20 proposed SXSW Interactive sessions worth your vote

The SXSW PanelPicker is back!

While the actual 2011 edition of SXSW Interactive is more than six months way (March 11-15), it is the public voting now, in the dog days of August, that goes a long way in determining which panel sessions are actually added to the final schedule.

With that in mind, we submit 20 panels worthy of your “thumbs-up” selections. To vote, just follow the title links below.

And we admit we’re biased here, but we think the first two proposals below from LiveWorld are especially interesting! Mark Williams and I will be attending our 3rd SXSWi event next March, and we’re hoping for our first crack at leading important industry discussions.

Note: In order to vote, you must already have or create a PanelPicker account. Public voting through the PanelPicker closes at 11:59pm Central on Friday, August 27, 2010

LiveWorld panels

1) Social Media FAIL: Lessons from the Dark Side
“Have you ever seen a social media FAIL in progress and wondered why the brand involved couldn’t see the mistakes they were making that made the situation worse? Doing everything ‘right’ in social media planning does not necessarily guarantee success, but doing the wrong thing will definitely ensure failure …”
– Mark Williams, senior community manager at LiveWorld
Solo session

2) How Brands Respond to Facebook Attacks
“What should brands do when their reputations are taking a beating in front of millions of eyes on the world’s largest social network?”
– Bryan Person, social media evangelist LiveWorld
Confirmed panelists: 1) Michael Lazerow, founder and CEO of Buddy Media * 2) Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford Motor Company

Facebook marketing

3) The Black Art of Optimizing Facebook Wall Posts
“Not all Wall Posts on Facebook are created equal. Ever wonder why some get more visibility in the News Feed than others? There are proven tactics to optimize content for the News Feed to foster engagement, grow fans, raise awareness and drive conversions for brands using Facebook Pages …”
– Helen Todd, Sociality Squared

4) To Reply or Not To Reply? Facebook Conversations
“Most businesses (especially big ones) are on facebook, but not all businesses actively engage with their customers and fans on a regular basis. this panel will focus on which brands are having a conversation, how to have a conversation successfully …”
– Jeannette Arrowood, Fleishman-Hillard for AT&T

Healthcare

5) Social-Powered Ethics: Healthcare Faces a New Curve
“Social media has seen rapid growth, but healthcare, a highly regulated and sometimes conservative industry, started as a somewhat reluctant player …”
–  Carissa Caramanis O’Brien, Red Box Communications

6) Socially Regulated: Social Media in Regulated Industries
“While many businesses and corporations have started to adopt social media as part of their marketing, communications, and other business practices, regulated industries – such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, and the automotive industry – often face challenges and restrictions that other industries do not need to consider, such as federal regulations and industry guidelines …”
– Shwen Gwee, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

7) Will Online Patient Communities Replace Primary Care?
“With doctors spending less and less time with their patients, patients with chronic conditions are turning more and more often to their peers instead of (or optimally in addition to) the medical community for guidance …”
– Greg Matthews, WCG

8) Healthcare Social Media: Lawyers Don’t Always Say No
“Learn how to minimize legal and regulatory risk while joining the vanguard of healthcare organizations engaging their constituencies via social media …”
– David Harlow, The Harlow Group LLC

Online community

9) Viva la BBS! The Beauty of Hidden Communities
“How secret, heavily-moderated, under-the-radar communities are providing the best social experiences on the internet, and have since the early days of the BBS.”
– Jon Bell, frog design

10) Are Your Customers a Crowd Or a Community?
“The word “community” is becoming so overused that it is beginning to lose its meaning. Many businesses apply that word to their customers without understanding the value of true community …”
– Thomas Knoll, Zappos.com

11) Real-World Moderation: Lessons from 11 Years of Community
“After 11 years of running MetaFilter.com, I (and the other moderators) have been through just about everything, and we’ve built dozens of custom tools to weed out garbage, spammers, and scammers from the site …”
– Matt Haughey, MetaFilter

12) 27 (Fun) Ways to Kill Your Online Community
“In this fun and extremely fast-paced session, you’ll learn how to manage an online community backwards …”
– Patrick O’Keefe, iFroggy Network

13) Without Tummeling, Your Web Community Will Fail
“Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody describes ridiculously easy group forming online, but also that most of these groups fail. The key to success is to have a Tummler to play the role of conversational catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become a community …”
– Kevin Marks, BT

Social business

14) Leveraging Social Media Middlemen
” The frontline employees who interact directly with your target consumers will have to be increasingly familiar with social tools. They will be your social media middlemen …”
– Tom Cummings, Dachis Group

15) Finding Your Brand’s “Social” Voice
“Conversations are the backbone of social media. But, unlike their face-to-face cousins, they’re far more difficult to master …”
– Jennifer Kane, Kane Consulting

16) Agency Structure: Where Do We Fit New Creatives?
“First we added the HTML guy, then the flash guy, then the app guy, then the design guy. The collaborators for any kickass advertising project are growing as new dimensions are being added to what counts as a delightful brand experience”
– Rachel Mercer, VCU Brandcenter

17) When Good Companies Go Horribly Wrong
“This is not my beautiful job, how did I get here? We never want to believe it, but often we watch in horror as the company that we once loved, either as a founder or as an employee, suddenly descends into a rotten, back-biting, stinking mess …”
– Rolf Skyberg, eBay, Inc. *

Content marketing

18) Not My Job: The Ultimate Content-Strategy Smackdown
“OK. So let’s say your business has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog (or lots of blogs), an email newsletter, some SEO stuff, and eighty bajillion landing pages you forgot about back when it was still funny to rick-roll someone. Who’s doing all this content?”
– Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic

19) Resurrecting Your Corporate Blog: Changes to Make Now
“Social media is crucial to the success of small & large businesses alike in today’s media dependent society. Unfortunately, the most commonly used tool, the corporate blog, often gets lost in the shuffle …”
– Aleksandra Todorova, Mint Life

20) The Death of the Brand Website
“Today’s brand sites do a great job of communicating a message, but what most sites lack is fresh content that keeps visitors coming back. Major brands can take a lesson from blogging sites that do an excellent job of keeping content fresh by creating stories around their products, adding video, and integrating social networks like Twitter and Facebook …”
– Gary Nelson, Organic/digital marketing

* Disclosures: 1) LiveWorld is a Buddy Media partner. 2) eBay is a LiveWorld client.