About two months ago, I reached out to Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, and Todd Malicoat about putting together a Social Media Marketing for your Business Panel at SXSW Interactive. We all thought it would be a great idea and I put it together.

All of us particpates in some sort of Social Media Marketing, Optimization, and Promotion on a daily basis with clients and/or the companies we work for. We wanted to share the knowledge that we have all gained on how to successfully drive traffic to sites, how to measure that traffic, and how Social Media Marketing for your Business really works.

We understand SXSW Interactive is a WAYS away at this point, but, the Panel Picker voting has been in full throttle and people have been talking about it like crazy on twitter. It’s no surprise that everyone is trying to pimp their panels and get people to vote.

Which is the reason for this post! A major part of the SXSW Panel Picker process is votes and feedback from the community on the panel ideas submitted. We have pitched a panel idea on “Social Media Marketing for YOUR Business” and WE NEED YOUR VOTE!

Click on the SXSW 2010 Panel Picker thumbs up image here, click the thumbs up and leave us a comment with what you want to see, why you are excited about the Panel, and/or any feedback you have!

We are all excited about the opportunity and looking forward to rocking it for you guys in Austin!

About two weeks ago I tweeted about having to say no to something and being bummed. I was invited by the SEOktoberfest crew to be an expert speaking and attending the conference. Unfortunately, because of prior commitments, I had to regretfully decline this once in a lifetime experience. From the expert panelists, to the parties, and of course, who could turn down the playmates?

So, why am I telling you this?

The SEOktoberfest Last Ticket is available and the charity auction has started! If you can participate in the auction, it is a MUST! You have a chance to participate in an auction that will not only change your life, but, also, change the life of many others. The proceeds of the event will go to the AMAZONICA Foundation.

Check out the post by Markus Tandlers post with all the details of the event and participate in the auction on eBay and get the last ticket before it’s too late!

I don’t normally sit here and try to pitch a reason to go to a conference or an event. The most I’ll do is usually tweet about something going on. But, with Twiistup, I felt it was absolutely necessary just based on all the reasons to go. I went to Twiistup 5 and it was my first one, but, Francisco Dao has taken Twiistup 6 to the next level and is blowing it out of the park. So, here are the reasons I am going, and the reasons you should too.

1. The Sessions and Speaker List

The wide variety of entrepreneurs that will be speaking at Twiistup is unreal. I have never see a cast like this put together in a single day. Every single speaker is an entrepreneur and innovator in his or her own right. They have all been in the trenches, succeeded, and failed like all entrepreneurs. And, to be frank, some of them are just like you…running a business and trying to make moves.

Here are the speakers (taken from the Twiistup website):

• Jason Calacanis Serial entrepreneur, founder of Mahalo and co-founder of TechCrunch 50 and Weblogs. Wikipedia Link
• Chamillionaire Grammy Award-winning and chart topping musician and entrepreneur. Wikipedia Link
• Cyan Banister Early stage investor in Facebook, Slide, Tagged and founder of TopFans.com and Zivity.
• Todd Goldman Artist, entrepreneur, co-creator of BLAHGirls (with Ashton Kutcher) and founder of David and Goliath apparel. Wikipedia Link
• Quincy Jones III (QD3) Music and film producer/entrepreneur. Wikipedia Link
• Dave McClure Seed stage investor for the Founders Fund. Bio Link
• Ian Rogers Former business partner of the Beastie Boys and former GM of Yahoo Music, now CEO of Topspin Media. Bio Link
• Ben Huh CEO of viral phenomenon www.IcanHasCheezburger.com
• Chris Brogan President of New Marketing Labs
• Mark Suster GRP Partners, venture capital. Former VP Product Mgmt Salesforce.com & 2-time CEO and entrepreneur. Bio Link
• Brian Solis Author of Now is Gone and Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, Publisher of PR 2.0 and bub.blicio.us, Founder of Future Works PR, and strategic advisor to Fortune 500 businesses and startups. Wikipedia Link
• David O. Sacks Former COO of PayPal, founder and CEO of Geni.com and Yammer, movie producer Thank You For Smoking. Wikipedia Link
• Brad Feld Co-founder of Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, founder of Techstars.org startup incubator. Bio Link
• Micah Baldwin Founder of Current Wisdom (sold 2007), VP of Business Development and Chief Evangelist for Lijit Networks. Bio Link

*Additional speakers are being added as availability is confirmed. All speakers appear during the daytime conference portion of the event.
**Sessions subject to change as additonal speakers join the program.

2. The ShowOffs

I don’t know of another conference that combines the ShowOff’s with amazing Panels. But, Twiistup isn’t going to bury you with 20-30 or a barrage of startups to bore you to death. These are going to be the best of the best 10 startups that were hand picked by the Twiistup crew.

3. Open Bar

Not many conferences have an open bar as readily available as Twiistup, and, they deliver. Let’s face it, we’re technologists and entrepreneurs that love to drink.

