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SXSWi 2010: Saturday recap
Headed out around 9am and grabbed breakfast with Todd Earwood and Chris Hall. We ran into David Alston and Katie Morse from Radian6. We took a photo with Cowboy Todd and they gave us some sweet Radian6 t-shirts. Mine is a Big Lebowski-themed shirt that says "The Dude abides listening, man." Nice.

After breakfast, we headed to Starbucks to grab coffee and ended up having an hour-long impromptu tweetup with Jim Storer, Adam Cohen, Chris Bergman, Paul Armstrong, Bill Johnston and the team from TweetyGotBack.

Headed over to the convention center around noon. On the way in, FreshBooks was handing out the absolute best conference swag ever -- bacon! With a belly full of bacon, we headed to the blogger lounge. There, we ran into Marcel and Rich from Radian6, Aaron Strout from Powered and Dave Delaney from Griffin.

While at the blogger lounge, Todd created a new site called BlueBallerz.com. The idea is that you can upload pictures of people who wear Bluetooth headsets while not using the phone. The tagline, which came courtesy of the team from TweetyGotBack, is "Everyday callers can become Bluetooth ballerz." E-mail your favorite photo to post@bluetoothballerz.com.

Around 3pm, we headed over to the Griffin tweetup at Champions before going to Jason Calacanis' live broadcast of This Week In Startups at The Mix Tap Room which included an interview with Tony Tseih from Zappos. It also featured my friend Rob May, CEO of Backupify, getting to ask a startup-related question to Tony and Jason.


Swag of the year goes to Fresh Books for handing out hot bacon outside the ACC

While waiting for the show to start, Rob, Todd, Chris Hall, Chris Bergman, Ben Thomas and the team from Lymbix.com played the most disturbing drinking game I've ever seen using ChatRoulette.com. Enough said about that :)

For dinner, we chose on of my favorite restaurants from SXSWi 2009 -- Maria Maria. Rob May, Chris Hall, Ben Thomas and I were eventually joined by Jason Calacanis and Charlie O'Donnell for some startup chat. We (the restaurant, not our table) were also joined by Emmanuelle Chriqui, who plays Sloan on "Entourage" (and Tyla in my friend Rob's movie "Waiting...") and Malin Ackerman who played Tori in a couple of episodes of "Entourage."

My food, I started with the guacamole and then had the red snapper veracruz, was absolutely amazing. Can't recommend that place enough.

The rest of the evening was a blur of events and parties including the Big Digg Shindigg at Stubbs. Will definitely be feeling the lack of sleep tomorrow... oh wait, I mean today :)

SXSWi 2010: Friday recap
Day 1 at SXSWi started early with a 7am flight out of Columbus. Ended up sitting next to Natalie Villalobos, product manager for Google Sidewiki, on the flight from Dallas to Austin.

After getting checked in to the hotel, I grabbed my badge, then connect with old friends from Louisville (and Cincinnati) including Greg Matthews and Chris Hall from Humana, Rob May and Ben Thomas from Backupify, Chris Bergman and Paul Armstrong. Got to catch the finish of the OSU-Michigan gave over lunch (and got to make an ass out of myself by jumping up out of my seat and cheering when Evan Turner hit that last second 3-pointer).


Chris Brogan snapped this stunning portrait of me in the Blogger Lounge. 8x10s available on request.

Ended up heading over to the blogger lounge at the Austin Convention Center after lunch and ran into a ton of familiar faces including Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Jim Storer, Adam Cohen, Amber Naslund, Jake McKee, Dave Delaney, Lewis Howes, Ewan Spence and Dave Peck. Also met Jodi Gersh from Gannett, Jay Baer, Darren Rowse and bunch of other people I had only known online.

Went to dinner with Jason Falls, Paul Baer, Valeria Maltoni and Jodi Gersh. Ran into the teams from USA Today and The New York Times and headed to the Social Fresh happy hour.

Later, we headed to Jeff Pulver's cocktail party at Lanai. Connected with Aaron Marshall, Todd Earwood, Mark Krynsky, Louis Gray and our host. Leo Laporte was running around trying to get interviews which seemed pretty futile over the music and conversation.



After that, we hiked the 1/2 mile down to Molotov for Jason Falls' Firefly Fandango event that featured funnel cakes from his dad Chillie Falls.

Ended up calling it a night around midnight so I could get my beauty rest for Saturday.

Heading to SXSWi 2010
For the 3rd straight year, I am heading down to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. IMNSHO, if you work in interactive, you need to be there -- great content, great food and great networking.

