Sarah Austin was one of the first live streaming, life-casters popularized on Justin.TV and she is the founder of Pop17, “a collaborative blogging platform and web show that covers and tracks emerging web trends and tells the stories behind what’s going in social media.” 

Sarah and I have a SXSWi 2011 Panel Proposal with Brandon Prebynski, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh. We’d really appreciate your votes and comments at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob by August 27th, 2010.

Listen to this entire 38th episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!” with Sarah Austin on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from your phone on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio. Some show highlights and quotes are below. Enjoy!

Brands on Social Media

 ”When brands become a part of the community, it really feels like the brand is like your friend. You really love them, like you would a real person. In social media, they take on attributes of people because there are personalitieis behind the brand making tweets, answering questions, customer service, and establishing relationships with people, connecting with people on their interests, and offering something back to the community.” (more…)

Brandon Prebynski is an Emerging / Social Media Strategist at FKQ Advertising and Marketing and the host of a live USTREAM show called Web Trends. Brandon is one of the first people I “met” on Twitter; you can follow him @Prebynski.

Brandon and I have a panel proposal with Sarah Austin, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh for SXSW 2011 so please vote for us at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob before August 27th, 2010!

Listen to this entire episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!” with Brandon Prebynski on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from your phone on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

Brandon recently joined FKQ so I asked him about his new role as a strategist. “It’s been great because within a set of guidelines I’ve been able to shape what the position is,” Brandon told me. He is helping clients create long-term strategies around marketing, customer service and product development.

He’s also been working on tracking, analysis and metrics. “We have this big myth out there that it’s really difficult to measure social media and there are many who say you can’t measure the results especially when it comes back to revenue, and that you can only look at trends over time, but frankly with the correct tools implemented correctly, you can sometimes measure it directly.” (more…)

I’ve often said that if I could live in “SXSW Land,” I would.
I’m only joking when I say that, but where else in the world can you find such a cool gathering of people creating and changing the future of music, film, and all things interactive?

That’s why I’ve put together two SXSW Interactive panel proposals for 2011 that I believe people will find interesting and valuable:

1. Samsung’s Social Media Journey Towards Customer-Centricity  with Cosmin Ghiurau @cosguru

2. How To Get A Job Using Social Media with Sarah Austin @pop17, Brandon Prebynski @Prebynski, Chris Kahle @chriskahle, Joel Cheeseman @cheezehead, myself @socialnerdia @samsungesteban, and moderator Ryan Paugh @paughginney 

It would be great if you created a SXSW PanelPicker account to vote for and comment on both of them. Your votes make up 30% of the decision. SXSW has already told me that they like both topics so your votes are extremely valuable.

To help us spread the word, click here to retweet on Twitter and click here to share on Facebook.

While I created this blog as a creative exploration of the convergence of tech, marketing, and social media, I also had two secondary goals in mind: To speak at SXSW Interactive in 2010 and to work full-time in social media within one year. Speaking at SXSW Interactive earlier this year was a great experience and Social Nerdia was definitely the platform that enabled me to join Samsung USA as Social Media Manager. I’ m very grateful for the many opportunities that have come from this tiny spec of Internet data called Social Nerdia. Thanks, as always, for reading. I hope to see you at South By next year.

Sometimes, to gain perspective about how big the world is, and how small I am in it, I take my glasses off.. just to realize how blind I really am.

Let me back up a bit. I can’t see 20/20. When I take my glasses off, everything goes awfully blurry and it makes me feel lost and confused. The sensation of not being in control, of not being being able to do simple things like reading a sign that’s only a few feet away, can be really frustrating and intimidating.

When I was about 16 years old I started sitting in the front of the classroom to “see better.” Eventually a teacher told me to just get some glasses already (as if it was obvious to everyone but me). After going to the optometrist and actually getting my first pair of glasses, I realized that I had been needing them for a very long time. I just thought that everyone saw things the way I did, blurry and cloudy and dull. I remember wearing glasses late at night, and the billboards looking so much brighter, so much more colorful and alive than ever. For the first time, I was seeing the way I was supposed to.

Taking my glasses off today really made me think about a lot of the things that are happenning in the social web. Two things in particular concern me, especially because we bypass them with all the excitement about “social this” and “social that.”

The first is that people are becoming more and more self-centered. While we talk about a cultural shift towards sharing, openness, authenticity, and transparency, the shift sometimes has more to do with our egos. This shift should worry us a bit because if we keep calling “social” what is often anything but, we might end up with a bunch of anti-social narcissistic human beings who crave micro-celebritism and their own utopian so-called personal brands.

My second concern kind of ties in with the whole ego thing. For those of us working in online marketing and social media, the ego dillema translates into a mindset of “no one else gets it” and “we are ahead of the curve,” as if we had discovered America or something. (more…)

Based out of Tenerife, Spain, Per Schmitz is the co-founder of DooID, a very promising digital contact card with privacy protection that is easy to use. If you’d like to easily share your social identities, and do so pretty quickly, check out DooID.

1. How did you get started?

When I accidentelly stumbled upon Tim van Damme’s virtual business card (http://timvandamme.com), I was blown away by its simplicity and usefulness. Tim’s card displayed all the important information about him in a stylish, easy to understand format. My first reaction was “wow, that’s the way I’d like to present myself to the world, too.” (that was in January 2009). The more I thought about how my v-card could be like , the more I wanted to build an application around the whole concept, to make it a service accessible to everyone. There were other services like content aggregators already, but the approach is clearly different: virtual business cards are reduced to the max, minimalism is the key. The main purpose is to show a person’s contact data – nothing more and nothing less.

2. Who would be interested in using DooID?

The platform might be interesting to everyone who uses a business card, e-mail or social networks – so almost everyone who has got a computer nowadays. This is by far the biggest challenge in developing DooID: the app has to be easy to handle for anyone, even people with very few computer knowledge. Many users are overstrained by the technology that surrounds them.

3. How are you better/different than competitors? (more…)

I believe we should all seek to do something meaningful with our lives. While paying the bills is essential, we should try to pursue something that we truly get excited about and enjoy doing on a daily basis. We should try to impact the world in a positive way, even if in a small way.

I’m personally passionate about the convergence of technology, marketing, and the social web. I feel like a huge nerd reading the sentence I just wrote, but it’s true. I like to think, learn, and talk about those three things as much as I enjoy playing sports and listening to music. It’s how I’m wired. If you’re reading this, you might be wired like that too.

So this is a short version of the story of how I went from being a social media participant to a social media content producer to a social media manager, in less than one year…

Up until two and a half weeks ago, I was a tech and business consultant. For the three years prior to that, I had been a consultant with a promising career. I had worked on challenging and interesting projects concerning innovative mobile web sites, IT cost-reductions and, my favorite, identifying social media opportunities for communications service providers.

It was going pretty good. However, my interest in social media was growing. I found myself thinking about the rapidly changing social web on a daily basis. I read blogs like TechCrunch and magazines like AdAge. I listened to podcasts like Buzz Out Loud and kept up with the latest in social media thanks to people I had started to get to know as friends (instead of followers) on Twitter.

I was fascinated by all things social on the Internet and I wanted to further explore the future of the web. I needed a creative outlet. I needed a new “home base.” (more…)