Tracksuit CEO

So SXSW Interactive is over and the music festival is just kicking off. I’m in a cafe right now trying to gather my thoughts and sort through the massive overload of information that I’ve absorbed over the past several days. As you all know, my talk was on Sunday and Matt Gierhart co-presented with me. Matt lives in London now and if it weren’t for some helpful flight staff and some ingenuity, he would still be there. But I’m certainly glad that he made it, he was invaluable in helping me with this talk, the eBook and all of the promotional material we used for it.

Everyone has been asking me how the session went. Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced was a huge success in my opinion. I see it as a success because of the turnout and most importantly because of the audience participation. The Core Conversations were set up to be just that: conversations. This was not just me giving a speech and asking for questions at the end. And I was absolutely amazed at the level of participation we got from this group. It was a group of people from varied industries and this made for a lively discussion.At one point I asked the group what techniques they use for disguising their non-work-related blogging and web browsing. The ideas ranged from the old standby: Alt-Tab, to the more sophisticated: a service that converts web pages into Word documents. These were too good not to record so I’ve actually compiled them into a full list here.

I was very pleased to hear how many of the people in my group have integrated their blogging (and other Web 2.0 practices) into their job description. Chris, one of our participants, told us how he has turned Twitter into a tool to update his company’s customers and to improve morale. He has become the Twitter ambassador at his company and if his co-workers aren’t updating often enough then he lets them know. The updates on Twitter are both professional and social; it’s the watercooler meets the company newsletter all in one location. By the way, here’s my Twitter account: http://twitter.com/TracksuitCEO let’s be Twitter buddies.

That’s just one example, I’m hoping the rest of you who were there will weigh in and leave some feedback in the comments or better yet let me know if you’d like to do your own post. This is where we premiered our eBook, The Digital Natives are Restless. Special thanks to Ross Hunter, Sarah Pitre, Joan Whitney and Eric Metze for contributing. At our talk we had some goody bags (as promised) thanks to our friends at Diigo, Birds Barbershop and Vinosity Wine Bar.

And for those of you who journeyed on to lunch with me, thank you guys. I wasn’t ready for the conversation to end and I’m glad you weren’t either.

Blogging and Web 2.0 are changing the face of business and I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about this with people who understand and who are doing their part to initiate that change.

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