I first landed in Los Angeles in 1987 (I was 21 years old).  I had long hair, wore suit jackets with the sleeves pushed up, sometimes a bandana in my hair and little round John Lennon type shades.   I played in numerous bands – most of them really bad – and lived my life toting around my keyboards from gig to gig in my beat up Toyota Celica.  Drummers and keyboardists can relate – our jobs begin and end way after the guitarist, bassist and singer are sitting at the bar.

Oh, and I had a day job.  I worked as a “marketing specialist” (e.g. receptionist) at a small defense department sub-contractor that made devices that tested military equipment to make sure they could withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a thermonuclear weapon.  Yes, really.

I was, like most young passionate kids, really a musician (then subsequently a screenwriter but that’s another story), and I had a “day job” that I hated.  Today, I have a day job that I love – and a good part of it is working with Joe Pulizzi and our whole gang at CMI.  He’s celebrating five years in business and we have a special giveaway - but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I’m sure you too know and love the term “Day Job.”  You know, it’s the thing we have to do in order to get to do the thing that we want to do.

Mastering The Function – Not The Form

Lately as I’ve been working with companies both large and small on their marketing strategies – I’ve been excited to witness the marketing department in transition.  We all intuitively know this – but it’s one of those things where sometimes change happens so slowly that we don’t notice that our world has completely transformed around us.  There’s a wonderful quote from 2004 that Joe and I use in our book Managing Content Marketing that says:

“none of the top 10 jobs that will exist in 2010 exist today [in 2004].  This may possibly be the first time in history when college graduates are taking jobs in categories that didn’t even exist when they first entered school”

Well guess what – that applies to us as well.  The marketing job FORM for which we were hired five years ago is almost assuredly different than what we actually do today.  But here’s the thing – the FUNCTION isn’t!

More often than not, when I ask my new client what their “story is” within the organization – almost inevitably their answer is: “well my day job is to manage ABC part of the XYZ process – but lately I’ve also been doing these four new things.”

Now, very occasionally that’s really just the company trying to do “more with less” and the job is filling in for a colleague on leave or a reduction in size.  But just as often it’s because new ideas, new innovations and new processes are taking over the marketing department – and there’s no reason or no ability (see the ‘occasionally’ above) to bring new people in to do it.

That’s the key.  If the process of marketing is changing in your organization (and it probably is) your Day Job is NOT to do the same tired process over and over again while you dip in and wait for this “new thing” to pass.  Your Day Job should be to continually learn and explore new ways and methods to carve out a FUNCTION of  something you can be passionate about doing.

I’m reminded of the content marketing specialist I just met at a large Fortune 500. She was hired (her “day job”) as a “marketing manager” – working the e-mail newsletter system and tuning the marketing automation system.  Her passion was writing.  As the company started exploring a content marketing and social media program with a blog and social channels – she was tasked with a new thing:  “find freelance writers and consultants” who could help.

Instead (more precisely in addition to doing what she was asked) she volunteered to learn on her own time about content marketing and blogging.  She volunteered to manage the corporate blog and the social channels.  Over the course of six months she became the resident expert on this new process. She inherited the process as “Editor of the Blog” and the “Social Media Manager”.  The process changed, in part, because of her.  She subsequently lost the  job of managing the marketing automation system – and became the companies “content marketing” specialist – which is now a key piece of the overall marketing strategy and something she’s passionate about.

Remember, you’re in marketing.  Your “Day Job” is to be innovative – and that includes innovating YOU.

99 Cents & Carve Out Some Innovation On Your Function

So, when I was in my early 20’s I quickly learned that the “day job” of being a Rock Star is NOT playing music.  The job of being a Rock Star is sales and marketing.  You spend 10-12 hours a day marketing and selling your product.  The music? That’s part of the payment.  That’s what you get to do as the fruit of the labor of your sales and marketing job.  Every successful musician and actor I know is first and foremost an amazing marketer and sales person.

