We’ve divided the grid by day as well as by session track or type:

• Design & User Experience
• Development
• Focus on Analytics
• Focus on Cloud Computing
• Focus on Mobile
• Keynote
• Intensive
• Social Media Marketing
• Special Programs & Events
• Sponsored
• Strategy & Business Models

We’ll continue to have more updates as the days pass. Feel free to message us if you have any questions!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Eric was the co-founder and served as the CTO of IMVU, his third startup. He has authored several books and received numerous awards. But he has no desire to rest on his laurels.

Listen to the podcast to find out what Eric’s been up to, what advice he has for entrepreneurs, and what he’s trying to do with current U.S. immigration laws.

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Adam Stacoviak is the host of the Web 2.0 Show, an audio-based podcast that profiles the Entrepreneurs, Businesses and Technologies of Web 2.0. If you have a Web 2.0 business to promote, he wants to hear about it on his new segment, Pitch the Show.

Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Here’s the Deal

“Use discount code [FAKE] for 25% off a Web 2.0 Expo SF conference pass—discount ends April 25! #w2e”

Tweet this sentence to enough of your friends, and you could earn a deeply discounted or free full-price Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco conference pass. Every time someone buys a conference pass using your personalized discount code (which we will send you—read on), you get an additional 10% off the cost of a full-price pass. That’s on top of the 25% discount we will give you for participating.

(Note: The discount code above—[FAKE]—does not work. It’s just an example.)

Here’s how to play:

• Sign up for the contest at the bottom of this post (scroll down, please!). All we need is your name and an email address to send you a personalized code. Space fills up fast and is limited to the first 100 people who apply.
• Tweet the discount code we give you to your followers so they can sign up using it.
• Kick back and let us do the rest of the work. We’ll contact you the week of April 26th to tell you how many people signed up using your code… and also to tell you how much money will be shaved off your conference pass.

If you already have a conference pass, you’re still more than welcome to participate. Although the credits you accrue will not work toward the pass you already purchased (retroactively that is), you will be able to earn another deeply discounted or fully paid-for pass for a friend or colleague. You can also use your credits toward Web 2.0 Expo New York 2010. One last thing—although we think Twitter is the easiest way for you to spread this deal, there is no restriction as to where you can post your code! Feel free to email your friends or post it on your Facebook account.

We are limiting this contest to the first 100 people who apply – so hurry! The discount code you are given will only work through April 25, so the sooner you start spreading the word the better.
Post any questions in the blog comments section or message us @w2e on Twitter.

Good luck!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

If this snippet of conversation hit a little too close to home, this is the blog post for you:

Diving into social media is a great idea if you know how to swim around. But what’s the point of blogging and tweeting and updating statuses and adding connections if you can’t measure the ROI?

Sean Power and Alistair Croll of Watching Websites are here to help analyze your social media strategy with their Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Intensive, “Applied Communilytics.” Sean recently spoke to us about communilytics (a mashup of “community” and “analytics”) to preview the content you’ll find in his Intensive.

(You can also check out his post-Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 interview with an attendee.)

Kaitlin: Successful businesses base most important decisions on cold hard numbers. But when it comes to social media, many companies haven’t yet applied this wisdom to their efforts. Instead they casually throw up a Facebook Fan Page or tweet about a product. If you were given the chance to scare someone straight and preach why analytics is important (how convenient - you have that chance right now), what case study would you cite to show what horrors can happen when you don’t pay attention to Communilytics?

Sean: I’m not sure I’d like to explicitly call out a company that failed to mitigate an issue in its social media efforts (like the Motrin Mom fiasco, for example), but rather concentrate on all the good that can happen when you actually do listen and react.  Late last month, the gay clothing and lifestyle company Fabulis had their Citibank accounts frozen because someone at Citi had reviewed the Fabulis blog and erroneously marked it  as porn.  Though this could’ve resulted in a massive PR nightmare for Citi, the company was quick to respond to the incident, revise their policies and issue a letter of apology to Fabulis – doing so transparently and openly.  The first step to communilytics is listening, and Citi’s listening efforts allowed them to mitigate a potential brand disaster.

Kaitlin: In your Intensive, you’re going to cover “applied communilytics on a shoestring.” Can you give me a preview how to do this or what sites you can use? Conversely, what’s the most expensive thing about communilytics?

Sean: The most expensive thing about communilytics is the time it can take when you’re not doing it right. There are many great vendors that help gather community analytics, but it can quickly suck a massive amount of time in a day when you’re trying to compare different data points without a clear end goal in mind. Communilytics efforts are about using little bits and pieces of analytics practices in order to understand how you’re achieving your business goals. We’ll talk about how to save time and money by learning to ask the right questions, and not waste your time looking at numbers that don’t bring you closer to success.

