Hillary drinking a Shiner at last year's SXSW

We love it when March rolls around – it means warmer weather is on the way and we get to make our annual pilgrimage to Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Interactive festival!

Be sure to drop us a note if you’re attending, as we’d love to meet up. Below are a few SXSW events that we’ll be actively involved with – check them out if you get a chance.

The State of Music Blogs in 2010 – Tuesday, March 16, 5:00pm
Austin Convention Center
I’ll be moderating a panel of prominent music bloggers, PR and record label executives to discuss the impact of music blogs on the industry today. More info: http://my.sxsw.com/e/692

Silicon Prairie Party – Sunday, March 14, 9:00pm
Lanai Rooftop Lounge
Lava Row has signed on as a sponsor of the Silicon Prairie Party and we couldn’t be more excited! This event will be an excellent opportunity to connect with innovators and entrepreneurs from the Silicon Prairie. Stop by and say hello, and don’t forget to RSVP on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=356824300398

See you in Austin!

It’s that time of year again – South by Southwest Interactive is right around the corner! In our latest podcast I spoke with Bryan Person about the festival, what keeps the city of Austin weird, and the Social Media Breakfast SXSW event being organized there.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe in iTunes. As always, thanks for listening! If you’re going to be attending SXSW, please leave a shout in the comments section – we’d love to meet you!

 

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Despite its audience of 60 million users, LinkedIn remains widely misunderstood by the mainstream business audience. We continually meet people that have a LinkedIn account, but rarely curate it or proactively make connections inside the social network.

On Wednesday we spoke at the American Marketing Association (AMA) Iowa chapter about the nuts and bolts of LinkedIn and how to use it as a platform to showcase your reputation, get found online, and generate new business connections. Below is our presentation posted on Slideshare.

LinkedIn is absolutely one of the most important tools in our business development arsenal at Lava Row. How are you using it? What success stories can you share?

On Friday I gave a presentation called Fostering Community with Social Media at the Midwest Newspaper Summit (put on by the fine folks at the Iowa Newspaper Association). The audience was a mix of journalists and editors from regional newspapers as well as college students excited to break into the media industry.

The journalism world (specifically newspapers) is currently in a state of flux, and many are wondering if anything will be left standing five years from now. Yes, media platforms and reading habits have evolved, but the point of my session was that community equals opportunity – advantages go to those who embrace technology shifts and understand how to operationalize social networks for their gain.

While most of the audience was there to learn, I did my fair share of learning from them, as well. The session allowed me to connect with smart people who are working on innovative things, right here in Iowa. Thomas Ritchie (Online Editor at the Sioux City Journal) has put a focus on harnessing the real-time web and live-blogging stories for his newspaper, and he’s achieved quite a bit of success from it. Steve Buttry, who blogs about the future of journalism and media, sat in the front row and asked all sorts of good questions. I was also impressed by many of the college students I met, who are eager to break into the industry and tear it up using their knowledge of self-publishing tools and networks.

I have lots of opinions on where this is all going, but I certainly don’t have all the answers. What are your thoughts on the future of newspapers and news media? Please chime in below.

February is shaping up to be a busy month, speaking-wise. Starting tonight, we’ve got 11 gigs in 28 days – now that’s a lot of talking!

Recently some of you have been asking about what events we’re participating in and where to find us, so we’ve posted a detailed list (ones that allow public registration) below. We’ll go ahead and throw March’s trip to Texas into the mix, as well. If you decide to venture out to any of these, please say hello and ask lots of questions. We’d love to meet you.

Midwest Newspaper Summit
Friday, February 5
Downtown Marriott Hotel, Des Moines, Iowa
Topic: Social Media – Fostering an Online Community Around Your Newspaper

Social Media and Health Care (Iowa Hospital Association)
Tuesday, February 9
Thompson Auditorium, Iowa Methodist Medical Center, Des Moines, Iowa
Topic: An introduction to social media

A Journalist’s Guide to New Media (Drake University SJMC)
Saturday, February 13
Meredith Hall, Room 104, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa
Topic: Linking w/ potential employers, clients and professionals via social media tools

American Marketing Association, Iowa Chapter
Wednesday, February 17
Hilton Garden Inn, Johnston, Iowa
Topic: How LinkedIn are you?

EntreFest 2010
Friday, February 26
West Des Moines Marriott, West Des Moines, Iowa
Topic: Using Facebook to build your business

South by Southwest Interactive 2010
Tuesday, March 16
Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas
Topic: The State of Music Blogs in 2010

Photo credit: visual_dichotomy via Flickr

The dust has finally settled and rumors have been confirmed or laid to rest – yesterday Apple officially announced their latest shiny object, the iPad.

