Ryan Holmes
Although social media is a relatively new form of communication, it has become the primary way retailers and customers are interfacing.Collection: Communication
Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn't go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won't have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn't take much for spending to spiral out of control.Collection: Finance
Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.Collection: Communication
If you catch me lying, it's probably because I'm about to surprise someone for their birthday, or hide away the specific details about a company getaway to a strange but amazing place.Collection: Birthday
At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.Collection: Design
As a child, I did what any normal kid who grew up without any electricity would do - I spent countless hours working on a computer wired to my parents' car battery... and learned how to code. This natural passion for computers lead me into the Internet market during the late 1990s and early 2000s.Collection: Computers
You can run a sprint or your can run a marathon, but you can't sprint a marathon.
Email is familiar. It's comfortable. It's easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.
From its humble origins in college dorm rooms, social media has quietly crept into the boardroom.
As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be building your brand. The ultimate goal is to set your company and your brand apart from the crowd. If you form a strategy without doing the research, your brand will barely float - and at the speed industries move at today, brands sink fast.
Don't be scared to try new things, but remember to hold on to the vision of your company and the initial successes that defined your brand.
When my company was first getting off the ground, we were completely lost in the shuffle, despite our best efforts. In 2012, however, we had a 28-foot-long, 15,000-pound secret weapon. To stand out amid the gala parties and blow-out bashes hosted by much bigger tech companies, HootSuite decided to take to the streets.
By monitoring the activity taking place on social networks, retailers can amplify successful marketing and sales strategies and avoid weak tactics which can later be tied back to organizational objectives.
I grew up off the grid in Vernon, and I saw my parents work hard every day, as teachers but also while farming and building a log home. So from a young age I knew the value of hard work.
My first real venture was a paintball company I started in Grade 10, when I was 16. After hearing about it from a friend, I realized my town didn't have a playing field. I did some research, spoke with other paintball company owners, and I started my own field the following summer.
Since social networks gained popularity extremely rapidly, there had been a debate as to whether social media was a fad. There are countless pieces of evidence now proving the contrary, among them the explosion in Twitter growth and Facebook's public listing.
An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually.
Anyone working at HootSuite will tell you that I don't sugarcoat my opinions. I heavily encourage feedback and suggestions - partly because I'm blunt about offering the same in return.
Although the tech industry is very open to change, many people still have a closed-off mentality where, in the interest of protecting their ideas, they keep them hidden in dark caves.
Ultimately, I'd love to see a legacy company that has alumni that come out of it and go on to create other big things. A maple-syrup mafia, a HootSuite mafia.
For everybody in their busy lives, you need to invest in sharpening your tools, and you need to invest in longevity.
I think that Vancouver as well as Canada needs a boot camp for young entrepreneurs. We have already seen tens if not hundreds of people put their names forward to be involved in the program, and we just think this is an amazing way to accelerate what they're doing.
I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.
As social is where consumers' eyeballs are, businesses must take ownership of their online company profiles. By providing their customers with a place to share content, social media managers can monitor and track content which directly relates to their brand.
Every day I'd come home after school, pop the hood of my mom's car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer. If I used it for too long, I'd wear down the car battery, and my mom would be all mad at me the next day.
I'd love to build a brand, a legacy.
Amongst high unemployment rates, a competitive job market and a shrinking global economy, the emerging social media industry only continues to grow.
Certification programs for social media are blossoming as a response to the demand for more social media training. Both industry professionals and recent graduates are tapping into tactical training programs to help them stay up to date as the industry grows.
Social media is the future, with employers recognizing they need to start hiring people with the right skills.
While social media skills were once a 'nice-to-have,' accreditation in the space is becoming a requirement for many of these job titles. Hiring managers and job seekers are realizing that printing stacks of resumes is turning passe, and social media is rising as the new way of generating real-time networking opportunities.
Social media teams tend to be decentralized - a motley mix of in-house experts, off-site consultants and international partners. The result: Confusion, rogue tweets, and off-message posts are almost inevitable. The worst gaffes live on in social media infamy.
Companies and managers that find a way to harness social media stand to gain.
Virtual currencies, used to buy digital goods inside online games, have become an integral part of the Internet landscape.
LinkedIn and Flickr, among other sites, have already proven freemium can generate revenue in the social media context.
By allowing multiple partners to contribute, an open platform can nurture an entire ecosystem of developers and apps. Good products integrate and become great products. Users get a one-stop solution for social needs.
Sales departments use social to nurture leads and close sales. HR posts job openings and vets applicants. Community and support squads mine networks, blogs and forums with deep listening tools.
No surprise that, as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded.
One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and - above all - creativity go a long way.
One of the most important principles I've learned is, every so often, just drop everything. Stop racing from one party to the next.
The reality is that SXSW is packed with brilliant entrepreneurs, investors and partners. They're everywhere, zipping back and forth like thousands of atoms. Your chances of colliding with one actually improve just by standing still.
When you think of technology that gets people excited - long lines at stores, enthusiastic reviews in the blogosphere, passionate evangelists - the first thing to come to mind probably isn't thermostats. Then, along came Nest.
Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.
Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered.
Tech companies don't exist in a bubble; they draw from and feed into a larger community. Ideally, the relationship is symbiotic.
Silicon Valley isn't the only game in town. Tech is increasingly decentralized. Around the world, new tech centers with younger companies are able to embrace a different approach to talent: recruit locally, identify homegrown prospects and, in a phrase, bring them along for the ride.
Understanding and respecting your roots is critical not only to winning the tech talent wars but leaving a legacy that transcends bottom lines.
Tech companies have a finite lifespan: For the successful ones, an IPO or exit is never more than a few years off. But by recruiting locally and developing homegrown talent, companies can build something that remains after they're gone. People, skills and a culture of innovation persist.
Social media listening tools make it easy to track brand references and mentions, and these functions can still be handled ably by a small, dedicated team.
As an entrepreneur, the pressures of a startup can be enormous, but it's rarely life or death.
For some people, staying grounded means doing yoga. For others, it's spending time with family. Social media, too, can be a lifesaver.