Apple Inc. spent decades building a cult-like following in the education sector. From grade school, through college and into professional life, young people around the world feel a kinship with the company’s Macbooks, iPhones and iPads.

They also rally behind social responsibility causes far faster, and with more commitment, than older adults. Which is why Apple is playing with fire by not immediately and convincingly speaking with kids about the disturbing allegations in a New York Times article last week about sweatshop-like conditions at manufacturing facilities that make Apple products in China.

Granted, many middle schoolers do not read The New York Times. We still receive a hard copy at the house every day, but it wasn’t until my youngest daughter, Libby, 13, got to school Thursday that she heard about the Apple article — during a gathering of Model UN.

Thursday was the day Apple got knocked off a pedestal for Libby, who wrote the letter below and posted it on her blog. Today, she started asking me whether it was time to sell our Apple stock. All this from an eighth grader.

Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an email to staff about the Times piece.  In the letter, a copy of which was reprinted by 9to5mac.com, the new chief executive said Apple cares about all of its employees and those involved in the supply chain.  He pointed to the Supplier Responsibility page on Apple’s web site for details on what’s happening in China and other places where Apple products are made.

It’s going to be hard work to get that message to every school kid using Apple products.

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From the “Being a Student in NYC” blog of Libby Armon, 13:

I sent a letter to Apple expressing my deep dislike for their factory in China. The letter is displayed below:

Dear Apple,

Have you ever considered having your Apple factory in the United States rather than in China?

If you relocated your factory to the US you would help create tons of jobs for Americans in a time where jobs are hard to find. Yes you would have to pay higher wages. However, I think that Apple would be benefited by the increase in respect that you would earn by relocating.

I thought that you not only designed your products in California but made them there too. In Model UN our teacher had us talk to Siri and ask her where she was manufactured or put together. Siri responded that she could not tell us and that the information we wanted was classified.

We then watched the film by the New York Times, “Made in China.” This video explained how Apple makes its products in China in a sweatshop. I know you think that it is okay to use this cheep labor because other companies might, but it isn’t.

People who buy your products do not want to know where they are getting their electronics because they know they will feel guilty. It seems your company feels shame also because you have Siri cover up for you. If you feel bad then maybe you should do the right thing and move your factory somewhere where you aren’t taking advantage of someone else.

Yes, I know you can do what you want and that Apple is more powerful than me but I can only hope you help improve your company morally. I am writing on an Apple computer right now, this shows how I do admire your craftsmanship with your products. Apple has been a key factor in positively connecting our global society. All I ask from Apple now is that you relocate your factory!

Sincerely,

Libby Armon

Today’s introduction of a new automated evaluation tool by London-based Lewis PR got me thinking:

• Are service providers in the PR space not innovating fast enough?

• Or are PR agencies no longer able to grow simply by selling billable hours?

By bringing LSCORE to market, Lewis joins a growing list of public relations agencies that have developed, branded and launched products that are positioned to fill a void in the market.

A few years ago, Waggener Edstrom strayed into “vendor territory” when it started selling an “Influence Toolkit.”  In the 1980s, Fleishman Hillard took a similar tack with its Wire News Network, ostensibly a miniature newswire that operated as a profit center and made PR Newswire and Business Wire insane.

The mammoth advertising and PR services holding company WPP — owner of Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy, among others — has plunked down some serious coin in this arena.  Cymfony, for example, is now under the WPP roof.

Strategically, services like the WaggEd and Lewis offerings seem to make sense as long as the firms did not spend too much developing the technology.  The agencies will likely upsell most of their own clients to the new platforms and non-clients who inquire will share information about their PR goals that make them more likely to become consulting clients.

But outside of those two pools of clients, it’s pretty unlikely competing agencies would recommend LSCORE or Influence Toolkit.  Without sales of their software through third-party agencies, the return on investment is harder to achieve.

That “I’ll-be-damned-if-our-agency-is-going-to-recommend-your-firm’s-software” conundrum is one reason PR services suppliers unaffiliated with agencies should continue to prosper.  After watching the success of Cision in selling hundreds of Radian6 subscriptions to PR clients, Vocus developed its own social media monitoring and analytics service and integrated it into its SaaS platform.  The new social product, according to Vocus CEO Rich Rudman, is selling like hotcakes.

