So I’m fresh off my first time at South by Southwest—my virgin experience, as Foursquare termed it as I checked into the Austin-Bergstrom airport when I landed last Friday night. The South by Southwest Interactive Festival (or SXSW) is an annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin every March. This was its 25th year.
It’s curious that I’d never been to SXSW before, right? But for various reasons in the past few years running—when it seemed everyone I knew was heading to Austin every spring—I just couldn’t make it.
(And as my mother might say, that’s a sign I probably never really wanted to go to begin with, otherwise I would have figured out a way to make it happen. She might’ve been correct there: SXSW has always seems a little too big and too over
whelming and too hipster and too Spring-Break-for-Geeks insider-y to appeal to me. But I digress.)
And to be clear, I contemplated not going this year … because my work and travel schedule has been tight, and the jaunt to Austin (a long flight! On a weekend! For just two days! Even if I am speaking!) started to feel insane.
(Do you know how much you pay for a flight from Boston to Austin booked less than 24 hours in advance? I hope you don’t. But I’m sorry to say—I do. And PS: It’s a lot.)
You know that saying about how you can be your own worst enemy? For all my bellyaching about being too busy, about traveling too much, about being too introverted or not cool enough to really get into the SXSW scene… well, what a load of crap that was.
Because the truth is that SXSW is pretty amazing, and if I hadn’t been encouraged by a few people from whom I sought counsel (I’m looking at you, Vahe and Mack and Matt), well … I wouldn’t have even known what I would have missed. Are you following? Bottom line: Not showing up, I understand now, would have been a huge loss.
For me, the real magic of SXSW isn’t in any one thing, and it’s not even anything that’s easy to point to.
How SXSW Is Different
Some conferences—like the ones we have here at MarketingProfs—offer great learning and inspiring keynotes. Some offer great networking; AdTech does that. Some offer an opportunity to rub shoulders with celebrities or even weblebrities—like TED or the more accessible TEDx events. Some are great trade shows and throw off-the-hook parties, like BlogWorld. And others you go to every year to reconnect with friends—you probably have your own favorites here.
SXSW, meanwhile, offers all of that rolled into one: There are a huge number of sessions with varying degrees of learning opportunities. There are tons of parties. There are lots of technology companies and startups: SXSW has a rep as a fertile spawning ground for hot new technologies. (Twitter and Foursquare both shot to prominence after debuting at the show in 2007 and 2009, Jesse Stanchak points out.)
There are weblebrities on hand: You can’t turn around without tripping over a book author. There were real celebrities, too: My daughter squealed like a little girl (perhaps because she is one!) when I gave her a copy of the book based on the new film Red Riding Hood—a gothic retelling of the classic—signed by the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke.
And everyone else is here, too. This year, there were something close to 20,000 registrants. As my friend and co-author C.C. Chapman says, there are places you go throughout the year to connect with certain groups of industry friends. But only at SXSW are all those people all in the same place, all at the same time. There’s a kind of like-minded shorthand with everyone you meet, making connections seamless.
Then there’s Austin itself. The city is as much a part of the experience as anything. Like Manhattan is a character in Sex in the City, Austin’s small scale and quirky, laid-back vibe is an important piece of SXSW. The pedicabs, cupcake and burrito food trucks, and solar-powered carousel framed the story as much as the 881,400-square-foot convention center.
Some who remember SXSW when it was smaller and more intimate say the event has jumped the shark. The corporate marketers and suits have arrived, and the Spring Break analogy no longer applies. The haters say that SXSW has lost its appeal.
I can’t really speak to SXSW in previous years—and possibly I’m one of those icky marketers the alums moan about (!)—but I imagine that an event that grew by 30 percent this year alone feels a whole lot different than it used to. Then again, I don’t know of a swift-moving industry that didn’t pine for some part of its former incarnation. I remember being at AdTech in 1999 when the suits arrived. They brought money and legitimacy. But still it felt like they crashed our party.
Some Perfect Moments. And Others … Umm… Not So Much
Was SXSW perfect? No way. It’s overwhelming. And exhausting. (I slept for exactly 90 minutes the whole weekend.)
And parts of it were downright annoying. Registration in the convention center comes to mind: You fill out your information on an index card (with a tiny pencil like you’d use on a miniature golf course—really, guys?) and then—with hundreds of others—stand behind a yellow line and wait for your name to be shouted into the cavernous belly of the convention center. It’s loud and really hard to hear, and the whole thing has the panicked feel of a place with limited resources but huge need. Like a Soviet bread line. Or TGI Fridays at happy hour.
But there were perfect moments. A interesting session called Brave New World: Debating Brands’ Role as Publishers—expertly moderated by NPR’s On Point talk-show host, Tom Ashbrook—offered both heat and light. But what was really special about it was the way that it got me and Eloqua’s Joe Chernov—who was standing nearby—talking: How can we help brands understand more specifically how to navigate this new world, where everyone is a “publisher”? What can we cull from a world we both know well—the world of journalism—that makes sense to them?
