Along with a handful of thought provoking sessions attended (more on that later), I made a couple really great discoveries today at the South by Southwest exhibit hall.

With Animoto, you can upload your photos and videos, and pick your favorite song. Animoto does the rest – using an analyzer, it’ll set the pace of your photos and videos to the beat of the song. It’s simple and beautiful.

Check out this little slideshow I put together from my Buenos Aires trip last summer.

Sliderocket, another cool service I came across today, offers speakers a way to create and manage presentations in the cloud, leveraging the web to pull in all kinds of media and making it easy to access slides and other assets, share files, and gather analytics.

Here’s a video from their site explaining how it works. It’s nearly as fast as it looks in the video, at least from what I saw at their booth today.

Also, go to their YouTube site or view this video of their founder putting together a sample presentation.

Amazing. These rich web applications are examples of the kinds of engaging experiences that many users desire and will soon be accustomed to. Further, both Animoto and Sliderocket are incredibly utilitarian.

The questions for us to think about are: What are our customers’ needs? What problems can we help them solve? How can we incentivize certain behaviors through rich web applications? How can rich web application enhance our customers’ experiences?

This morning I dropped by Tech Crunch’s Real Time Crunch Up which is taking place all day at the Intercontinental Hotel in SF. You can still catch the afternoon sessions via this live Ustream.

In an obvious nod to Twitter as the real time leader, Dick Costolo, Twitter’s new COO, appeared first on stage for a 30-min one-on-one discussion with the inimitable Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. (Inimitable? Who else tells his staff to “Get off the stage, Eric” on stage, in front of an audience of about 300?)

Mike started by asking Dick (jokingly) “So, what’s happening?” a reference to the recent change to Twitter’s user prompt (which used to be “What are you doing?”).

Dick talked about that change, and the removal of the Suggested User List, as being first steps towards addressing the Twitter’s huge onboarding problem. He admitted that lots of new users sign up for Twitter, and then “fly into a cliff and catch on fire. If you’re brave enough you climb back on the cliff.”

The brief discussion continued around funding and monetization. Twitter’s got an astounding $155 million in the bank – and their burn rate is the least of Twitter’s worries, according to Dick. On the horizon for Twitter is monetization – through advertising, syndication, and commercial accounts for example. In Dick’s words, their advertising program will be “fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it” (half-joking, he’s a funny guy!). He forecasted a launch of early next year. As for syndication, Twitter will continue to foster ubiquity of its Tweets, for example through recent agreements with Bing and Google. And of course, Twitter’s been talking about commercial accounts for awhile, which would include service level agreements, analytics dashboard, etc – something a lot of companies have been waiting for.

The 30-minute interview with Dick led into the second session of the day: “Filtering the Stream: Getting Rid of the Noise” which featured 11 panel speakers (!) who continued to talk about Twitter, among many other things. No wrap-up of that session – it was a bit disjointed – but I’ll post some thoughts at another time about filtering noise, once I figure out how to do that myself.

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending my first SF New Tech, a monthly gathering of the tech industry – over demos, schmoozing, drinks, and free tacos!

SF New Tech has been held every month for 3 years, since 8 people including founder Myles Weissleder first started getting together for beers at Mars Bars. It’s since grown into what Myles referred to (lovingly) last night as “the heart and soul of the tech community.”

There were about 150-200 people in the audience – half of whom were attending for the first time. (By the way, nearly 100% of the audience is on Twitter and 3/4 involved in a start up.) We heard 5 great companies demo, including itiBiti (on their new NBC Communicator which is live), Webvanta (a new CMS), reframeit (a web annotation service), NationalBLS (a listing of real estate buyers), and Smedule (an appointment service).

It’s great to be a part of such a vibrant community. Really intelligent, passionate, creative and hardworking people under one roof. And, I imagine that attending a monthly event where new start ups demo can really keep the excitement and creative juices flowing. It certainly did for me – I’ve got a couple ideas for blog posts.

The pic above is from the SF New Tech website at a previous venue. Unfortunately I don’t have any pics to share of my own because the current venue, The Mighty, is a nightclub on most other nights and too dark for my iPhone camera.

When I was younger :), I used to get all done up to go dancing at The Mighty. Now I’d prefer to sit around and geek out with a bunch of other geeks!

You can register here, and see the list of demos and attendees.

Name: SF New Tech
Date: Takes place monthly.  Next event on Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009.
Location: The Mighty in SOMA district, San Francisco
Link: http://sfnewtech.com
Description: Monthly tech event where “people/companies get 5 minutes to strut their stuff,” i.e. demo their start up and receive feedback from the audience.