See my recaps from 2008 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday) and 2009 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday) if you want to learn more about it (and why I love it).

My pals Jake McKee and Jason Falls have created a nice list of tips for the first-time attendee. Check them out if you're heading down this weekend.

The World's Greatest PSAs in the World!
As part of our The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World campaign, we had to craft a compelling back story for the character. One of the things we did was create a series of public service announcements from the 70s and 80s.

While the one about germs was the most fun to shoot, it is a toss-up between bears and safety as my favorite.

How The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World got social
This week, we launched our new The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World ad campaign for Nationwide Insurance. Of all of the campaigns I've been in involved with over the past 19 months, this one is, by far, the most integrated with 3rd party social media sites.

In fact, much of the content from the campaign is housed exclusively on sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

On nationwide.com
There are two key elements of the campaign that live on nationwide.com:

1. Home page element
We have replaced our feature graphic on nationwide.com with an image of The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World. In addition, we have placed prominent links to his Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts right alongside the link to his nationwide.com launch pad.



2. The World's Greatest Spokesperson launch pad
Rather than build a microsite for this campaign, we chose to build a "launch pad" that houses some content, but really serves as a jumping off point for all of the other great content we have on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.



Off of nationwide.com
The rest of the digital campaign lives somewhere other than our website. The biggest difference with this campaign, though, is that the content was produced with that in mind. In other words, we're not just reposting our TV commercials on Facebook or YouTube and calling it a social media campaign. We created two Facebook apps and more than a dozen web-only videos to integrate The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World into the leading social destinations.

1. Facebook page
The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World has his own Facebook fan page that allows us to post historical photos, web-only videos and the TV commercials. It also gives him an opportunity to interact with fans through status updates.



2. Two Facebook apps
We build two Facebook apps for the campaign. Actually, they are the World's Greatest Facebook Apps in the World!

One is a t-shirt generator that allows you to create a "The World's _________ ________ in the World" t-shirt. I made "The World's Baldest Hair Metal Fan in the World" for mine. The first 1,000 t-shirts are completely free, so hurry up!



The other app allows you to caption any of your Facebook photos using the same concept of "The World's __________ ___________ in the World." For example, I could caption my profile photo as The World's Smoothest Forehead in the World.

3. YouTube channel
In addition to the videos you can also see on his Facebook page, we also have some exclusive content on YouTube. We have posted some content related to the campaign on other YouTube accounts and we have them listed as The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World's favorite videos. These include clips from his 1984 movie "Talk Back 2: The Mic is On" complete with VHS tracking lines and poorly overdubbed profanity.



4. Twitter account
His Twitter account will provide status updates that will be separate from anything posted on Facebook. We wanted him to have a distinct presence on each site rather than just repost the same content in both places.

It is still too early in the campaign to determine how well it is performing with consumers; however, I am willing to go on record saying that this is the best campaign work I've been involved with at Nationwide and sets a high bar for social integration moving forward.

Meet The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World
Tonight, we are launching a new ad campaign for Nationwide Insurance featuring The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World. The new :60 spot will air during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.



In addition to TV spots, we also shot a lot of supporting digital material for use on the web and in social media.

I was able to be in L.A. all last week to be a part of the digital shoot and I think it is the best work we have done since I have been at Nationwide. I took a lot of behind-the-scenes photos and video that you can check out on Flickr (including this gem below).



Check out the launch spot below and then head over to www.worldsgreatestspokesperson.com to see more video, connect with him on Facebook or follow his tweets.



Here is one of my favorite web-only videos:



As always, would love to hear what you all think, so please leave a comment and let us know.

Overcoming your fear of user-generated content

I am going to be participating in a webinar tomorrow (February 11 at 11:30am EST) with our partners from Rosetta and Bazaarvoice. It is titled "Overcoming Your Fear of User- Generated Content: A Webcast for Highly-Regulated Industries (catchy, huh?)."

Here is the description:
"Consumers want to hear from others like them when they shop for insurance, banking, healthcare—just like they shop for everything else. How do you conquer corporate fear, consumer privacy, and liability concerns to give them what they really want?

This webcast gets to the heart of these concerns and how Nationwide Insurance tackled these issues—and won big with consumers."

I will be joined by Adam Cohen, Partner and Social Media Lead at Rosetta, Marc Ostryniec, Vice President of Financial Services Division at Bazaarvoice, and Sue McManus, Leader of Direct and Customer Solutions at Nationwide.

Learn more about the webinar here.