Kaitlin: At the end of your Intensive, you guys are teaming up with Eric Ries, who is running the other Intensive – Lean Startup. I read this article of his a while ago and really enjoyed it. Do you agree with Eric that some metrics may just be ego boosters? How can a marketer turn that around and make it useful?

Sean: The only numbers that matter are numbers that bring you closer to your business goals.  These numbers are generally not ones that make you say “That’s interesting.” only to walk away.  They’re numbers that make you say “we need to change feature X as a result of what we just learned”.  They’re numbers that paint a picture or story that you can act on.  To turn numbers around and make them useful, marketers need to know what their goals are, and which numbers allow them to track the state of those goals.

Kaitlin: In my interview with you last year, you talked about the importance of forming a hypothesis around one’s marketing efforts, then testing them. Should community managers and marketers approach social media the way a scientist would approach a study? What process should they use?

Sean: Part of social media efforts is simply making sure you come to the party and bring your party face.  The other part revolves around creating compelling stories that people at the party might like, in hopes that they’re going to want to learn more about you (or even buy stuff from you!).  Social media should be thought as a marketing channel instead of a separate entity.  With this in mind, many of the same processes used in marketing channels (email, direct, etc) can be applied to social media, including the use of analytics and goal tracking.

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If you’d like to see more about Communilytics, you can watch a preview of Sean and Alistair’s O’Reilly Master Class on the subject. Or watch Alistair talk shop about how Twitter followers propagate information:

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

We had a great time putting this on, and would like to share the video of the webcast with you. Check it out now.

We also invite you to look through the slides we put together.

If you have any questions for either Sarah or me, drop us a line @SarahM, @w2e, or @kcpike.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

We’ve been around for four years now and know that we wouldn’t have made it without you supporting us.

So if you’re a paid conference attendee in 2010, and you’ve been an attendee at any previous Web 2.0 Expo or Web 2.0 Summit event, you’ll automatically receive the following benefits:

• Invitation to a special lunch on Thursday, May 6 with Tim O’Reilly and other key Web 2.0 figures
• Access to our Alumni Lounge, featuring power, Internet, all-day coffee, and light am/pm snacks. The Alumni Lounge will be open Tuesday - Thursday.
• Free O’Reilly book (you will be able to choose one of the following titles: The Social Media Marketing Book, The New Community Rules or Facebook: The Missing Manual, 2E)
• 40% off on all O’Reilly print and ebooks on oreilly.com (offer valid 4/26/10 - 5/14/10)
• Special designation on your conference badge

There is no need to formally sign up for the Alumni program; we’ll automatically flag you in our system and send you more details about how to take advantage of these benefits as the event gets closer. This is just our way of saying thanks for your continued support of Web 2.0 Expo and the Web 2.0 community.

See you in May!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

If you’re the latter, it’s likely not intentional; the basics of effective marketing to multicultural communities, especially through social media, aren’t taught in most seminars or even deeply considered by most professionals. Effectively engaging groups outside your own cultural background can be impossible if you don’t know where to begin.

Luckily, Jessica Faye Carter of Nette Media has tackled this issue and offers some answers. Her session at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this May, “Lessons from the Marketing Campaign Trail: Using Social Media to Engage Multicultural Communities,” will help you build effective multicultural social media campaigns. She agreed to an interview with us, which you’ll find below.

As Jessica notes in her session description, multicultural communities now account for more than 30% of the U.S. population with spending power of approximately $2 trillion. If your company wants to reach these audiences, you can start learning how to by reading on:

Kaitlin: How do marketers find people online based on cultural identity? Doesn’t the anonymity of the web make that difficult?

Jessica: One of the easiest ways for marketers to find users from various cultures is through blogs and social networks geared toward ethnic communities. Sites like MiGente (Hispanic & Latino cultures), Soompi (Korean and Asian cultures), and BlackPlanet (Black cultures) have sizeable audiences that would appeal to advertisers. Microsites within larger, more popular sites like Facebook or Linkedin are another option, along with websites of culturally-focused organizations.

Kaitlin: What are the differences in behavior among varying cultural and racial groups online? Is it a difference in tools, say, Twitter versus Facebook? What studies support these observations?

Jessica: Most groups are engaging in similar behaviors online, such as information gathering and sharing, making purchases, listening to music, using social media. The differences are perhaps the extent to which the groups are using certain services, or the platform they use to access the Internet—which could limit or expand a site’s service offerings. Research more specific to multicultural users of social media, from organizations like Nielsen, Pew Internet, Forrester, AdAge and the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication, indicates that there are higher percentages of multicultural users on social media than was initially supposed. And while the breakdown of user demographics varies across social media sites (sometimes widely), it seems to be more a function of the type of site (e.g., sharing media vs. connecting with friends) than reluctance on the part of users to interact across cultural differences.

Kaitlin: In your session description, you mention you’ll cover some “multicultural marketing principles.” Could you explain a few of these?