I hated that job.  And so I quit.  But here’s the thing – I didn’t hate the function.  I hated the form. I didn’t give up on my dream job – which was to do four things:

• I wanted to write for a living (I thought the form of this was screenwriter)
• I wanted to get up on stage and entertain and inform people  (I thought the form of this was musician)
• I wanted to help people get excited about their story and experience their joy at solving problems (I thought the form of this was teaching)

Guess what?  20 years later and I’m so blessed that I get to do my dream job – just in a very different form.

So, how can you start to carve out your own function over form?

Well let me hopefully add a very very small bit to that. CMI and my writing partner Joe Pulizzi are celebrating their five year business anniversary.  Part of my “day job” is not only writing with Joe, but also running the consulting practice for CMI.   In celebration of the Five Year Anniversary – Joe and I are offering up the Kindle Version of Managing Content Marketing for 99 Cents for the next 42 hours.  For less than a buck – you can start carving out the new process of content marketing for your business.

John Lennon once said that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”.  I actually operate from another point of view.  My version is:

Your plan is what happens when you’re busy making your life.

I’m speaking in April at a conference co-hosted by the Poynter Institute and PRNewswire called, “Creating Credible Content.”   It’s a conference on Brand Journalism – and they asked me to write up a little abstract for the talk I’m going to give – and well… I got a little fired up.

There is a very strong tie between content marketing and branding.  When we talk about the story that we want to tell as marketers – it very naturally leads us to what the organization “stands for”.  We need and want to be interesting, engaging – and to tell a compelling story.

And, one of the challenges I get at almost every workshop I teach is “how can I make my XYZ company that sells ABC product to a boring/conservative/old industry interesting or engaging?”  But that’s the key. If you think it’s boring and uninteresting – it is. So, therefore, your job as a content marketer is to find that emotional connection. I mean isn’t that why we do this?

It all reminds me of this George Bernard Shaw quote:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.”

I combine this with this true fatigue I have over the phrase “data-driven marketer”.  Interestingly, if you Google this phrase today, you’ll get about 7 million results and most of them are links to how to become one.   We just simply need to lose the vision of the “data driven marketer” – holding a spreadsheet triumphantly over their head, ROI emblazoned on their super-hero cape as they stand at the summit of their mountain of Google analytics.

Thankful for Mediocrity

What would the world of marketing look like if everything were creatively amazing and compelling?    What if it was easy to create amazing, compelling, persuasive stories?  What would we do?

Well, I think Paul Arden had about as good an answer as I’ve seen. In his book, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be – he asks:

Why do we strive for excellence when mediocrity is required?

There is little demand in the commercial world for excellence.  There is much, much bigger demand for mediocrity.

Arden wonders what we would do if everything was extraordinary – and suggests that we would “react against it, saying, “Isn’t this boring.  How can we be dull?  Let’s do it badly, let’s make it ugly, and let’s make it really cheaply.”

In fact, you can even see some of this happening today.  I actually wrote an article for iMedia connection in June of last year called How ‘Ugly’ Can Boost Your Campaign.

But the key difference in all of those campaigns was that “ugly” was “remarkable”.  They weren’t trying to be safe – they were actually trying to be different.  That’s the key.  They actually said something.  As Realtor Mark Seiden relayed to me when I interviewed him for that piece:

“We took the challenge of ‘ugly’ very seriously. The designer’s first iterations really missed the mark. They were too pretty. The key was for the designer to really feel the emotion and the feeling of the frustrated seller.”

So, thank goodness the world is demanding mediocrity.  It gives us a chance to do something different.

No Remarkable Idea Is Ever Data Driven

Name any remarkable creative marketing campaign you can remember, and I’ll guarantee you that it did not come out of a spreadsheet.    Our most compelling story, our most persuasive campaign our most viral content didn’t come as the result of an A/B test.  It did not come from our Google Analytics report – and it did not come from our landing page conversion metrics.

It came because we took the time to figure our what our business REALLY does and what problem we are REALLY solving for our customers. And we creatively figured out a way to tell a story that was different from our competition.