In London, Glide Technologies has leapfrogged both Cision and Vocus with a very sophisticated, next-generation sentiment analysis and media evaluation tool.  Expect further innovation in this arena in the coming months from other suppliers.

We will keep an eye on LSCORE to see how extensively it is marketed outside of core Lewis clients like Lexmark, Mozilla and Pret a Manger.  In the meantime, we’ll watch competing firms like Weber Shandwick — which for years has been quietly supplying clients with monitoring and measurement through an extranet dubbed WeberWorks — to see if they jump on the selling-software-to-non-clients bandwagon.

Jeffrey Hayzlett’s groundbreaking social media work for Kodak made him into one of the biggest brands in marketing. Did Kodak stumble when the CMO left the company?

Similarly, the departure of Frank Eliason from Comcast and Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines made social media headlines and raised the question: Should the power of our company brand be shared with our community manager?

Best-selling author Charlene Li, CEO and co-founder of Altimeter Group, discusses how organizations should be thinking about structuring their social media engagement. She spoke with Dave Armon during the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C.

“They shouldn’t be scared about somebody leaving,” said Li, using former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble as an example.

“Goodness, Microsoft benefited so much from Robert’s involvement early on. He left, but Microsoft still really benefited from the time he was there,” she said.

In the video, Li also praised the work of Ford Motor Company social media chief Scott Monty, saying the automaker is well poised to thrive even if he moved to a different role.

She also addressed her departure from Forrester Research, saying the firm’s controversial blog policy was appropriate for its business model.

Budget season is in full swing inside organizations with calendar fiscal years.  Chances are a few new line items have made their way into the public relations spending plan for 2011.

More than any other corporate function, PR is leading their organizations into social media, says Charlene Li, founder of research firm Altimeter Group and author of the best-selling business books Groundswell and Open Leadership.

Li, a former journalist, was a keynoter at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, DC, this week, telling 3,000 attendees that PR continues to outpace, by a good distance, the customer service function in the use of and spending on social media engagement.

Although Li maintained the dollars required for social engagement are modest, when contrasted to other corporate earmarks, I have noted four or five separate buckets that many organizations are now funding. The addition of staff for social media community management, a platform for monitoring and analysis, and publication tools for scheduling posts are routine investments for any company or agency trying to meet business objectives on the social web.  Many consumer-facing companies are going a step further, spending on technology to build Facebook applications or integrate social into CRM systems.

My interview with Li will continue next week, focusing on how companies cope with the departure of highly recognizable community managers, and the use of digital agencies versus social platform specialists.

Image credit: Tom Humbarger

For those who see the glass as half-empty, don’t worry.  Marketers and PR folks will start focusing on you in 2011.

Jonathan Evans, my longtime colleague and friend, attended the annual Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C., with me over the past few days.  Like Jon, I suffered social media overload.

Which brings me to Jon’s snarky prediction for the possible theme of the 2011 conference in Orlando:

“Anti-social media: How to reach those who are not interested in you, indifferent to your products and are quite frankly annoyed with human interaction.”

Jon had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek while prognosticating about the next big thing in PR.  But I don’t think we should be so quick to dismiss the concept that there’s a large group of constituencies who consciously choose not to engage.

These are the people who like phones that just make calls, proudly show off their small TVs without cable, and love New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” mantra.

The first step to luring this crowd into social media is in Facebook’s hands.  Introduce the ”Don’t Like” button, Mr. Zuckerberg, and you’ve got ‘em.

Tweeting from industry conferences is a doubled-edged sword.

Those interested in the content from the event are thrilled to pull in a stream of interesting observations without having to plunk down the cash to attend.

But your followers who chose not to attend the conference because they don’t value the material are likely to be annoyed tweet after tweet on a moot topic.

Which brings me to radical decision to stop zapping 140-character observations, accolades and barbs from sessions like today’s Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston.  But I will update this blog throughout the event and send a tweet or two, containing the #MSM10 hash tag, to alert the three or four people — my mom, secretary, an out-of-work PR agency staffer and a prison inmate named Hector — who care about this kind of stuff.

