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We are at RSDC or the Rational Software Developer Conference 2008 in Orlando, Florida, hosted

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by IBM Rational.

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And we've got a special guest with us.

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Would you like to introduce yourself?

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Well, I am John Simons.

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I work for ISV and Developer Relations and for the most part I head up blogging and Twitter

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for IBM and most of the social.

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That's the main thing we're going to talk about is how, as sort of a representative

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of IBM in that area, like how you came about to start using Twitter and blogging and things

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like that and how that's been working out for you.

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Cutting a little midway through there, when did you start using Twitter?

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I started using Twitter actually a few months ago.

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I held off doing it because I just didn't think I was that relevant.

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But I figured out that I needed to do it because it was going to capture a lot of information

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to follow the analysts.

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At events like this, for example, there was an issue at Pulse with you, as it turns out,

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that we needed to get to you.

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And I captured one of your tweets.

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I sent it over to one of the AR people, Amy Loomis.

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She got to you.

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We solved an issue.

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And that's how quickly it worked.

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So how many analysts do you find running around on Twitter doing things in there?

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You know, it's a growing list.

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It started out mostly with Redmog.

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Okay, you guys have been the leaders.

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I blog mainly because of Redmog.

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But as I go through it, I see who's following who and my list just keeps growing.

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Right.

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And then there's the analysts that are more relevant to the software group at IBM.

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And I tend to follow them more often.

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Right.

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There's some people I follow like Dvorak just because he's interesting.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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You know.

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He's always got some excitingly harebrained kooky thing to talk about.

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Yes, yes.

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He's always been entertaining.

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Right.

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And you know, a little bit off the wall.

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Right.

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I follow other people like that.

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And then sometimes I follow people who follow me who I have no idea how they pick me on.

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And I either keep them or drop them depending on how much traffic I stomach during it.

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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.

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With some slight different question that always comes up.

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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?

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Or do you just mix them together?

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It's a little bit of a mix.

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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.

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And I made it on time.

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And you know, it was really helpful.

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So I got the one opportunity I got to see Stephen O'Grady was at the meetup.

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Oh, right.

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Because he left and I needed to get to him for a very important analyst relations issue.

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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.

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That's right.

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That is a pretty vital issue.

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Right.

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It is.

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Definitely analyst relations.

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No, but I used it as a tool.

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Occasionally I put some personal stuff up there.

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I saw a cool picture of a stealth fighter today that I put up for fun.

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Right.

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But for the most part, you know, I keep it, you know, analyst related and or analyst relations related.

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Right, right, right.

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And, but I am able to help out.

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I have been sort of the leader for the software group team.

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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.

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Oh, that's exciting.

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Yeah.

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And, you know, she's heading up the software group.

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So, just because it was easy to do and, you know, for 140 characters, you know, you can do it.

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I find it a good way to keep track of what's going on.

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You know, and I mix it in and out with the blogs.

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I'm a little bit more extensive with the blogging on a show like this because I'm trying to capture video.

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So, I did, I videoed you videoing somebody else and put a link to YouTube.

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I just put that up.

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I still photoed my way through the show.

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Right.

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Looking for one of the biggest geeks we could find.

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And I think we both found the same person, Mr. Black Sox.

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That's right.

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I wanted to capture the show and so I'm doing it that way.

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Yeah.

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I mean, it seems like as far as documenting something, blogs are still the best option.

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You know, short of like, you know, writing an article or something more extensive than that.

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Whereas a Twitter thing is more for, you know, instantaneous, real-time, just thought stream or whatever.

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You mentioned, you know, tagging.

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How do we develop that?

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Right.

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So, we try to develop a consistent tagging theme where we, you know, put IBM up front because that's an easy search term.

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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.

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You know, it's a lengthy tag but it's least descriptive.

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Yeah.

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And next year you can go to it.

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But it's a consistent tag and it seems to help the other group.

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And at the end of the day we can go to Technorati or Google or whatever and farm all the information.

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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.

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It used to be easy.

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You just go to the New York Times or E-Week or whatever.

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Yeah.

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But now, you know, the analysts write very informative and probably deeper articles than, say, the press do.

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You know, blogging is all over the place.

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There's Twitters about it.

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We need to capture all this information so we use the good tags where we can farm everything at the end of the day.

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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.

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The last question I had, it was on the topic of tags.

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And this is probably a typical case of me overthinking something, right?

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But I've noticed most of the tags you guys have come up with, they end in '08 instead of 2008.

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And I'm always very conflicted when I'm coming up with a tag.

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Do I need the full year or can I just go with the two-digit?

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Well, I was trying to keep the length of the tag down.

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We're not going to have, you know, Y3K problem now.

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Hopefully.

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For another 92 years and hopefully they'll have the software figured out by then.

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Right.

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So I'm guessing they're going to figure out what '08 is.

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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.

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Yeah.

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You know, and some are acronyms and some are not.

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So, you know, that was sort of the rationale just to keep it sane and small.

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Yeah.

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That's probably my issue is I've got too much Y2K thinking in my head.

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Next year you'll see '09 and probably the same tag.

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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.

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So it's just delineation.

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Well, great.

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Well, thanks for taking this time to talk about all this stuff.

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Enjoyed it.