SXSWi: Saturday the 14th

11:30 AM Blog on Company Time and Get Promoted. Picked up a few tips here but generally the title promised a little more than it delivered. Most interesting was the issue of NOT linking:

Apparently a municipality in California is getting sued for linking to one dry cleaner and not three others in the area. Legal issues surrounding potential favouring of some businesses over others. Solution suggested was to create a little link on site, asking: ‘Did we forget your business, should we be linking to you?’ and link to another page to give them the opportunity to post up their business that way.

Anti-social networking at SXSWi.
Anti-social networking at SXSWi.

03:30 PM The Future Of Social Networks
This was the big session for me, essentially a talk by Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell. It's going to take some sinking-in time but it is based on the assumption of social networks becoming like air (not a new idea but…) but interested in the reasons for business resistance to them.

Social networks 'disrupt the traditional info flow' to customers and so businesses will have to integrate them to keep focus on the customer. The biggest reason (possibly) that engagement is being resisted by organisations is that the change in structure represents a huge threat to middle management. What will be their role if their CEO decides to engage in that world? Will they have a role at all? I'm tempted to say, look at what's happening in journalism – the traditional models were resistant to Web2.0 and are now suffering the price of that. Engage and innovate now or potentially risk your job.