Open The Dialogue

South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual meeting of professionals and passionate fans of social media, music and film, began March 12 and concluded this past weekend in Austin, Texas.  In my first year at SXSW and attending on behalf of Nikon, I enjoyed a week full of learning, collaboration and inspiration.  The hype is true.  It’s an excellent opportunity to build strong relationships and create unique brand engagements for your client.

For those unfamiliar with SXSW, the first five days are dedicated to all things “Interactive,” including panels, parties and power-bloggers roaming the halls of the Austin Convention Center discussing what’s next.  The Music and Film portion of the Festival follows and the city swells to more than 30,000 filling the streets of downtown Austin.

This year,  attendees for the Interactive portion doubled with not only bloggers and social media “experts,” but corporate representatives and hundreds of PR, advertising and digital agency representatives, including a team from @mwwgroup.  As Jenna Wortham of the New York Times wrote, “the high concentration of tech savants supplies a rare opportunity for companies to woo the eyes and clicks of early adopters and influential Twitter users and bloggers capable of elevating their sites and services out of obscurity.”

Of course, not all content enlightened attendees.  There was a great deal of noise and panels with intriguing titles that didn’t deliver anything more than what is already covered within Mashable. As AdRants put it, “Some of the content was good. Some of the content was truly terrible.”

Here are a few takeaways from what we learned throughout the 10-day Festival…

#1.  Geeks like to karaoke and party.  A lot.

Interactive included five days of cookouts, kickball and Foursquare matches along with lunchtime happy hours, cocktail hours and after-after-after parties. This might seem like all fun and games, but in practice, it was a Festival of networking and idea generation for brands as large as Microsoft and as small as FoodSpotting, and a great celebration of the important role of technology and entrepreneurism of the past year.

#2. “Just watch American Idol.”

The legendary Smokey Robinson gave the keynote address to the SXSW Music attendees.  He spoke of his award-winning history in the music business and how some of his greatest hits were created by accident.  When asked what advice he would give to rising stars, he paused for a moment and said, “You are not the first to be in showbiz, you will not be the last.  Just watch the crowds at an American Idol audition.”  Knowing always where you’ve come from, what you stand for and appreciating the breaks you’ve been given along the way is key to success, according to Smokey.  It’s advice all businesses and practitioners should follow.

#3. Business in the Bathroom Line.

An incredible thing about SXSW was that everyone was someone worth getting to know.  Everyone had similar interests, passions, and desires to collaborate just waiting for a connection to be made. Everyone had an idea worth pursuing or a friend-of-a-friend you “just need to meet!”  Even standing in the 50-person bathroom queue at Stubb’s BBQ, you might meet the lead singer of a cool band, the CMO of a brilliant startup, or even a filmmaker debuting at SXSW in need of PR representation.  And, just like that, a relationship or a deal can be made.

#4. The Necessity of Official Sponsorships
The usual suspects sponsored the SXSW Festival, including Pepsi Refresh, AOL, Chevy, Miller Lite and more.  Their presence was big, splashy, and ever-present among a sea of Convention Center visitors.  We realized, though, that impact can be made without a step-and-repeat banner and pricey sponsorhips. Nikon (MWW client) partnered with the largest photo and video uploading service for Twitter, called yfrog.  Knowing there was no official aggregator for images and video at SXSW, this service pulled in content using the Twitter hashtags #SXSW and #SXSWpics to form an online gallery.  In addition to public content gathered, Nikon also sponsored several top bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Pop17 and Jeff Pulver, to hit the streets of Austin with their Nikon cameras to capture the scene.  The Nikon Gallery had hundreds of professional photos and thousands of public images.  The openness of social media, and collaborators like yfrog, allowed Nikon to have a unique brand presence without official SXSW sponsorship, although the right official sponsorships can work too.

