Aaron Strout : Citizen Marketer

Cleaning Out the Desk Drawer

1. We are merging with Prospero. I am very excited about this on a number of different levels (listen to the podcast that Colin Browning and I did with Bryan Person for details). We also got some pretty cool media coverage - local and national:
• Chris Brogan says we did a good job breaking the news using social media
• Rachel Happe of IDC says while the news is cool, she likes what Mzinga's offerings
  
• Scott Monty echos Chris' sentiment
• Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and GigaOm all covered it as well
  
  
2. On the heels of our news, Demand Media announced that they were buying quasi-competitor, Pluck. Has the consolidation game begun in earnest? I think there will be more business social media/white label community providers before all is said and done. The big question is when will the big boys like IBM, Cisco and Microsoft jump in and start acquiring enterprise social media players?
   
   
3. Going to a conference has changed dramatically since the old days of printed brochures and lost opportunities pre/post event to connect. I'm going to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference this weekend and the social networking/online tools that exist for this event are magnificent. My four favorite so far are:
• The signup for folks that twitter and are going to SXSW
• The session planning tool (including all the parties) that you can then download into your Outlook calendar
• @sxswbloghaus' real time updates on Twitter
• Yahoo's upcoming.org site - I checked out where Scoble was going and am following suit
  
  
4. Realizing that I am getting behind on my podcasting. I hope to nail a dozen or so at SXSW.
   
   
5. Looking forward to speaking on the "Data Collection" panel today at Marketing Profs B2B Expo at 1:00 PM ET.

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