The transformative nature of this device has been discussed over and over again by tech industry experts, bloggers and pundits leading up to the event. Apple is billing it as “magical” and “revolutionary.” After watching video of the Steve Jobs keynote last night, I’ve formed a few opinions of my own on how I see this thing getting used.

(Side rant: The name “iPad” is a yawner. I would have preferred Tablet or Slate.)

There are hundreds of thousands of voices out there dismissing this device as just another eReader, a super-sized iPhone, a laptop lid without a keyboard, etc. – many of these are legitimate comments. Meanwhile, hundreds of people are getting busy brainstorming applications and building stuff for the iPad, and figuring out opportunities for how it will fit into their industry. That’s going to be the focus of my post.

Just to recap what the iPad can do right now: Web browsing, eBooks, email, music, video, photos, games and the iWork software suite. Lots of devices can do these things, so let’s go deeper.

Textbook Publishing

Jobs briefly touched on the textbook market during his keynote, and by “briefly touched on” I mean he spent about one second on it. I think textbooks are one of the first industries that the iPad can disrupt. Think about the textbook business as it exists today: College students end up spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, on heavy books for their classes that get used for five months and then discarded. I’m envisioning a future where students purchase digital books through the iTunes store for anywhere between $9.99 and $29.99 each.

Calling them “books” might be a mistake – these could potentially be very interactive pieces of content that include motion graphics, video, audio and social interactivity intertwined with the text itself. Make this device affordable and accessible to a generation that grew up digital, and I think the iPad can have a huge impact on how textbooks are purchased and read.

Today a student in my internet marketing class (@ Drake University) asked: “What about people who like to highlight their texts?” I love it when a common-sense perspective like this completely stops me in my tracks. We can’t dismiss the tactile quality and experience that tangible books give us – the eReaders will have a hard time replacing this aspect.

Healthcare

Every day we get closer to medical records being 100% digital and stored in the cloud. I see huge potential for touchscreen tablet devices being used among physicians, nurses and psychiatrists. Custom-built applications would allow them to pull up patient records on the screen, add annotations, cross-check details against other information databases (drug reactions, symptoms, etc.). Don’t be surprised if some kind of visual-based translation software gets built for the iPad – helping doctors and nurses communicate directly with patients who speak a different language, without needing to pull in a third party. You can expect Rosetta Stone to make a play here.

Everything I described above would require note-taking, so the iPad is eventually going to need some sort of add-on stylus pen and sophisticated handwriting recognition. For instance my wife, a licensed therapist, is going to want to take hand-written notes during session and have them automatically transcribed and synced to systems elsewhere.

Television

The infrastructure to completely disrupt television networks is *almost* in place with on-demand services like Hulu, Netflix and iTunes. Apple knows that every day people are firing their cable company and consuming TV content on their laptops, smartphones and/or services like Boxee. (We just did and we’re saving $70/month.)

What’s missing is a device that can replace those cumbersome laptops that we crawl into bed with to watch The Colbert Report. Apple believes their iPad fits this niche. There’s a strategic reason why Jobs did much of his keynote from a couch. I’m a firm believer that watching television shows will be one of the biggest uses of tablet devices, for those “in-between” moments: In bed, on that couch, riding on the train or sitting in the airport. (Yes, portable DVD players officially died yesterday.) Of course, Apple will want you to watch TV via episode purchases or subscription through their iTunes choke point.

Much to the dismay of many geeks like myself, the first iPads will not support Flash, meaning that watching Hulu is out of the question – at least right out of the gate. It remains to be season whether HTML5 (currently in its “last call” stage) will solve this issue, reducing the need for browser plug-ins that display video.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there. Yes, Apple is going to create this new market, but I’m not yet convinced that the iPad will reign supreme as *the* ubiquitous device as they have done with the iPhone and iPod. For instance, publishers and content-owners are fighting already back with their own innovations. Hearst just launched the Skiff (an eReader with a flexible display, shown to the right) which is very intriguing. I’m going to have a blast watching this space evolve.

What are your thoughts? Does Apple have something here, or will someone else do it better? Do you see yourself using this device, and what industries do you think it will disrupt?

Today we interviewed Julia Rosien, Director of Communications at Natura World, about how she’s using social media to build the brand of a mattress company. We chose to highlight Julia to prove a point – that smart, strategic use of social networks can benefit any business, regardless of the product or industry.

The discussion also touches on the FTC’s recent guidelines for blogger outreach and disclosure, and the importance of transparency within Natura’s marketing efforts – differentiating them from other organic businesses that might dabble in less-than-honest “greenwashing.”

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe in iTunes. Thanks for listening, and let us know if you have ideas for future guests or content.

 

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