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" I'd like to think my company HootSuite is anything but a stodgy old-boys' club. As a social media company, our employees are by and large young, progressive and open-minded. "

Ryan Holmes

Media

Employees

Social Media

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

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

" 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. "

" For some people, staying grounded means doing yoga. For others, it's spending time with family. Social media, too, can be a lifesaver. "

" I'd love to build a brand, a legacy. "

" 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

Ground

Investment

" 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. "

Ryan Holmes

School

Day

" 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. "

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

" 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

Seed

College

" Understanding and respecting your roots is critical not only to winning the tech talent wars but leaving a legacy that transcends bottom lines. "

" 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

Reality

Standing

" 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

Create

See

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old-boys' club. "

" 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

Talking

Spam

" 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. "

" As an entrepreneur, the pressures of a startup can be enormous, but it's rarely life or death. "

" For anyone who devours the web on a daily basis, the biggest problem is too much of a good thing. There's so much extraordinary content - from articles to images, videos and Tweets - that it's almost impossible to keep track of it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Facebook, Twitter and Google have all opened offices in Brazil, recognizing the importance of localizing their products and customer service efforts. "