Some final thoughts on South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2011

With ten venues and a reported 18,000 registrants scrambling to sort through hundreds of sessions, along with untold dozens of promotional parties and impromptu events

Today's post is brought to us by guest blogger and fellow TAAN member Mark Gale. Mark is the president of Charleston|Orwig, a Wisconsin strategic communications firm that deals with reputation management and integrated marketing.

With ten venues and a reported 18,000 registrants scrambling to sort through hundreds of sessions, along with untold dozens of promotional parties and impromptu events, it’s pretty much impossible to get a sense of everything that happened at the 2011 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. However, even with all the churn, there were some things that still rose to the top and just might be worth a look.

GroupMe clearly had the group’s attention. If you are not familiar with the company, it’s a simple service that lets you share via texting with several contacts at once, creating a private chat room of sorts. For example, I signed up (it takes about a minute) and can now send a text message or photo to my wife, daughter and son by using my “Family” group. They can all reply back to the group. GroupMe also allows for voice conferencing and has a GPS function that shows you where individuals in your group are on a map. (Handy for the three of us from Charleston|Orwig spread out around Austin.)

Foursquare brought 40 of its 50 employees to SXSW this year, along with a new interface and a CEO (Dennis Crowley) who enthusiastically spread his passion. In an interview with Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Crowley explained that the Foursquare vision goes well beyond getting crowned as mayor of the local coffee shop. The idea is to tie your location and even your history at a location into a database that pushes out useful information and suggestions based on your preferences. To spur further development, they’re also opening up that database to others. He sees strong retail tie-ins and a heavy emphasis on useful information.

FourSquare CEO, Dennis Crowley speaking at SXSWi

In a sense, Foursquare is where Twitter was a couple years ago—moving from a novelty to a legitimate business platform. Foursquare hit a daily record 2.6 million check-ins during the festival and is certainly worth a second look. (Meanwhile, closest competitor Gowalla was heralded as has having great design.)

Another company getting some buzz at SXSWi was 4chan. If you are like me, you might not have heard of 4chan. Before you search it out, be forewarned that content can be a bit wild, which is why no link is included here. Regardless, 4chan is one of the largest, loosely-knit communities online with a reported 12 million users per month and more than 20 million page views per day. Its 24-year-old founder, Christopher Poole, launched a new platform called Canvas that might just bring the raucous idea of 4chan into mainstream use. Right now, the beta site allows community editing of photos and promises to provide a platform to do the same with music and video. Those of us involved with communicating and influencing ought to take a look. Wired wrote a nice article about Canvas also.

It’s worth a note that some of the “biggest” designers and user experience experts at SXSWi still use paper notebooks, pens, whiteboards and flip charts to generate ideas. In one session, the presenter had her “slides” drawn in marker on a flip chart by an intern. It was quite compelling.

Not all designers use computers to generate ideas.

 My final bit of advice is this: If you attend SXSW Interactive next year, you should certainly seek out the obvious marquee sessions and events that relate to your business. Then do yourself a favor and look for some quirky thought-starters. On Monday afternoon, I quietly sat in on a discussion of some very passionate and self-proclaimed activist vegan bloggers. They said that less than one percent of America is vegan. Yet, several made their livings by serving this extremely narrowly defined niche. In fact, check out Vegansaurus, which is said to be one of America’s leading vegan blogs.  

You can read more from Mark on his company's blog, Reputation Forward.

Comments

[True Religion Jeans]

We use friendship writing a book, a thick book.

[Sean Duffy]

Mark,Thanks for your excellent posts from SXSW. I enjoyed them. It helped dull the pain of not being able to attend. - Sean

[My Bussines]

nice post :D

[Visit Macassar]

thanks for information...

[Text Message Marketing]

Interesting post. I still believe that with the way people are using their mobile phones these days, text message marketing is a great technique for businesses. But it should be executed wisely. Otherwise, consumers will feel that they are being spammed.