Differentiating means “being different” not being incrementally better than our competition.  If you haven’t read “Different” by Youngme Moon – give yourself a treat.  It’s wonderful.

Data is important.  Data is helpful.  Data helps you wring efficiency out of your visitors, and target your message more capably and generally gives you the foundation to help make your content better.  Data helps you be incrementally better today than you were yesterday.

Data gives you the opportunity for insight.  But YOU are the one that has the insight.

You are the one that makes the exponential leap. The B version that outperforms the A version by 2000% isn’t an A/B test.  That’s an innovation – and YOU created it.    You are the one that dreams up the story of your business that you’ll tell through content marketing.

You are the one that tells a personal story.  Ben Settle outlined this well in recent Copyblogger Post.

Our Content Our Unique Story

If I can butcher the Shaw quote for a moment I’d say that the reasonable marketer adapts their story to the world.  The unreasonable marketer persists in trying to adapt the world to their story.   All of our success therefore, will depend upon us – at some time or another – being unreasonable.

Whether it’s our creative brief, our positioning statement, our content marketing story or our newest creative ad campaign.  Let’s occasionally be unreasonable.  Let’s be remarkable.   As Arden says – there’s little demand for it.   And, we’ll certainly fail more than we succeed at it.   But it’s our best bet to create something memorable.

P.S.> I’ll be speaking at the Poynter Institute’s “Creating Credible Content” Conference April  11-13.  If you’re thinking about joining – it should be an interesting three days.

A cookie cutter approach – especially when it comes to Content Marketing and Strategy – may be scalable – but it makes you less human.  It’s that simple.

I thought I’d share an experience I had last week that illustrates this particularly well.

I’ve been a customer of Network Solutions – the domain name registrar – in varying degrees for more than 10 years.  Over that time period, I’ve utilized them for two things exclusively – domain name registration and (only twice) email hosting.  In the last two years I’ve spent almost $1,200 with them – so extrapolate that out over 10 and you can see I’m a relatively decent customer. It also tells you two things.    One – I register quite a lot of domains.  Two – I overpay (and am painfully aware) for that privilege.

Now, a couple of years ago I got notified that I was a special, super-duper “Gold VIP” customer of Network Solutions. Beyond the fancy little banner that greets me each time I log in – it means I get special deals (none of them have really been that special) and I got a dedicated email address and phone number to rectify any questions or issues.

So, okay all that notwithstanding – I’ve been lazy about moving my domains over to another registrar.  Moving domains is kind of a pain in the butt.  But also – given that I’m aware that I need to do it – I’ve also shut off “auto-renewal” on them. All that brings us to last week.

Have You Contacted Support?

So, two weeks ago, one of my domains(my wife’s photography domain) expired. As such, her email and site stopped working.   Life went on (as she doesn’t get a lot of email through that account) for about five days (and by the way I’m absolutely *sure* they sent me an email warning that I just spaced on).

But then as soon as she did make me aware of it – I had the usual Homer Simpson “Doh!” moment and logged in to Network Solutions to renew the domain.  Only this time – for the first time in as many years as I’ve been a Network Solutions customer – I got greeted with a “$25 Reinstatement Fee”.  So – in addition to the hugely overpriced renewal on my domain ($38) for another year – I was getting hit for an additional $25 reinstatement fee.  Basically they want to charge me a 65% penalty for missing the renewal by 5 days.

So… what to do…. Well, even though I was annoyed – I was actually on an airplane, busy and I decided to pay it so that my wife’s stuff would start working again.  But, I also thought I’d just reveal my displeasure with the new policy on Twitter.  So I tweeted the following:

To their social team’s credit – less than half an hour later.  I got a response.

Now… Hmm… This didn’t strike me as a “template” at first (though in hindsight I believe it is)… But I would have thought that my mention of being a “Gold VIP” customer might have struck a little different chord.  Not so much.