4. Innovation, Innovation, Innovation

Twiistup is just that, all about Innovation. You can go to another boring conference where you try to learn 2-3 things about Twitter or how to do SEO, or, you could attend a conference that is going to inspire you and invigorate you and your ideas to get you to take that next step. You’re going to watch these people on stage, you’re going to interact with others, and you will leave with a fire ignited ready to get stuff done.

5. The Networking

Not only is the speaker list phenominal, but, the attendees of the event are going to be unbelievable. You’ll be interacting with fellow business owners, innovators, marketers, people in the press, and investors. Personally, I always take away the personal interaction from the people attending a conference, it is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT reason that I attend. With Twiistup, it is definitely going to be that. I want to meet these people, I want to share the stories, hear what people have to say and get involved in some of the greatest conversations that will be happening in Los Angeles, this year. If there is one reason to attend, it would be the opportunity to be involved in the conversation that could shape innovation for the rest of the year.

Sign up for Twiistup before Tickets are Sold Out!

Another SMX is in the books and I had a fantastic time! From checking out awesome Panels to speaking on the “Proving the Value of Social Media” Panel to the amazing people, SMX Advanced still is one of my favorite conferences to attend during the year.

Of course, this year, a bit topic of discussion was Microsoft launching Bing…which of course was the search engine formerly known as Live Search and MSN…wonder if Microsoft can pick a brand and stick to it with Bing now…

That said, there was some other major topics of discussion this year from the entire track dedicated to Social Media, which I truly enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon from Brent Csutoras, to Twitter from Michael Gray, and well, my talk about proving the value of social media and the metrics and data behind it. I did have a couple interesting discussions though about the need for a seperation between the Monitoring and Corporate Social Media Profiles and the Persona based Social Media Marketing panels.

On the SEO side of things there is always a fun discussion with Paid Links with Michael Gray talking about Google Profiling SEOs. Michael and Matt definitely got into it a little bit at the Mixer and it was definitely made clear during the You & A with Matt Cutts. Also, during the Canonical Tag Panel there was a major debate apprently about how the tag is really not working as it is suppose to, and, how people are still using PageRank Sculpting. There was obviously some confusion about how the “nofollow” attribute is being used and some debate about how it is working.

That said, as always, my favorite part about the conference is the 1 on 1 conversations that I got to have with some of the most amazing people that I know in this industry. I had some amazing conversations with people like Michael Gray, Alex Bennert, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Brent Csutoras, Michelle Robbins, and Rae Hoffman. I also got a chance to uphold Yahoo!’s honor by beating Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan at a game of Pool with Jonathan Hochman at the SEOMoz party. And, Carol Adam (my sister) helped out the Third Door Media team by volunteering to help and apparently did so well, others wanted to hire her as a Virtual Assistant! (Go Carol!)

Finally, I got to take some really cool pictures at the conference, here is the Flickr Slideshow:

See all the SMX Advanced Pictures!

(Yes, Jason, you can use me as a Case Study =P )

Normally, I never write posts telling you about how great a single company is, but, in this case, I feel it is absolutely necessary. Every presentation I give now, I quickly upload to DocStoc before I go up and tweet out the URL. (They also have a ridiculous amount of legal forms and business plans on the site as resources, just an FYI). The reason for this is easy access for the crowd and in case of technical glitches.

First and foremost, I do it so that those that are looking to feverishly write down slide notes or anything of that nature, don’t have to worry about it. Anything that is in the slide you can quickly and easily get to right away. This gives everyone the opportunity to really pay attention to the presentation and speaker (in this case me, and we all know I want all eyes on me!). As I mention also, I tweet the URL out, so it is easy to get to.

Now, in regards to technical issues. I never thought this would happen because I am a know-it-all geek (hint: sarcasm). But, guess what, shit happens and it happened yesterday. (Side Note: I must say Beverly Macy and Rodney Rumford both did a good job of engaging the crowd during this until we could figure out a solution). As I went up to speak yesterday at Gravity Summit, my presentation was loaded completely funky and almost half of it was missing. This includes all the cool and fun animations that I put together that helped frame the stories I was trying to tell. But, no matter what we tried, it didn’t work and I had to think of a solution fast. I knew I had it up on DocStoc and figured we could just run with that. Now, the animations didn’t work because it was hosted on their site, but, still, after experiencing the technical issues that I did, this was AMAZING.

Yesterday, DocStoc truly came to the rescue in that it gave me an opportunity to present slides that I thought I was not going to be able to get to because of a technical glitch. I still have no idea what the issue was, or, how it arose for that matter. But, at the end of the day, being able to show the visual cues that I needed to was the most important thing possible at the time and DocStoc gave me the opportunity to do that.

For those interested, you can find my presentation on Social Media and SEO on DocStoc or find me, Tony Adam, on there as well.

Find my profile on DocStoc and also keep the conversation going on twitter by following me, @tonyadam.