Okay, I know I expressed a bit of concern about whether SXSW would be this big I Heart Twitter! fest or if I would actually learn something new. No worries! I attended three fabulous panels and a keynote address on Day 2. In all honesty, the speakers most certainly did teach/encourage/motivate/challenge me, so if I had to go home today I would feel like I got my money’s worth.

I very much enjoyed hearing from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, his keynote address was packed out and even spilled into three simulcast rooms. The great news about Tony is that he’s relatively young, extremely successful and absolutely understands that THE BEST way to have productive, customer service-oriented, on-message employees is to create a culture that fosters those things.

If you want your customers to be WOWed, as Hsieh does, then you’ve gotta take great care to hire employees who enjoy WOWing folks. And, “fire quickly” those who do not. Nice the hear that Zappos’s priority is creating and maintaining that culture. “If we hire for the culture fit,” Hsieh said, “the rest just takes care of itself.” He also said that Zappos considers money spent on WOWing customers and training and motivating employees as marketing dollars. It’s billiant, in my opinion.

The panel on Internet privacy was also fabulous. It wasn’t so much that I learned new stuff, you already know how I feel about the importance of knowing your online self. It’s was really just nice to have my obsession validated by really smart folks who are just as freaked out as I am about how little the average person cares about what personal information of theirs is floating around on the Web.

Anyway, there were so many great nuggets of geekdom crowding their way into my head that I thought I might explode a little. You can see my schedule over there…except for that Obama/Dean one. I skipped that to hang with hubby. And that’s okay because the keynote for Day 3 is the same Obama Web-ness, so it’s all good. The topics and converstaions spurred many blog ideas for me, so look for those in the coming days!

In the meantime I’ll leave you with this video of Dave stripping down at the trade show to get a cool t-shirt. We do what we have to do, friends: