Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people.

The SXSW conference started with opening remarks from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh on how fostering a passionate culture of employees while proving extraordinary customer service can massively extend your brand. He spoke about good deeds, chasing your dreams, greater life purpose, goals, inspiration and ended with a strong recommendation for a book by Jonathan Haidt called, "The Happiness Hypotheses". Heavy stuff for a company that known best for selling shoes.

It was inspiring and while obvious on many levels, became an underlying theme throughout the conference: sharing, open, trust, playing fair.

Over the next four days, the number of references to relationships, friends, community, openness, honesty...were many. While not a new concept to business chatter; individuals, brands (countries, civilization...), are realizing the need to focus on the basics to create, foster and extend their image, products, brands and survival.

Concepts like sharing, openness and free may be the new buzz, but would never have made it to the white boards of corporate America as a priority or requirement to remaining relevant. It's a monumental shift for companies formed around protecting intellectual property to now open their doors to the open sharing of content, often for free.

The panel on Becoming Social: This Changes Everything, lead by the heads of development for Myspace, Yahoo, Google and Reuters Thompson was interesting specifically in that the former was a perfect example of a company founded on the dissemination of proprietary information finding it a difficult transition to becoming transparent with it's data, while acknowledging that there was not a choice. To survive, brands need to not only acknowledge consumers, but to open their doors, give them something they don't expect and foster the open conversation that drives perception, respect, trust and happiness?

Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Figure out how to monetize free.