SXSW: Day Five Recap

This was the last day of the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin. The conference lasted five days and was been jam-packed with educational sessions about emerging technology. It was long, fun, exhausting, engaging, informative, crowded and worth every minute.

According to reports, the interactive portion of the festival outsold both the film and music portions. There were 12,000 interactive badge holders this year. For those that have been attending SXSW for several years, this number was almost too much to handle: they complained about the mass and accompanying lack of intimacy among the group. This being my first year, I was in awe of event and appreciated everything it had to offer. Maybe they are right and SXSW interactive has jumped the shark, making it less valuable than before, but that was not my experience.

The last day offered approximately 140 sessions, of which I attended the following:

• “LBS 101: Geolocation on the ‘Horizon’”
• “Social Business”
• Keynote presentation with Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of online music service Spotify
• “Interactive Infographics”

“LBS 101: Geolocation on the ‘Horizon’” was a continuation of the location theme that was prevalent throughout the conference. This particular session focused more the technology aspect of the services rather than the user aspect. To emphasize the demand and opportunity for location-based services (LBS), the presenter started with the statistic that approximately 55% of all text/SMS messages sent are some variation of “where are you?”. That equates to almost 650 billion location-based service text messages in 2009. To further demonstrate the potential, the presenter revealed that of the 200 million mobile subscribers in the United States, 18.5% are smart phones with built-in technology for geo-location. However, for most of the market, downloading an app for updating location status is a barrier to entry. The benefit of using a location-based service will need to be pretty great to jump that hurdle with the mass-market user.

Today, location-based services are being used for navigation, family location (if on a shared mobile service plan) and friend finding through social media applications. The future of location-based services could include notification when friends are nearby, location aware advertising, location aware marketing/couponing, crowdsourcing traffic systems and fraud prevention. The technology already exists today for location-based advertising, but it is not being implemented. Just last week, Starbucks announced a partnership with FourSquare to award a barista badge to frequent visitors, but won’t be sending coupons or promotions through the service just yet. An example provided in the session for how location-based advertising/marketing could be used: the Starbucks on a corner in Austin is having a slow day so they push out a coupon for everyone within 25 meters for 50% off to bring in customers. Based on the amount of conversation at SXSW this year, it is safe to assume that we will see location-based services increasing in use over the next two years, both among business and consumers.

“Social Business” was a panel presentation from three communications people (marketing, PR, customer service) talking about how social media has impacted them. The panelists included David Meerman Scott and Captain Nathan Broshear of the Air Force. David Meerman Scott, a professional marketing and leadership speaker, as well as author, started the session. Scott presented many quotable one liners for this captive audience: speak to buyers in their language, not yours; create triggers that encourage people to share; the most overused terms in press releases include “innovate,” “unique,” “pleased to” and “leading provider”; lose control of your brand. Although his presentation style was engaging and entertaining, the content was pretty generic.

Captain Nathan Broshear is Director of Public Affairs for the Air Force. He talked about how the armed forces can use social media with every airman acting as a spokesperson using his iPhone and Flip cam as tools. The Air Force now allows members to post content to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, knowing that this assists in spreading the message about their work efforts and can help with recruiting. The embracing of social media has resulted in media calls to the Air Force to expand on intriguing stories, rather than the Air Force having to reach out to the media to “sell” their stories. As a result, the Air Force claims to have not issued a news release in eight years. The Air Force is using social media is used to humanize the organization.

Tuesday’s keynote presentation was an interview with Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of online music service Spotify. It was a nice transition from the interactive portion to the music portion of the SXSW festival. Spotify is a music sharing site that is not yet available in the United States. The site and service allows users to build playlists, access them from anywhere (mobile or online) and share them with friends. Because most in the audience was unfamiliar with the service, Ek did a demonstration and overview of how Spotify works both online and through a mobile app. Ek’s stated the Spotify goal as wanting “to make music like water” in its availability. He talked about the social nature of music and our human desire to share it with others.

“Interactive Infographics” was a session for designers to understand the impact of presenting data as interesting graphics. The panelists include designers from the New York Times and GOOD magazine, as well as a representative from Processing.org and Stamen Design. The majority of the session was spent showcasing the work of the four panelists as examples of the possibilities.

There was a lot to take in over the five days of SXSW. As we digest the information and figure out how it applies to our businesses, it will be interesting to see if and/or how the predictions hold true.