Jessica: Hofstede famously opined that the most profound elements of culture manifest themselves in four ways: through heroes, symbols, rituals and values. Those root elements, in turn, influence cultural norms, behaviors, and value systems, which differ considerably across ethnic groups, as well as within those groups. Multicultural marketing attempts to engage ethnic consumers using cultural indicators that resonate with them, both superficially and more profoundly.

Kaitlin: Obviously you’ll have some good case studies to refer to in your presentation, but I was wondering if you have a few examples of poorly run – even offensive – social media campaigns aimed at particular cultural groups. (This is with the assumption that the campaign was trying not to be offensive, but successful.) As the phrase goes, if you can’t be a good example, you’ll be a terrible warning.

Jessica: Well, the idea of using social media to target multicultural groups is relatively nascent, so there isn’t much to report in the way of offensive campaigns. When McDonald’s launched websites geared toward Black and Asian consumers, there were some rumblings—some questioned the appropriateness of the sites; others liked them; still others remained unsure. But this is often the case in multicultural campaigns, because there are multiple perspectives within the various communities. One size doesn’t fit all. McDonald’s, to its credit, is known to use ethnic-specific focus groups for all of its multicultural initiatives; my guess would be that they put considerable time and resources into developing the sites. That said, the warnings from failed multicultural marketing generally still stand, and companies still have to be careful in this space.

Companies are also learning is that social media can highlight product flaws that impact various cultural groups differently. In the case of Hewlett-Packard, some friends tried out an HP laptop’s facial-recognition function, and found that it didn’t work for the darker-skinned friend; it worked fine for the lighter-skinned person. Nikon experienced something similar with its CoolPix S630, when a Taiwanese-American user found that every time she took a picture of herself smiling, the camera asked if someone blinked. Both stories went viral, and made their way onto popular social media sites, eventually ending up on Time.com. We’ll probably see more of these types of situations highlighted in social media going forward.

Kaitlin: I’ll like to talk more broadly about women and different cultural groups in the tech and web industries. You write and speak in various venues about workplace diversity and getting more women and traditionally underrepresented groups into this sector. What factors contribute to the comparatively small number of women and certain minorities in the web and tech world?

Jessica: The factors hindering women and certain ethnic groups from joining and advancing at tech companies are similar to the factors preventing these groups from advancing in other industries. Such issues include perceptions that women and certain U.S. minority groups are not as technically competent as their peers, stereotyping, bias, low levels of institutional support, and lack of access to informal networks, mentors, and sponsors.

Kaitlin: What advice would you give to these groups?

Jessica: Not exactly advice, but there are a few things worth considering: performing well is essential to your professional success, but after a few promotions, it will take more than performance to get ahead—it will take solid relationships with your peers, managers, and a mentor or influential sponsor. Careers in any profession are made from the top-down and not from the bottom-up, meaning that those senior to you have to identify you as an asset to the organization before advancement opportunities will come your way. A good mix of performance, relationships, professional image, and exposure will garner attention from higher-ups and put you on the path to career success. There is, of course, much more to professional success than what I’ve noted here, but it’s a start.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

What is Ignite? Carmel Hagen and Emily Goligoski, the founders of Ignite Bay Area, would like to lay it down for you.

Watch their presentation by clicking on the Ignite logo below. (Although the page will ask you for name & email, registration is NOT required - just hit “Submit” to watch.)

Sponsored in part by Web 2.0 Expo, Ignite Bay Area’s Global Ignite Week event is tomorrow night - March 2 - from 7 to 10 p.m. Tickets are sold out but you can Livestream it here. You can also watch recordings of Ignite talks here. And here’s the list of Ignite Bay Area speakers for tomorrow.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Thanks!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Collaboration is the heart of Web 2.0. But we at Web 2.0 Expo know that effective cooperation involves more than good technology; we also recognize the very human drive behind it. And we can think of no better example of the human need to collaborate — and the creative ways it can be done — than can be found in the countless non-profits that work to better our community and world by using the web as an organizing tool.

We are once again hosting a Non-Profit Pavilion at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. This Web 2.0 Expo tradition has hosted such organizations as ChangingthePresent, Amoration, Creative Commons, Donorschoose, Knowmore, Social Actions, USIBA and the University of Denver CIS Program. You can also see this past fall’s Web 2.0 Expo New York Non-Profit Pavilion list.

If you’re a non-profit organization that is using Web 2.0 technologies to support your cause, mission, or community goals, we invite you to apply for a spot in our Pavilion.

We will choose 10 non-profits to participate in the Pavilion (located on the Expo floor). Each organization will be supplied with a booth space, on-site branding, an Internet connection, and inclusion in the events guide, completely free of charge.

To apply, fill out the form below. The deadline to apply is March 18.

Organizations must be a registered 501c3 to participate. Space is limited to 10 non-profits. An internal Web 2.0 Expo committee will select the booth recipients and announcements will be made the week of March 22.

Thank you.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.