Switching Channels

So, after the @Reply Tweet – even though I wasn’t really looking for “support” per se, I decided that I’d actually take them up on that suggestion and see what being a Gold VIP customer really meant.  And so I sent this email to my handy dandy special VIP Gold member services email address:

Now… to be clear – what I was looking for there wasn’t necessarily remediation (although that would be nice).  I actually was (truly) interested in understanding WHY they wanted to charge me $25.  In other words (and certainly I could have been clearer in my email) I really wanted a human response as to why they felt justified in charging me a 65% penalty.

Well then (as is common when email gets involved)… things slowed down a little.  It was a day later that I got the following email back from the Gold VIP support system.

Okay Really???   The first sentence is just kind of um… Yeah, Duh!  Now, I’m pretty convinced that this is a great example of Copy and Paste type of communication here.   If I had to guess – I would say that even the apology for the tardiness is part of a template because they’re counting on always taking a day or so to respond.

Certainly the email didn’t answer my question.  And, in fact, offered nothing in the way of a satisfying resolution to my question.    If I had been, in fact, looking for special consideration (as a Gold VIP Member) this email was basically saying – “look dummy, turn on auto-renewal and you’ll avoid this charge in the future”.

So by now I’m convinced that they’re not interested in “talking” with me – but are just interested in closing this “trouble ticket” as quickly as they can. So, I thought I’d end it by just giving them some feedback.  And so I sent this email – expecting it to end there:

To which I then got this response two days later:

Now this one looked to me like a combination of a Human assembling an email – with a good dose of copying and pasting the frequently used “modular” content from some FAQ library.   But, come on, what kind of ridonkulous name is ARLYN002?!?   (If there are any ARLYN002′s out there – I sincerely apologize).   I mean at this point – it’s like you’re not even trying…  Even in an automated system you can fake a real name….

But, okay… Interesting.  At least they say somebody is going to call me to resolve the issue.  Again, in my case there’s no issue to resolve – but okay… let’s talk.  At this point – I want to learn more about  ARLYN002.

Now comes my favorite part…

On Friday (remember this all started with my original email on Monday) I was heads down working on client work – and my cell phone rang.  I didn’t recognize the number – and so not wanting to get into any type of long discussion I let it go to voicemail.  I got the following 22 second voicemail (I’m quoting the voicemail verbatim):

“Hello Robert this is from Network Solutions.  We appreciate your feedback. However, if you need further assistance, please call us back at XXXXX – and provide this service request number XXXX.  Thanks for choosing Network Solutions.”

Now, whether it was ARLYN002 or not I’ll never know…  Because it was just “this is from Network Solutions”… But I also love the use of the word “However”.  They appreciate my feedback – HOWEVER if I need further assistance – please call…

Then (and this is my actual favorite part)… almost simultaneously – (because literally the voicemail timestamped at 11:39 and the email was timestamped 11:42)  – came this email:

ARLYN002 was done with me.  This came from a generic “Network Solutions Customer Service address”.  Also, note that it’s not part of the original thread.  It’s as template as template gets.  It states, almost comically (my cellphone only shows one call from that number), that they’ve tried to reach me several times.  So, even though it’s a template – it’s STILL kind of passive aggressive – as if it’s now somehow my fault that I’m so damn unreachable.

So, if it was ARLYN002  – who has a lovely sweet voice by the way – who called, she literally had her finger on the “send” button (or perhaps that too was even automated) and hit send on that email as she hung up the phone.

So – in the end I’m going to bow to the templates. I don’t need further assistance, and because the email explicitly states not to “reply” – I shan’t be calling back.

Come On – Just Be A Little Human!

I understand that large organizations (and even small ones) that have a very large customer base – and very common challenges will develop modular content to deal with frequently asked questions – and challenges.  I also understand that legal departments can sometimes require that you not “admit” any guilt in email exchanges.

