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.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

Art Your You

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.

Ryan Holmes

Work Success Works

You can run a sprint or your can run a marathon, but you can't sprint a marathon.

Ryan Holmes

Your You UN

Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.

Ryan Holmes

Communication Up UN

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.

Ryan Holmes

Men Finance Art

I don't know how many times I've turned to Twitter and Facebook to commiserate and celebrate, bounce ideas off of friends, colleagues and other entrepreneurs, and just connect with the wider world outside my office.

Ryan Holmes

Time World Wit

Hammer down product fundamentals first. Make sure you've got something that works before doubling down on promotion and marketing. Create a groundswell of organic support, and only then leverage PR and advertising to spread the word.

Ryan Holmes

Work Men Age

Although social media is a relatively new form of communication, it has become the primary way retailers and customers are interfacing.

Ryan Holmes

Communication Way Us

From its humble origins in college dorm rooms, social media has quietly crept into the boardroom.

Ryan Holmes

T Social Media Social

Sales teams use social media to generate leads and track clients as they move through the sales funnel. Operations and distribution teams forecast supply chains, while research and development squads brainstorm product ideas.

Ryan Holmes

Men While Use

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.

Ryan Holmes

Wit Ways Way

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.

Ryan Holmes

Technology You Views

Amongst high unemployment rates, a competitive job market and a shrinking global economy, the emerging social media industry only continues to grow.

Ryan Holmes

Pet Men Us

The growing role of enterprise social media, plus the growing budgets and authority of CMOs entrusted with choosing the best platforms, translates into an exciting future for apps that harness social potential for large companies.

Ryan Holmes

Trust Future Wit

Tech companies don't exist in a bubble; they draw from and feed into a larger community. Ideally, the relationship is symbiotic.

Ryan Holmes

Relationship Unity Unit

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.

Ryan Holmes

Work War Art

It may be coincidence that the decline of newspapers has corresponded with the rise of social media. Or maybe not.

Ryan Holmes

Wit T Social Media

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.

Ryan Holmes

Work Design Car

A swarm of new business tools coming to phones and desktops near you promise to boost efficiency and streamline collaboration by borrowing social features from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Ryan Holmes

War Business You

A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?

Ryan Holmes

Art You Will

Not using social media in the workplace, in fact, is starting to make about as much sense as not using the phone or email.

Ryan Holmes

Anyone with an inbox knows what I'm talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.

Ryan Holmes

As technology has improved, our digital lives have only grown more tangled and cluttered.

Ryan Holmes

Entrepreneurs, by disposition, are built to think big. When a role no longer affords those opportunities, it might be best to leave it in capable hands and move on.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

We've all been inundated with so many ingenious, must-have, time-saving apps and tools that we really don't have a second left to spare.

Ryan Holmes

The longer you're stuck in a position that doesn't truly challenge you, the less likely you'll be able to leave it. Inertia, in fact, is one of my worst fears.

Ryan Holmes

At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.

Ryan Holmes

Companies and managers that find a way to harness social media stand to gain.

Ryan Holmes

South America's most populous country, Brazil, is also emerging as one of the region's most social-media savvy.

Ryan Holmes

Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

No surprise that, as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded.

Ryan Holmes

Social media has shaken up the world of sales, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offering new ways to hound leads and unprecedented insights into clients.

Ryan Holmes

For resourceful tech founders, finding capital is rarely a problem; making the best use of it is another story. A few years slinging pepperoni pies and chicken wings - on tiny margins and with minimal investment - might not be the worst fiscal training.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

Customer service teams at many companies have already embraced social media, often out of necessity.

Ryan Holmes

LinkedIn and Flickr, among other sites, have already proven freemium can generate revenue in the social media context.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive.

Ryan Holmes

Payfirma has revolutionized the payment process, consolidating mobile, e-commerce and in-store payments under a single solution, much like HootSuite did for social media.

Ryan Holmes

For everybody in their busy lives, you need to invest in sharpening your tools, and you need to invest in longevity.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

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.

Ryan Holmes

The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.

Ryan Holmes

It helps to look at branding as a challenge that entrepreneurs spend years perfecting.

Ryan Holmes