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Katie Paine opened the session with a deck that included many of the same slides in this deck. In her “10 signs that it’s the end of ROI as we know it” slide, she claimed United Airlines lost brand value of $180 million over its handling of the “United Breaks Guitars” episode.  By not quickly replacing Dave Carroll’s damaged instrument, the carrier suffered losses equal to the cost of 5,100 guitars, Paine said.

If that’s true, why didn’t the newly formed United Continental Holdings choose to fly under the Continental brand?

In a less far-fetched pitch to attach quantifiable business measures to social media involvement, the food services giant Sodexo chopped a $300,000 employee recruitment spend with Monster.com and instead began using Twitter to attract staffers who expressed an interest online in flipping burgers.

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Amber Naslund took a swipe at Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter score, saying Radian6 is toying with introduction of a “net advocacy score” that will ask whether a consumer actually recommended a business or service.  Net Promoter focuses on willingness or likelihood to recommend.

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Keith Woods-Holder –  who, in the words of conference organizer Luke Brynley-Jones, ” has been doing sentiment analysis since before many of us have been using the internet” — poked fun at social media gurus who ridiculous graphics that resemble Spirograph (my interpretation).

Keith’s key takeaway, looking at the tweet stream, was that PR and marketing types should not be fixated on the volume of mentions of their company or brands.  It’s volume matched with context, expectations and objectives that matter, said Keith, who now works with Glide Technologies.

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Two NASDAQ-listed companies pinning their growth to sales of social media tools to small- and medium-sized enterprises are Vocus and Constant Contact.

Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media for Constant Contact, told the crowd at Monitoring Social Media they don’t need the large budgets required for Radian6 or Compete.com. But they need to do something.

“There’s no cure for sucking,” said Schmulen, adding, “We”re not talking about spamming people, we’re talking about permission-based marketing.”

Like Naslund earlier, Schmulen made the broad generalization that no robot can properly analyze sentiment.  That kind of slam was unnecessary and unfounded, especially with providers like Glide Technologies knocking it out of the park with precisely that kind of insight. Yes, it’s big-budget stuff, but it does exist.

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Machines aren’t enough.  Humans aren’t enough.

Analytics pro Seth Grimes zipped through dozens of tools — from “toys” such as “We Feel Fine” to expensive enterprise solutions like Clarabridge and Crimson Hexagon — and actually had the guts to tear a few of them apart.  Unlike many of the speakers at today’s conference, he wasn’t shilling for one particular process, consultancy or tool.  His deck is worth a look.  You can find it at this link.

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Tools are commodities but the ability to segment the data and use it could save you hundreds of man hours a month, says self-described analytics guru Marshall Sponder, ex-Porter Novelli.  Good workflow capabilities are the differentiating factor, and vendors are not going to volunteer to show how to do the work.

“They’re going to be brain dead by the time they are ready to analyze it,” Sponder said during a “How to Choose the Right Monitoring Tool” panel with Katie Paine and Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall.

One pitfall is that companies and agencies will often put social media management in the hands of relatively inexperienced personnel because of the “funness” of it, said Hofer-Shall.  They lack the analysis skills to provide management with key insights and metrics.

For self-service tools, Sponder advised attendees to evaluate Brandwatch, Radian6 and Sysomos.

More sophisticated are solutions from Synthesio, Brandology and Attentio, which can construct a custom dashboard, sanitize data, and provide multinational extractions of meaning for you, said Sponder.

For companies that do not yet have dedicated social marketing functions, Sponder suggested outsourcing to firms like Integrasco, where they will choose the right tools, methodologies and do the work for you.

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What works and what doesn’t in social media at industry trade shows? 

Aafia Chaudhry, MD, gave an example of a medical conference where Novartis tweeted the most.  But the tweets were very repetitive and aimed only at convincing those reading the tweet stream to visit the Novartis booth.  She chartacterized it as a fail.

On the other hand, Novartis received positive feedback for smartly displaying the tweet stream at its booth.  This allowed attendees  — some of whom were not yet active on Twitter — to see the real-time social media conversation about the conference.