But come on – this is just not that hard.  I’d like to suggest that in my particular case – Network Solutions missed a huge (and EASY) opportunity to make me feel like an important customer – and simply just answer my question.  Let me suggest an alternate reality to what could have happened:

1. Robert forgets to renew domain.  Goes to renew – gets hit with $25 reinstatement fee and gets annoyed enough to tweet about it.
2. Gold Customer Service sees that and quickly sends Robert email (or @ Reply) that says – “So sorry – we could have communicated that reinstatement fee much more clearly to our Gold Customers.  We’ll waive it THIS TIME.  And, by the way, thanks for all your business and please call or email GEORGE your customer service representative if you have any other questions.
3. Robert does neither of those things – but appreciates the effort and feels like an appreciated customer.
4. Robert stays with Network Solutions and subsequently forgets to renew another domain three months later. This time, he gets hit with the same $25 reinstatement fee.  However, – because he knows better – he feels like a heel, eats the $25 and switches on autorenewal on his domains.

Sticky customer goal achieved.

But this isn’t the alternate reality.   This is the reality where I now put moving domain registrars front and center on my to do list.

I’ve recently been privileged to teach content marketing workshops at a few large, Fortune 500, enterprise organizations. As it turns out – because content marketing is a new process that many organizations are trying to implement, I often start with a piece on building a business case for “innovation” that Joe and I wrote at the beginning of our book Managing Content Marketing.

Innovation is a topic that, quite frankly, I really love – and was glad to put into the workshop – but I thought it would go largely unnoticed in the larger scheme of assembling a repeatable, scalable and measurable process to put content marketing into the organization.

Well – as it turns out – it seems to be one of the most popular parts of the workshop and it seems to be really resonating with people. So.. okay…. if that’s the way it’s gonna be – let’s rock and roll…

“New” Comes From Your Imagination – Not Analytics

There’s an old saying of Peter Drucker and made popular by any number of management consulting firms that says “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I’ve also heard this get bastardized into “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count” – and other types of nonsense.

Yup – I said it. Nonsense. With a capital NON.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I love Peter Drucker – and quote him with great frequency. But I can’t get behind that one at all.

Myopic management by measurement is comforting indeed – and (especially these days) it’s what allows us to look into our past and grade ourselves to hopefully PROVE to the world/our boss/our board/our colleagues (pick your poison) that what we’re doing NOW is somehow more valuable than what we did yesterday.  Here’s a helpful safety tip: with that strategy it doesn’t matter who you are -  you eventually hit a ceiling.

Now, let me be very clear: I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t measure our marketing efforts (more on this in a minute). But I am suggesting that in order for us to remain innovative and build new and innovative practices like content marketing into our businesses – that we should not solely rely on previous measurements as our way to manage our efforts and predict the future.

In one very large, Fortune 500 organization I worked with recently – they were entirely limited to mapping their marketing planning future by looking at their previous success and failures (and they were heavy into metrics) – and creating predictive forecasts based on those numbers. In other words – the only thing they could EVER hope for was a future that was the same as (or perhaps incrementally better) than the past.

I asked “what happens if unexpected forces” completely “F UP” your forecast. The response: “well that’s unpredictable isn’t it?”.

Yes it is – and it locks you into a future that will never be anything different than your past.

Now, again, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t measure our marketing efforts. Measuring what’s important is critical to creating insight that helps us iteratively improve our processes and get better at what we do.

That’s the critical and important point. If we use measurement/analytics to help us optimize our process – and that gives us the freedom to imagine a much different future – and make changes – then measurement is helpful. On the other hand – if its only use is to prove that we’re continually moving “up and to the right” – then it’s nonsense. Again, with a capital NON.

If You Can Dream It You Can Make It Real

If you’ve read this blog, or heard me speak, you’ve often heard me say that differentiation is telling a different story – not the same one incrementally better.

In order to successfully implement a NEW content marketing process – we have to look well beyond our past – and imagine the future and bring it into our present. It’s about telling a different story – or a unique story – and it’s often one that will be radically different than what we’ve done before.

New ideas are inherently based on our future – not on the past. When we dream up an innovative – or new idea or process – as much as we’d like to think it came from the past – it didn’t. It came from our imagination looking into the future – the “what could be” – and pulling into our present.

