Today was the second annual Interactive Austin Conference and I was able to attend. Let me start by saying that it was a great event, lots of great people, the speakers knew their topics and the crowd was great as well. I attended three of the “Practical application and implementation” track and whurley’s keynote (my favorite speaker at this event).
I got to the event late in the morning, around 10:45 so I was not able to hear the other two keynote speakers: Dion Hinchcliffe and Sam Lawrence.
The speakers all coincided in one thing; social media is nothing new, it just happens that now we can take social media to a whole new level using the tools available to us in the internet such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc…
Several of the panelists also mentioned other tools such as Google’s alerts and analytics to take care of metrics, budurl and tinyurl to shorten long URLs, but they all seemed to LOVE Twitter. Almost every panelist mentioned Twitter several times and a lot of them even had a live twitter feed connected to the projector while giving their presentation.
The panelists comments about Twitter went from explaining how to sign-up for a Twitter account and start posting tweets to explaining how to use it to market your products, services and also to use it as a market research tool.
There was one speaker “whurley” who didn’t seem that interested in Twitter, whurley’s keynote focused in future technology trends and he was great with this topic. whurley basically asked the audience to choose about 5 topics to talk about. The following are whurley’s predictions for the topics choose by the audience. Microsoft’s Azure Services platform source is never going to be open, instead it will be as close and tight as Windows, or probably more. LinkedIn is a great networking tool, however it has gotten too big and it is becoming more useless everyday… and my favorite, social media will die.
Yeah, it was interesting to hear those things at this event when everyone else was cheering up and promoting social media and all the online tools available.
I am happy I was able to attend this event, I learned about some cools things you can do with social media and all the tools available to you in the internet. The first step is to embrace online social media and be smart and SELECTIVE about the connections and the content you want to consume and share using sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc… another thing that we all need to do when using these social media sites is to make sure we are not anonymous, small steps such as adding a real picture of ourselves and a bio go a long way in these social media sites.
That’s it for Interactive Austin 2009, if you would like to get more details or check what people where talking about while at this event… go to Twitter and search for #ia09.