The Social Media World Forum, in Santa Clara this past Monday and Tuesday, focused on how big brands use social technologies to engage customers. Representatives from brands like Coca-Cola, Nissan, Intel, and GM presented on recent marketing campaigns employing social technologies. It was a first of its kind conference for me – and it was great to see established brands experimenting, learning, and sharing their lessons with the community. Here are my favorite moments from the conference:

• Michael Brito, formerly of Intel, talked about actionable listening over active listening. That is, listening with the goal of improving the customer experience in concrete ways. Michael discussed how Starbucks successfully did this with its My Starbucks Idea customer community. Last year, Starbucks launched its Splash Sticks, “plastic plugs for sip holes” which prevent spillage, an idea which came from a customer on the site.  (See pic and USA Today story here.) Michael also described the “Intel Star” campaign, which he was personally involved in while working at Intel. The campaign ran a hilarious ad about Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB. You’ve got to see it, especially if you have any love for geeks. The spot was so popular, Intel added an accompanying t-shirt contest and built a contestant community. In Michael’s words, “Sometimes little things you do that create valuable customer experience.”
• Jeff Parent, VP Sales and Marketing of Nissan Canada, talked about a grass roots marketing campaign for Nissan’s new Cube.  Knowing it was a niche product, Nissan targeted a younger demographic which tended to be early adopter, socially connected and skeptical of traditional marketing. They opted for 100 percent social media driven campaign, inviting 1000 “people on the street” to enter to win 50 Nissan Cubes.  100 of these invitees were shortlisted and given a blank canvas to share why they deserved to win. Contestants created 35,000 YouTube videos, posted 30,000 Tweets and 10,000 Flickr photos, and organized Tweet-ups and dance-offs. What was most interesting about Jeff’s presentation is that Nissan conducted a pure social media campaign, and now has a baseline with which to compare future hybrid campaigns. How much awareness did Nissan raise with this campaign? In March, 12% of their target market had heard of the Cube, by May – 23%, and by July – 32% of their target market, and 52% of Canadians of all age groups. More importantly, sales of the Cube are on target with forecasted goals.
• Christopher Barger, Director of Social Media at GM, delivered an honest and funny presentation about engaging in social media as GM was about to file the biggest Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US history. He joked about being “the most hated brand in the US” at that time. While others thought he was “nuts,” he believed that the only way to “rejuvenate a brand and get through a crisis was to be as open as possible.” GM created a temporary social media team to listen, respond, and interact with customers during the crisis. GM’s CEO posted a video to thank the 12,000 dedicated supporters who had joined GM’s Facebook fan page at the peak of the crisis. GM brought in its most vocal critics to receive and act upon marketing and customer experience feedback. All the while, GM made sure that their employees received the appropriate training to engage directly with customers. They took a “thousand flowers bloom” approach, fostering dialog and learning throughout the company, where even engineers, finance, etc. were joining the conversations. Members from GMs communications and marketing teams worked for an entire year in the social media department, learning new skills and diminishing others, and then returning to their teams and dispersing the knowledge they’d gain. In GMs words: “Immerse and disperse.”
• Finally, check out this video presented during the conference and created by one of nearly 35,000 contestants in last year’s Queensland, Australia “Best Job in the World” campaign (This particular contestant didn’t win, but it’s great nonetheless). Chris Chambers, Director of Digital Marketing at Tourism Queensland, spoke about the wildly popular contest, which awarded one lucky contestant a 6-month job on the Great Barrier Reef with $150,000 AUD salary. The contest received extensive mainstream media coverage, including a spot on Oprah, and raised global awareness of Queensland as a holiday destination.

This is a just a brief run-down of the day 1 of the conference.  It continued yesterday as well.  Overall, one of my favorite conferences this year.

Update: Michael Brito offers his take on the conference here on his blog, as well as a nice Flickr gallery of pics.

Update: Just found the Conan O’Brien interview of the real Ajay Bhatt.  Good stuff.

Next on my calendar is the Social Meda World Forum, which takes place next Monday and Tuesday, November 9-10 in Santa Clara. Over 500 attendees have registered and the exhibition hall is free to the general public. Or, if you’d like to volunteer the morning of the event in exchange for an afternoon pass, connect with me via Twitter.

Name: Social Media World Forum North America
Date: Monday and Tuesday, November 9-10, 2009
Location: Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara
Link: http://www.socialnetworking-northamerica.com
Description: Global brands, advertisers, content makers, and leading social networks discuss their strategies and models.

What’s great about free expos is that I can check out demos of the latest technologies. In this case, I’ve been curious about Enterprise 2.0 tools because I’ve always worked in small organizations. We never had a huge need for collaboration and community platforms because our teams comprised of 3, maybe 5. I’d simply turn towards my coworker and say “Hey.” On the other hand, we also didn’t have an awareness of what was available.

What did I come away with?

• Service providers and platforms ranged from highly established, robust, and expensive (Jive) to more upstart, narrowly focused, and cheap (or free) (SocialCast).
• I was surprised that so many large enterprises were using 2.0 tools.  Client lists for Jive and Yammer were particularly impressive.  Enterprise isn’t as old-fashioned as I thought.
• After talking to several service providers, their offerings all started to sound the same.  The big distinctions for me were credibility (as gleaned through presentation and client list), and I hate to say it, design.  Despite being customizable, some platforms had a core design which was more pleasing to my eye.  For instance, I really liked PBworks, a collaboration platform, which was clean and intuitive.  Jive was also very sleek.
• Honestly, it’s still hard for me to understand how companies benefit from internal use of microblogging tools. A Yammer exhibitor offered: information-sharing and building a knowledge base.  Socialcast added that social analytics behind microblogging reveal which employees are “periphal players, connectors, or brokers.”
• My favorite platform was PBworks, not just because it was eye-pleasing.  It had the most useful applications for me, such as, collaborative workspaces, chat, and conference calls.  Check out their webinars here.

I imagine that enterprises are eager to tackle the silo effect.  Social tools seem like an obvious way to open discussion, while improving employee morale.

If anybody out there is using any of these tools, I’d love to hear about your experience.