Let’s say you have that amazing new idea for a campaign, or a blog post, or a content marketing program – or even a new business idea. Certainly it’s informed by your history, your experience, your knowledge – but the new idea COMES from the future. You imagine the world with that new idea as a reality – and that’s what ultimately convinces you that it’s a good idea to begin with.

And, if and when you decide that this new idea is good – you have NO data to support that idea – because it’s not from your past. Now, you may immediately think to yourself “oh, yes it is”.  But it’s not. If it’s truly new – there is nothing in your past measurement that will inform you that this is a good idea. The care and feeding that you give to this idea (the excitement you feel in your belly) comes purely from you bringing the future success of this idea into the present.

Crafting A Future Into Your Present

In many marketing organizations – such as the ones that I’ve been privileged to visit over the last few months – I realize that this is hard. It’s easy to sit back and say – let’s just dream up some stuff and make it happen. Management of a large group is hard – and turning a ship that has the “we’ve always done it that way” mentality is difficult.  I understand that.

But as we come into Spring – and many of us are working to do new year marketing planning – and implement NEW content marketing and other types of digital, social and other processes into our marketing departments – let’s look at how we can bring the future into our present. Instead of looking at our metrics as the only way to manage our future – maybe we can pick one thing to completely break – and try something new.

As content marketing grows, we will naturally start to change our marketing department into a storytelling department. As such – I believe it will be increasingly important for us to continually craft new, innovative ideas that help us differentiate our story against ALL the competitors we have to deal with.

Einstein said it well when he said “not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured counts”.

I ask you: how can you love your wife more than you do on your wedding day? Well, I’ve somehow managed to love my wife more and more every single year that I’ve been married to her, –Every year I discover some new weird reason to love her more.  It’s way beyond measurement at this point.  And I’ve been married 20 years this year.

But who’s counting….

Friday this week marks the annual South by Southwest (SXSW festival in Austin) – and once again I’m not going.  I started a tradition two years ago by providing all of us that either can’t, won’t or for whatever reason just are unable to make it – a virtual experience so that you’ll be able to at least keep up with all the “hep cats” once they get back toward the middle of next week.  In fact, I dare say with how crowded the *actual* SXSW is – you may end up more knowledgeable than they are.

So…  I hope you’ll join this Texas boy on a quick virtual tour of what I’d go see at SXSW this year.  When you’re ready to spend a couple of hours (that’s all you’ll need for this tour) pop open a Lone Star, get yourself some great BBQ from your favorite joint wherever you are.  Kick back and watch a few videos.

I promise ya, if you go through all this content – other than a few more business cards and Twitter followers – no one who went will have anything up on you… And you may actually teach them a thing or two…

Some Quick History…

If you didn’t know the first SXSW was held back in 1987.  It was purely a music festival – and that’s how I’ll always think of it.  I was there that first year – and I believe (although it’s a bit fuzzy if you know what I mean)  it was the first time for me to see Queen Ida and The Bon Temps Zydeco Band.  They were awesome.

This year of course, there’s the Interactive festival, the music festival and a film festival.  With more than 12,000 attendees – it’s just a huge event.    Now, if you’re ready… Let’s take a virtual trip to this year’s SXSW together…

First – The Keynotes

The keynotes are of course talks that you just simply can’t miss – although many will because of overcrowding – and there just not being enough room for everyone.  But you won’t miss them here.  If I were going – I’d hit these:

Baratunde Thurston will be the opening keynote – and he’s also the keynote at this year’s Content Marketing World.   He’s a great speaker – so here’s one of him that’s very recent at The Black Googler Network.  I suspect his talk at SXSW will be similar.

Then, on Sunday – if we can get ourselves together from the Saturday night, we’d go see Amber Case talk about “Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface”.  That sounds like an amazing talk.  In lieu of that, here’s Amber’s Ted Talk “We Are All Cyborgs”

Then, on Monday – we couldn’t miss Ray Kurzweil (you gotta see him at least once) and his talk on “Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit”.  Sounds interesting.  But here’s a talk he gave recently at the Singularity Summit about artificial intelligence and the Turing test.