Chaudhry is CEO of JuvoLab and founding partner of Noesis.  She seems like a highly informed resource for those tracking the use of social media in pharma.

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I’m convinced having Queen Elizabeth on your currency is the best way to get invited to speak at Influence People events.

In addition to all the Brits, CEO Carol Leaman of the Waterloo, Ontario, social measurement firm PostRank shared wisdom with us.

Telling your story is far more important than measurement, she said, echoing advice heard earlier in the day from Katie Paine.

“Creating of content is absolutely the first thing you should think about, and then seeding that content in social networks,” said Leaman.

Brands producing content benefit handsomely when they understand how their information is shared, and by whom.

“The half life  of data on the Internet is under an hour,” she said. “More than half of the engagement happens in the first hour.”

Life would be much simpler if those responsible for defending corporate reputations only had to worry about good old-fashioned F-bombs.

But four-letter words are just one of a growing list of fears for marketers and corporate communications pros striving to keep their social media channels brand-safe.  What happens when an organization runs afoul of new standards, guidelines, codes of conduct, terms and conditions, or — this is where it gets serious — actual binding rules from a regulator?

Anyone responsible for their organization’s social media engagement, and those community managers on the front lines, should have a thorough understanding of why their activities are being scrutinized, and by whom:

• FTC — Most consumer marketers are well aware the U.S. Federal Trade Commission created Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising last fall.  What they may not know is that Washington is already starting to take action against companies for things like inadequate disclosure of sponsored posts and blogger payola.  Women’s clothing retailer Ann Taylor was on the receiving end of one such rebuke (PDF).

• FINRA — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees brokerage firms and investment professionals, is worried about consumers getting duped through social media.  In a regulatory notice, “Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites,” FINRA warned the financial services industry they had better pull in the reins and increase surveillance on those selling stock, insurance or other similar investment products online.  Just last week, FINRA fined Piper Jaffray $700,000 for not archiving old emails.  Imagine what will happen when the regulator gets around to searching for a bank’s years-old Twitter posts or deleted Facebook wall posts.

• FDA — Long known for tightly restricting the marketing messages from pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held public hearings last year to better understand how social media changed the game for drugmakers, healthcare professionals and patients.  Even before new rules are published, a few gutsier brands are betting their one-way approach (brand talks but consumers can’t talk back) will pass muster.  Two examples: Johnson & Johnson’s ADHD Moms page and Boehringer-Ingelheim ’s DRIVE4COPD page, both on Facebook.

• Facebook — Much of the debate about Facebook’s new heft as a marketing platform has centered on rights of consumers to protect their private data.  Yet the responsibility for preventing abuses falls to the brands that use Facebook to reach consumers, and to developers hired to build applications on the platform.  Facebook is not a government agency or a utility company; it’s a private company.  Just like the Seinfeld episodes where Kramer, Jerry and George are barred from various eateries (i.e., Poppy’s Pizza and the Soup Nazi, pictured above ), it behooves social marketers to truly understand the letter and spirit of Facebook’s rules rather than risking a misstep on a platform used by 500 million consumers.

There, I’ve ranted about F-bombs for all this time without actually dropping one.  I’ll probably lose some SEO points for that.

Chief financial officers have dealt with auditors since the days of the abacus. Smart chief technology officers bring in friendly hackers to test the ability of firewalls to withstand cyber attacks. Facilities managers conduct evacuation drills.

However, aside from airlines and a few industries susceptible to high-profile incidents, it is rare to see mandated, periodic reviews of a company’s crisis communications plan.

Update with care

For organizations that have a mandatory annual review of their crisis communications plan, the task may be relegated to a junior staffer who lacks the skill or authority to make major changes. This is a mistake.

A rubber-stamp process that simply updates staff phone trees and media lists is dangerous because many of a company’s newest communications channels and techniques to reach stakeholders could be missing from a legacy crisis plan.

Many PR professionals used 2009 to experiment with social media, speaking with influential audiences directly rather than through one-way messaging with the help of mainstream media gatekeepers. The numbers told the story: As Facebook surged past 350 million unique users, a record number of daily newspapers folded in 2009, plagued by a deepening recession and debt.

