PR Week was kind enough to make me a guest blogger for the week of SxSW. Like any reporter, I captured more material than I was able to use. Here’s some interesting happenings that caught the eye of my faithful Flip:
Check In For Charity — Use of the location-based social network FourSquare was central to a promotion at SxSW to benefit Save the Children’s Haitian relief effort. Porter Novelli worked with StudioGood President Chris Noble, interviewed here, to execute the campaign, in which Microsoft and Paypal contributed 25 cents for each check-in on Foursquare in Austin during SxSW Interactive. As of March 14, the goal of $15,000 had been achieved.
FourSquare — Tristan Walker chatted with me about FourSquare’s involvement in the http://checkinforcharity.com benefit for Haitian children, and how organizations can work with his company on similar campaigns. Walker also addressed the competitive energy at SxSW between FourSquare and Austin-based Gowalla.
Move over Facebook Connect. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams used his keynote speech at SxSW Interactive to demonstrate how the micro-blogging platform will integrate more easily with third-party web sites.
A key benefit of the new @Anywhere platform is the ability to follow people directly from web sites they visit. Web site owners will see additional “tweets” about their content, said Williams, adding that the inclusion of Twitter’s full stream of public content on Google, Bing and Yahoo has allowed users to find relevant information more easily.
“There are 50 million tweets a day,” Williams told a packed auditorium in the Austin Convention Center. “You may see 100 of them. But are they 100 that will really help you out?”
Using a short video to demonstrate @anywhere, Williams said launch partners will include The New York Time, Amazon, Salesforce, eBay, the Huffington Post, Meebo, Yahoo, Advertising Age and Digg.
Among the features is the generation of a “hover box” that appears when visitors to a @anywhere partner sites mouses over a bold-faced company name or the byline of an author. With one click, and without leaving the partner web site, users can add that individual or organization to their Twitter followers list, said Williams.
The SxSW session used a slow-moving interview format, with no input from Twitter users or audience members, resulting in a steady stream of people exiting the auditorium as well as a online complaints from Twitter users.
A sampling:
@omarg: “How dry would you like that keynote? REEEAAL dry?”
@MattSummers Half expecting the moderator to ask @ev his favorite color
@jackiehuba: Just heard sirens outside. Too late to resuscitate this keynote
@daniel7720this has fail whale written all over it