Then, on Tuesday we’d go see Jennifer Pahlka talk about “Coding the Next Chapter of American History”. We’re hoping it’s good – but there doesn’t seem to be much else going on – so we’re in.   Meanwhile, here’s a recent talk from Jennifer on Government 2.0

So – that wraps us for the Keynotes – and I guarantee you that just those will most likely put you ahead of most folks.  But, now let’s look at some of the Featured Talks…

Featured Sessions

Now, obviously we can’t go to all of them – and there’s a whole bunch of them here.  So, you’re going to have to trust me here as I pick for us.   This is what I’ve got for our SXSW 2012….

We would have gone to see Ade Olonoh, Brian Wong & Dave Morin – on “Why Happiness Is the New Currency” – but in it’s place we can watch this interesting interview with Brian Wong the founder of Kiip.

Then, we would have snuck out of that a little early to catch the last half of Jane McGonigal talk about “A Crash Course In Becoming SuperBetter”.  Sounds interesting – but in lieu of that let’s watch Jane’s Ted Talk about how gaming can make the world a better place.

Then, we definitely don’t want to miss Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha talk about “The Startup Of YOU”.   But since we’re not there – let’s watch a snippet of Reid’s recent interview on Charlie Rose.  It’s really good.

Then, quite frankly we would have skipped the mid afternoon session to make sure that we got into the closing session of the day – which is Rainn Wilson – “The View from inside Rainn Wilson’s Brainstem.”  Sounds just fun and interesting.  Instead, let’s watch this really cool interview that Rainn did at Google in 2010 when he was talking up his book Soul Pancake.

The next day I say we give Steve Case, and Barry Diller a big skip (since they’re old media anyway) – and drink some Bloody Mary’s.  Then, once we’ve got a cool buzz on – let’s go watch Anil Dash talk about blogging and journalism.  Or… let’s just watch Anil talk about it here.

Then, we’ll wrap our featured sessions with (maybe) saving the best for last as we go watch Howard Rheingold.  For Howard… we’ll just link to his site.  Go explore.

Start digging into that BBQ…

But What About Startups?

Okay… as you know since Twitter had their coming out party at SXSW – it’s become quite the “thing” to spot the next big startup at SXSW.  And, this year – there’s a whole “Startup Village”.  Literally hundreds of startups will be vying for attention – and we’ll see who actually makes it beyond the week.  But here are three I think folks may be talking about.

NowSpots – the social media advertising solution

Buzzdata – which is giving you the ability to publish data, open it up and start to do interesting things with it.

Banjo – which is bringing “local” to social networking.

And if you managed to get all that done – you’d have had a complete SXSW experience…

But What About Music…

And here’s  where I get send you off with my favorite bit.  See, I’d convince you to play some hookey and stay for the music festival.  It’s just so much damn fun.   Here’s who we would absolutely see:

The Beach Fossils – they’re just an interesting band.  Not really my type of music. But really interesting in an ethereal way.

Grimes – She’s definitely one of the most interesting artists going right now.  Again – a little techno for me but really interesting music.

Justin Townes Earle – Okay now we’re talking.  Get yer tequila ready….   This is a performance of him on Letterman – and he’s just awesome.

You Can’t Win Charlie Brown – Great name for a band – and I just came on to these guys and I’m hooked.  One of the most interesting sounds I’ve heard in a while.  Just great chill music.

And finally… my headliner…

Dash Rip Rock… I LOVE LOVE LOVE these guys… Reminds me of my old Cowpunk days back in the late 80’s…. These guys tear it up.  The link is to one my favorites of theirs – a cover of I Saw The Light.

Let that I Saw the Light Play Us Out…. And play it loud as we down one more beer… We’re done with SXSW – and we didn’t even have to get on plane…

Ya’ll come back now… ya hear?