As organizations of all sizes began building social media communities, their dalliance was often short-lived and lacked scale. Other organizations have proven that they are worthwhile enough to earmark significant marketing dollars.

Any 2010 crisis communications planning needs to consider an organization’s new social channels — whether on internal networks like Jive Software andYammer or externally via platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Learn from others’ crises

Following the devastating January earthquake in Haiti, communicators who used social media channels not only reached customers and brand loyalists, but also reached influential mainstream media. For instance, when American Express waived fees for merchants accepting earthquake-assistance donations, the company found that their tweets quickly made their way in news coverage.

Pleas for doctors and nurses to help in Haiti also spawned rumors that American Airlines and JetBlue Airways were flying medical personnel to the ravaged nation. Within minutes, the @jetBlue Twitter feed, which has attracted an astonishing 1.5 million followers, dispelled the misinformation and directed would-be volunteers to an organization that validates credentials of nurses and doctors willing to help.

Of course, the nature of social media is that everyone is a publisher. Because consumers can generate content that is sometimes incorrect — or, worse yet, deliberately disparaging — organizations that embrace social media must be extra vigilant.

If left unchecked, third-party postings and comments on the wall of a brand’s Facebook fan page can spread rapidly and become amplified by a social media influencer or a mainstream outlet. The damage can be immediate and profound.

Use your own channels

Brands that are proficient in distributing their own content — from simple tweets to polished thought-leadership white papers, webinars and videos — should ensure that their fans and followers know about critical news as it happens. Waiting hours or days to comment leaves room for rumor mongering and speculating.

As we’ve learned from mature social media programs, like the one run by Ford Motor Company’s Scott Monty, the crowd generally accepts that instant answers are not always available during a crisis. Monty and his staff have earned respect from fans and followers by promptly replying, even if the Ford response is something as innocuous as, “I just read your tweet and am looking into the situation.”

For fans, just knowing that someone is on duty and moderating the channel may be enough to calm the frayed nerves of an angry consumer.

But being awake and in touch via social media channels is not enough to keep a corporate reputation intact while under siege. It’s one thing to promise a reply and something quite different if no one in senior management is willing to go on the record in social media, just like in mainstream print and broadcast. An organization’s social media team should have access to senior communications executives to address the issues of those making noise online. Common sense should dictate whether to do this outreach publicly or privately.

Tone down commercial content

On Sept. 11, 2001, my office window in New York overlooked the flashy billboards in Times Square. The brands advertising their wares in lights just two miles north of the World Trade Center should have been unplugged immediately. In reality, it took a day or two for most of the signs to go dark or for advertisers to replace them with appropriate messages of sorrow, charity or patriotism.

Just as airlines have long enforced a policy to immediately pull their ads from TV and print after any major crash involving a passenger plane, brands using new media must have a kill switch built into their crisis plans.

It was hurtful to see animated beer ads on Broadway on Sept. 12, 2001. As crisis communications plans are created and updated, it’s critical to remember the many consumer touch points between a brand and its publics: the Web site, ad campaigns, events and pre-scheduled company announcements unrelated to the crisis.

Stay aware, active

While I don’t know of a magical solution that lets a company’s entire marketing program instantly switch off, there are powerful tools to prevent gaffes within the most widely used social networks. Among the features that apply to crisis situations:

• Moderation consoles that capture posts and comments, matching them against “black lists” of words and phrases that an organization may not want on its Facebook wall. These tools also display comments made to pages that are only weeks or months old, eliminating the possibility of disparaging content being buried deep within a fan page. An “escalation” feature allows questions posed by fans to be e-mailed to experts for faster responses.

• Page management tools to schedule the publication of content in advance. Some crisis scenarios can be anticipated, so approved responses can be loaded into the tool for faster responses. These tools also let administrators suspend campaigns without the intervention of third-party vendors.

• Self-service application dashboards allow organizations to publish customized content quickly for their Facebook page. Using these tools, a company, agency or nonprofit could quickly move from a sales-oriented page to one that distributes information about an incident or engages fans to support benevolent nonprofits.

