We are at RSDC or the Rational Software Developer Conference 2008 in Orlando, Florida, hosted by IBM Rational. And we've got a special guest with us. Would you like to introduce yourself? Well, I am John Simons. I work for ISV and Developer Relations and for the most part I head up blogging and Twitter for IBM and most of the social. That's the main thing we're going to talk about is how, as sort of a representative of IBM in that area, like how you came about to start using Twitter and blogging and things like that and how that's been working out for you. Cutting a little midway through there, when did you start using Twitter? I started using Twitter actually a few months ago. I held off doing it because I just didn't think I was that relevant. But I figured out that I needed to do it because it was going to capture a lot of information to follow the analysts. At events like this, for example, there was an issue at Pulse with you, as it turns out, that we needed to get to you. And I captured one of your tweets. I sent it over to one of the AR people, Amy Loomis. She got to you. We solved an issue. And that's how quickly it worked. So how many analysts do you find running around on Twitter doing things in there? You know, it's a growing list. It started out mostly with Redmog. Okay, you guys have been the leaders. I blog mainly because of Redmog. But as I go through it, I see who's following who and my list just keeps growing. Right. And then there's the analysts that are more relevant to the software group at IBM. And I tend to follow them more often. Right. There's some people I follow like Dvorak just because he's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know. He's always got some excitingly harebrained kooky thing to talk about. Yes, yes. He's always been entertaining.
2:00Right. And you know, a little bit off the wall. Right. I follow other people like that. And then sometimes I follow people who follow me who I have no idea how they pick me on. And I either keep them or drop them depending on how much traffic I stomach during it. I find that a lot of discussions about Twitter are the same sort of a replay of discussions people had about blogging a while ago. With some slight different question that always comes up. You know, came up in blogging and with Twitter is like how or do you divide like personal versus work stuff and things that you write about? Or do you just mix them together? It's a little bit of a mix. There is, at events like this, I found out about a blog or Twitter meetup about 15 minutes before it happened because I was on Twitter. And I made it on time. And you know, it was really helpful. So I got the one opportunity I got to see Stephen O'Grady was at the meetup. Oh, right. Because he left and I needed to get to him for a very important analyst relations issue. I had some flies that matched a pattern he was fishing up in Maine and I needed to get to him before he left town. That's right. That is a pretty vital issue. Right. It is. Definitely analyst relations. No, but I used it as a tool. Occasionally I put some personal stuff up there. I saw a cool picture of a stealth fighter today that I put up for fun. Right. But for the most part, you know, I keep it, you know, analyst related and or analyst relations related. Right, right, right. And, but I am able to help out. I have been sort of the leader for the software group team. Although, I'll give credit to Don Neely who stepped into the game quick, you know, and I even talked to Sarita Torres last night who said she's going to sign up for Twitter. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah. And, you know, she's heading up the software group. So, just because it was easy to do and, you know, for 140 characters, you know, you can do it. I find it a good way to keep track of what's going on.
4:01You know, and I mix it in and out with the blogs. I'm a little bit more extensive with the blogging on a show like this because I'm trying to capture video. So, I did, I videoed you videoing somebody else and put a link to YouTube. I just put that up. I still photoed my way through the show. Right. Looking for one of the biggest geeks we could find. And I think we both found the same person, Mr. Black Sox. That's right. I wanted to capture the show and so I'm doing it that way. Yeah. I mean, it seems like as far as documenting something, blogs are still the best option. You know, short of like, you know, writing an article or something more extensive than that. Whereas a Twitter thing is more for, you know, instantaneous, real-time, just thought stream or whatever. You mentioned, you know, tagging. How do we develop that? Right. So, we try to develop a consistent tagging theme where we, you know, put IBM up front because that's an easy search term. And then whatever the show was, like RISDUC or BPLC for the Partner Conference or Pulse or Impact and then put the year on it. You know, it's a lengthy tag but it's least descriptive. Yeah. And next year you can go to it. But it's a consistent tag and it seems to help the other group. And at the end of the day we can go to Technorati or Google or whatever and farm all the information. Which is important because we like to know what people are saying about us at the show and it comes from a variety of sources. It used to be easy. You just go to the New York Times or E-Week or whatever. Yeah. But now, you know, the analysts write very informative and probably deeper articles than, say, the press do. You know, blogging is all over the place. There's Twitters about it. We need to capture all this information so we use the good tags where we can farm everything at the end of the day. Get it to the right constituencies or the execs like to see it and, you know, and so, you know, it's been a good tool.
6:02The last question I had, it was on the topic of tags. And this is probably a typical case of me overthinking something, right? But I've noticed most of the tags you guys have come up with, they end in '08 instead of 2008. And I'm always very conflicted when I'm coming up with a tag. Do I need the full year or can I just go with the two-digit? Well, I was trying to keep the length of the tag down. We're not going to have, you know, Y3K problem now. Hopefully. For another 92 years and hopefully they'll have the software figured out by then. Right. So I'm guessing they're going to figure out what '08 is. So it was just a matter of trying to keep the tags small because we made it big enough with IBM and some show names are longer than others. Yeah. You know, and some are acronyms and some are not. So, you know, that was sort of the rationale just to keep it sane and small. Yeah. That's probably my issue is I've got too much Y2K thinking in my head. Next year you'll see '09 and probably the same tag. But if I just called it RizDuck, it starts to mix into prior years of blogging and, you know, you mash up the stuff, what's this year, what's last year. So it's just delineation. Well, great. Well, thanks for taking this time to talk about all this stuff. Enjoyed it.