Ever since blogging became popular, people have been trying to make a living at it. A few have been successful, but many eventually give up, or if they actually do continue to blog, they aren’t making anything. In a session I attended about blogging at SXSW last month, one of the panelists asked the question, "how many of you have a blog?" Nearly everyone in the room raised their hands. Next, they asked, "how many of you are earning with your blog?" Very few people raised their hands.

I probably don’t have to tell you that time is valuable, but is this something you are considering when it comes to your customers’ time?

If you run an e-commerce business, you have to consider that consumers want to spend as little time on your site as possible. That’s not to say that they don’t want to buy from you. They just want to be able to do so quickly, and the more time you make them spend on the buying process, the less likely they are to actually buy from you (remember – the competition may only be a click away).

Pushing your brand’s message through social media as proven to be an effective strategy for plenty of businesses. That said, it has also proven to be a way for disgruntled customers to voice their disdain for brands and products, and spread that disdain virally throughout their social circles. Businesses are often quick to step in and defend their turf (at least businesses with interest in online reputation management), and respond to criticism.

It used to be you spent five minutes registering for an event, and then showed up on the big day, went to a few workshops, drank two free Coronas, and went home.

Social media changes all of that, enabling events and their planners to have long-term, nuanced, shifting interactions with attendees.

I gave a speech last week in suburban Cincinnati to the Mid-American chapter of Meeting Planners International, titled “7 Ways to Use Social Media to Create Buzz-Worthy Events”.

Every year in March I make my annual trek to Austin to be part of the South By Southwest Interactive show, one of the biggest gatherings of people working in all aspects of the web in the world. For those who have been, they might describe the event as a simultaneous assault of information, networking and back to back parties. It has become the Everest of social media events, and in my fourth year of attending I realized that there are techniques for surviving a large event that I have been using and adding to each year.

I don’t think too many people will dispute the fact that location is buzz topic of 2010 so far within the online marketing industry. Big players in this space include Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook (soon), and of course Google.

As reported earlier this week, Google noted that a third of its searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment, and that they think of location as a "hugely important signal".

In case you were wondering, Twitter is not killing blogging. No matter how many times this is said, there is still this notion out there that blogs aren’t needed when you can simply express what you’re feeling to the audience who is interested through Twitter (or Facebook or other social networks). The fact of the matter is, yes – you can do this with Twitter or Facebook, but blogs exist just the same, and the blogs and social networks frequently complement one another.

There are many ways to market your business through Facebook. Some are obvious, and others not so much. One thing you can pretty much count on is that there are incredible masses of people on the social network that you can potentially reach, and in ways that will allow them not only to engage with your brand in a comfortable setting, but with other Facebook ecosystems they are already engaging with.

As usual, this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference was a blur. Between the people, the parties, and purveyors of all things bacon, it was a twenty ring circus of the sublime and bizarre.

There was no shatteringly impactful takeaway from SXSW 2010, as it seems we’ve entered a (sure to be brief) innovation lull. But, I absorbed many smaller lessons that will help guide my thinking about the conference, technology, and social business in the coming months.

I sat in on the Future of Music Delivery Keynote interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and author Eliot Van Buskirk on the last day of SXSW Interactive. Buskirk’s covered the digital media industry for ten years in various publications. This keynote was not nearly as crowded as the Evan Williams one was at the beginning, but definitely kept a lot more people hanging around through its entirety.

As you may know, Google recently acquired social search service Aardvark. I attended a panel on social search at SXSW this week, in which Max Ventilla, the service’s "Head Zookeeper" talked about not only the service, but what social search means for the industry in general.

There is no shortage of interesting sessions going on at SXSW Interactive in Austin, but one that was especially interesting was "Can Wikipedia Survive Popular Success and Community Decline?" – a presentation from USC Professor of Journalism Andrew Lih.

We’re here at SXSW Interactive waiting for the keynote with Twitter CEO Evan Williams who will discuss "The Next Generation of Social Media." There has been some speculation that an announcement of Twitter’s ad platform could occur at this event, but that may or may not happen. We’ll see.

Either way, I’ll be liveblogging the keynote below. Please forgive the inevitable typos.

Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab."

Liveblogging starts

02:00:  Still waiting…

Here at SXSW, we attended the session "CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?" At the end, one of the speakers asked the crowd, which they thought it was. Almost everybody responded with the former, while maybe one or two raised their hand for hype.

I’m sitting here in Exhibit Hall 1 waiting for the keynote to begin. I will be liveblogging/paraphrasing what is discussed (please excuse the inevitable typos).

Bio from the SXSW Booklet: Valerie Casey works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services to transforming organizational processes and behaviors….She is the founder and executive director of Designers Accord.
 

Liveblogging starts:

At SXSW, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan of the newly launched Dynamo Player talked about different routes online video producers can take to try and make a buck. While the discussion ultimately led up to the duo’s demo of its new product, it was not above representing some different options fairly. The two talked about some of the pros and cons of advertising, such as:

Pros

At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft‘s Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google’s privacy "fails" with Buzz.

I’m sitting here in the exhibit hall at SXSW getting ready for the opening remarks keynote, which is getting ready to get underway. It will be delivered by Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research

Her SXSW Bio: One of the world’s foremost authorities on social networks, boyd works at Microsoft Research New England and also serves as a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.