Many of today’s consumers gather information in real time. This can lead to big rewards for organizations that learn to behave like media companies, attracting an audience and then earning trust by communicating continuously through the good times as well as the bad.

(I wrote this piece for PRSA’s monthly newspaper, “Tactics.“  It was published in the April edition.)

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

A presentation by corporate product manager-turned-cartoonist Tom Fishburne captured the complex vibe of this week’s South by Southwest Interactive conference.

Angry at the way “blood-sucking corporations” systematically dull the sharpest ideas, the Harvard MBA grad and author of “Brand Camp” has fought back with his pen and, over 10 years, earned a loyal following of 50,000 like-minded brand managers.

The connection between drawing cartoons and innovation struck a chord among the eclectic mix of software developers, marketers, artists, PR pros and others attending SXSW, as seen in the live Twitter feed of the event.

@escapetochengdu: Most organizations are better equipped w/ cutting tools than with growing tools

@brianrudolph Ideas are like a muscle. The more you work and exercise it, the more you get out of it

@mercurek Most frustrating & inspiring core convo

@jenn__chen The criticism sandwich – start and end with good, keep the bad in between

@frenkie the remarkability of a cartoon is determined by its simplicity, comparable to Apple’s innovative designs

With his cartoons mounted on fabric sheets on the walls, Fishburne recounted his frustration working at General Mills and other consumer products companies that spurred the creative process through highly structured “ideations” where participants sang Kumbaya and sat in beanbag chairs. Following the retreats, Fishburne said, remarkable ideas were systematically whittled away by his risk-averse colleagues.

Despite the bitter start, Fishburne’s cartooning session was uplifting.  His attributed his career happiness to being “deliberately exclusive” to connect with a highly targeted audience fanatical about his cartooning, and a day job where collaboration on product development is encouraged every day.  Tools he uses at Method Products include floor-to-ceiling white boards and a 3D printer capable of churning out prototypes of new laundry detergent bottles overnight.

With its start in 1987 as a music festival, SXSW has long had a knack for melding technology, design, music and filmmaking in a way that’s irresistible for marketers searching for the next great genre, gadget or platform on which to build a brand.

A milestone this year is the explosive growth of SXSW’s interactive portion. Registration was up 40 percent over last year’s 11,000 attendees versus a 25 percent rise for film and flat attendance at music, according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Derczo.

Fishburne’s presentation was just one example of the juxtaposition of deep-pocketed corporate sponsors trying to be edgy and the starving artists that provided the foundation for SXSW.

During a “How to Rawk SXSW” panel advising newcomers how best to navigate the five days of sessions, events and parties, a speaker noted Miller Lite was a sponsor before telling a joke:

“What’s the difference between American beer and making love in a canoe?  They’re both fu@*ng near water.”

Welcome to South by Southwest.

A roundup of other key events during SXSW’s opening weekend:

– The news-sharing website Digg used a SXSW party to announce a simpler, one-click process for uploading content. CEO Jay Adelson a technology overhaul of Digg is expected to speed ingestion of articles, video and other user-submitted content from the current level of 20,000 items a day to as many as a million.

– AT&T bolstered wireless coverage in downtown Austin to satiate the bandwidth appetite of the iPhone-wielding throng.  The telecom giant stationed trucks outfitted with wireless transmitters trucks in parking lots near the convention center and hotels hosting SXSW.  Among other image-improvement initiatives were distribution of coupons offering 25 percent off items purchased at an on-site AT&T booth at SXSW, and charging stations that resembled the miniature lockers used to secure wallets while working out at the gym.  My iPhone functioned fine on the AT&T network during the conference.

– Google took a hit for vastly underestimating consumer concerns about the privacy of their Google Mail and address book data during the recent launch of its Buzz social network. SXSW Interactive keynoter Danah Boyd, a self-described “social media scholar, youth researcher and advocate” who works for Microsoft Research, attacked Google for connecting Buzz to Gmail, which she described as “one of the most private systems imaginable.”  Boyd’s remarks also addressed privacy policies at Facebook and other Internet companies. “I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.

(Editor’s notes: This post was written for PR Week; Photo of Tom Fishburn by Joshua Duncan, Austin, TX)