#5 The Next Big Thing

Our minds are spinning with thoughts of what could be next for Interactive.  Of course, the talk of the town was FourSquare, Gowalla and more location-based social media networking.  The “celebrities” included Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), iJustine (@iJustine), Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) and many more who will continue to drive the thought leadership in this space. We also heard great buzz for Food Spotting, Twitter’s @Anywhere platform, and countless analytics tools and opinions about ROI.  It remains to be seen what the next “big thing” will be, because the SXSW community is full of early adopters and it takes time to create mainstream adoption, but we’re confident one of the 15,000 brains at SXSW will be responsible.

Austin featured a great cast of characters, living up to its motto “Keep Austin Weird.”  And, we can’t wait to return for the weirdness, creativity and rockin’ music at #SXSW2011.

Just because it’s Friday doesn’t mean we are taking the day off! Here are some of the social media stories that got bookmarked by Dialogue Media this week.

One is the Loneliest Number, but One Billion is a lot Happier

In case anyone is still trying to convince you that social media is a fad, new numbers suggest that two of the largest sites in the world could both pull in 1 Billion Dollars in revenue in the coming years. It seems that Facebook is geared to hit the 1.1 billion mark in 2010 while YouTube could hit the magic mark in 2011 ( and have Google keep 700 million in the process).  Not bad for a fad.

American Idol’s Social Profiles Get a Facelift

After establishing profiles for each of the 24 contestants earlier in the season, American Idol has apparently consolidated their entire operation into one account on each major network.  Fans of contestants were greeted by “Thanks so much for following me! All my updates from now on will be on our Official Ai9 Twitter Page”. Some are wondering if follower counts were taking away some of the mystery that AI usually enjoys.  We’re wondering if this will affect how fans interact with the brand down the road.  What do you think?

Foursquare and Owalla to Battle for World Domination at SXSW

Well… not really.  But after unveiling last year at the conference, both have rolled out new features in anticipation of this year’s party in Austin.  Techcrunch is reporting that Owalla has done a major redesign while Foursquare has added a category functionality.  And the word on the street is that both are rolling out new mobile apps next week.  We’re happy using both, but it will be interesting to see who wins this battle of the buzz.

What were some of your favorite PR or social media stories of the last week?

Has the economic crunch kept you from attending this year’s South by Southwest Conference in Austin? Don’t fret; Open the Dialogue’s got you covered with 5 ways to follow SXSW.  

1. Twitter:  Twitter’s reach has grown stronger by the minute and it won’t slow down on Sixth Street. The downside? Anytime a large group of first-adopters get together watch out; the amount of information will be staggering.  There are easily over 1500 (100 pages of search terms x 15 tweets on a page) tweets in the last 40 minutes.  Make sure to set up an RSS feed if you don’t want to miss anything! And make sure to follow Dialogue Media’s Blake Robinson and Joe Becker who are live on the scene.
2. Delicious: With over 16,000 SXSW tagged bookmarks so far, delicious makes it easy to see what other people are reading.  Add more tags to quickly find what you are really want to see. 
3. See Scenic Austin:  Reading all about SXSW is great but wouldn’t it be nice to see it?  Well now you can by using Ustream or Flickr. Flickr’s photo tagging allows you to quickly find the best photos or explore some of the official groups to easily get the photos you really want to see. Like video better?  Then head on over to  UStream’s Studio as they broadcast live music  from the Belmont in Austin, TX. 
4. SXSW.ning.com- The best way to see any event is from the inside.  Here at SXSW’s Insider’s guide you can easily find out what’s going on at SXSW. With plenty of pictures, videos and discussions going on, it should be easy to find something that interests you. It’s also a great place to find people to follow on Twitter, that way you don’t have to dig through all the search results.  
5. Alltop: Need to see all of the best information in one quick glance? Don’t forget about Alltop.com.  The SXSW page features all of the official and unofficial SXSW blogs, tagged stories on delicious, imeem.com, Twitter and Wordpress and even featured blogs from SXSW.ning.com. Easily the quickest way to get a lot of information.

There you have it; an easy way to stay informed about all the hot news  in Austin without having to leave your cubicle. Hopefully you’ll be there next year! Until then, how else are you staying informed?