You may have heard the rumors, the buzz, the adulation, and now the complaints. There’s a new social media tool in town and it calls itself Quora. Quora describes itself as “A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” While I’ve been following the Quora surface buzz for awhile, it never struck me as anything more than an interactive wiki. In fact, I secretly thought its real appeal was its non-mass adoption and use by “high-ranking” social media folks in the know, and honestly, I didn’t want to take the time to play with a hip new toy that wasn’t useful to me. As it begins to fall from grace however, I find myself drawn to delve deeper into this seemingly web-retro tool and see what it offers the digital sphere.

Yesterday marked the inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Marketers, PR Specialists, Web Development Companies, Technology Experts, Associations, Government Organizations, Social Media Addicts, and more converged on George Washington University in Washington, DC to listen, learn, share, and network. Whats Next, the brainchild of Tod Plotkin of Green Buzz Agency in Arlington, VA, was born of Plotkin’s frustration with the fluff and sales pitch-iness of typical events, and so he set out to create something different. His goal was to keep people engaged constantly with good information and make sure they got any questions answered that day. While not quite an “unconference” like Nonprofit 2.0, it was a veritable assault of information lined up with no breaks (except for a quick lunch) in short bursts with scheduled “niche conversations” and “floating experts” on the side. Captico sent 3 emissaries: our Lead Developer, Todd Fisher; a Project Manager, Bob Wolfe; and New Media Coordinator, Corrie Davidson (me).

Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Founder of SEOmoz.org, managed to stuff an inspiring presentation on “Advanced Tactics to Maximize SEO Opportunity” into a too-short 25 minutes presentation at the What’s Next DC 2011 Conference on Monday, January 24th. With organic search results becoming increasingly competitive, Rand’s specific tactics supplemented with examples and case studies had me eager to try some new techniques to pimp out our website. You can view his slidedeck here. (All photos by Nakeva Corothers). Some key takeaways included:

Bryan Eisenberg, Managing Partner at Eisenberg Holding was the second presenter at yesterday’s “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. He held the one of two 45 minute time slots with “The Future Shopper, How Offline is the New Online”. It was a great presentation on how the convergence of communications, logistics, and financial technology continues to evolve to reduce the friction in the customers’ buying process.

Brian Halligan, CEO and Founder of Hubspot, was the first presenter at yesterday’s inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Brian opened in one of the two long time slots of the day (45 minutes) but gave a fantastic presentation on actionable steps businesses can use to take advantage of modern inbound marketing techniques by optimizing their websites to get found by more prospects and convert a higher percentage of those prospects into paying customers. View Brian’s Slidedeck. Takeaways included:

Tomorrow several members of the Captico Team will be joining social media, new media, and technology experts from across the country (and perhaps the world!) for the “What’s Next DC” Conference in Washington, DC. The event promises to be jam-packed full of real data, case studies, real experts (no fluffy “gurus” here), networking opportunities and roving discussions.

When you think of technology companies, you probably think of hip offices, modern furniture, sleek styling, and a foosball table in the break room (well, I do). And while many a company does look just like that – Google in particular is known for its amazing culture and office environment – old school Intel was known for its “endless rows of gray cubicles, low ceilings and fluorescent lighting. For decades it resisted any changes to its office environment.” But in the last two years, Intel has been making changes.

The folks over at DCWEEK have announced this year’s event dates! DCWEEK 2011 will take place in Washington DC, November 4-11, 2011.

“DCWEEK is a festival in the US capital focused on bringing together designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators of all kinds. It’s a series of 100s of distributed events powered by the community and complemented by core conferences, parties, and projects created by the festival organizers iStrategyLabs and Tech Cocktail. DCWEEK 2010 was assembled in 3.5 months and drew 6,000 attendees from around the world.”

Several days ago, Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, covered an onstage-interview at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) by Kara Swisher of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Its a great read to get a look at where Twitter sees itself going and what it’s priorities are. Plus Dick is a pretty funny character. Below are some highlights that I found noteworthy, but I suggest reading the original article for a better picture and for Peter’s great coverage…

How much is too much? At what point do we overwhelm our websites with links to, lets be honest, 3rd party sites? Are we driving users away from the very place we purport to use social media to drive them to?

In previous articles we have shown you how to add Facebook Like and Share buttons to your site and how to embed a Tweet button on your site – you can even see our Twitter feed on the right of this blog and retweet or share on Facebook this article from links below (we hope you do)! We are obviously big fans of engagement through social media, and while perhaps we need to take it a step further on our own site (stay tuned for our forthcoming redesign), I think some people might be taking it too far.