And yes, we know, most of them are full of it. But when you do fight your way through the white noise, you’ll find that some of them are well worth following to get a direct feed from thought leaders who supply you with new social media marketing ideas and breaking news and trends. 

To help you find those worthwhile few without having to pull your hair out, we’ve compiled a list of our ten favorites who deliver about all the social media info you can handle. We whittled our way down to ten based on the usefulness of each tweeter’s social media marketing advice, the originality of their tweets and the ratio of links and relevant info to personal chatter. @SocialMedia411
Their Twitter bio speaks for itself: Highly recommended by people who like things that don't suck. We keep a high signal-to-noise ratio and stimulate gray matter in the minds of doers and thinkers.

@timoreilly
Founder and CEO of O’Reily media, Tim is truly one of the thought leaders in social media. 

@Mashable
A prolific source of social media news, trends and advice. If you only follow one Twitter user to keep up with the latest in social media, Mashable is the one to go with. 

@Scobleizer
If you have any interest in social media you’ve probably heard of Robert Scoble. There’s hardly anyone on Twitter more enthusiastic about social media.

@Problogger
The problogger focuses on giving you helpful advice on using Twitter, writing blogs and generally having success in your social media efforts. 

@GuyKawasaki
The co-founder of Alltop, Guy is a social media pioneer. His self-proclaimed goal is to uncover the most interesting stuff on and about the internet.

@y2vonne
Yvonne focuses on marketing to women online. Worth checking out if you’re doing any work dealing with female-focused social networks.

@jdlasica
JD provides an interesting perspective on the latest social media happenings and delivers advice through his tweets and his blog.

@TobyDiva
Dubbing herself a social media marketing diva, Toby shares her passion for finding new ways to use social media with the tweeple of the world. 

@joelcomm
Joel is an interesting follow as he lets more of his personality pour into his tweets than most of the others, while still giving you useful social media advice and links.

That’s our top ten. Feel free to add your favorites in the comments section.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.