Also perfect: The way Leigh Durst, principal of Live Path and a MarketingProfs contributor, used SXSW as a launchpad for an impromptu but inspired campaign to collect aid for the relief effort in Japan. Leigh, along with BlogWorld conference director Deb Ng and CauseVox founder Rob Wu, created SXSW4Japan.org (on Twitter: #SWSWCares) in partnership with The American Red Cross, and launched a website at SXSW to collects donations. (As of Sunday night, the group had raised close to $100K.)
And that’s the thing: That’s the kind of stuff that makes SXSW unlike any other event in the digital space. So what does that add up to? For me, that adds up to two things: Inspiration and opportunity.
Like Slamming a Red Bull
I left SXSW feeling alive with inspiration and more ripe with opportunity than I have in a while. Brimming with ideas and contacts, and feeling lit by the energy of the people I met there and their love for what they do. It’s kind of like the conference equivalent of a Red Bull.
Saturday night—my only full night at SXSW—I bumped into my friend Rich Nadworny at a party coordinated by KickApps. One of the things he was hoping to get out of SXSW, he said, was a little inspiration, because he’d been feeling a bit in a rut.
I said I felt that way, too, because there’s a very fine line between a groove and a rut. And with my schedule lately (see that bit about too much work and travel, above), I have felt like I was slipping from the former into the latter.
I was quoting the songwriter Christine Lavin (“There’s a very fine line between a groove and a rut; a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts.”) which seems appropriate for Austin, when I think of it now.
Because of the city itself, and because of the conference—both of them full of eccentricities, nearly verging on full-blown nuttiness … but not quite. Which, it turns out, is a great formula for guiding you out of a rut and into a groove.
So who went to SXSW? Who left inspired? And who came away from it not-so-much … ?
Tags: Austin, events, in-person meetings, South by Southwest, Spring Break for Geeks, sxsw, SXSWi, TradeShows
Sounds like you got a lot out of it, Ann. Did they tape your session?
Love the pic!
Thanks Elaine. That’s me with Lee Odden, of TopRankBlog.com, at the Wiley Publishing party. It was part of his “funny face series.” ; )
They didn’t tape the session, but you can see photos of it on the MP Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/marketingprofs
It was good to see you there, Ann.
Same! And I loved that I got to see you TWICE in one month!! COUP.
I’m so glad you got to come to SXSW Ann! You’re right, the experience isn’t perfect, and it CAN be stressful as hell after a couple of days (especially for us introverts!). But the bottom line is that there’s no one event that brings THIS MANY PEOPLE as SXSW. If I were to list all of the hundreds of people that I’ve been lucky enough to meet in this space, the majority of those meetings happened at SXSW.
I really hope to see you again next year in Austin, and hopefully for more than a day
Totally. What took me so long anyway, right….?
Glad to hear you came out! Yes, SXSW is wonderfully nourishing for the mind and soul. The breadth of content over 4.5 days offers something for everyone. I could have done the whole conference over again with an entirely different series of sessions and still had a terrific time. The growth to nearly 20K participants has stifled the interaction and I hope they either cap registration or do something to limit the population next year.
And yes, Austin is an awesome town. Help us keep that way and please don’t move here.
LOL… I love Austin. But I’m a Boston girl. So no worries there.
This definitely seemed to be a transition year for the event; it’ll be interesting to see how they manage its growth. On balance, though, that’s a good problem to have: Because they do so much right.
Ann — thrilled you made it, altho regret that we didn’t connect while you were out that weekend. I took a couple of days off from the happy madness, and it loox like those were the 2 days you were here. Ah well, at least we in Austin served you up better weather than we did for the M Profs Digital Marketing Forum.
For my part, I WAS one of those nattering nabobs of negativity who was proclaiming it had jumped the shark. Have spoken at SXSWi multiple times on SEO and AdWords and general online marketing topics, and last year thought the whole thing had just reached a level of ridiculousness. Am now, after last week, convinced I was WRONG. Yes, SXSWi isn’t what it used to be, but the NEW creature it has morphed into is a creature of value, and its own sort of beauty.
See you in Boston at the MProfs B2B event, if not before.
All best wishes,
Bill Leake, CEO Apogee Results
Exactly, Bill. Change is sometimes painful, but inevitable, I guess. It is ridiculous – but for me that was part of the charm! Insane charm… maybe. But charm nonetheless!
And yes — hope to see you in Boston!
I think just talking, drinking and hanging out with you got me out of my rut! See you soon in Burlington VT.
To quote another singer/songwriter…from a different generation. Ronnie Milsap “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world”. Although I wish they would have held the social media track closer to the convention center it was great. Next year I hope they can do better with the transport or make more sessions closer together.
Drinking from a interactive knowledge fire hose while at the same time meeting F2F with followers and/or people I stalk is the only way to describe it. I think I liked the gaming connection to saving the world best. Jane McGonigal.
Thanks for coming to Austin. Ya’ll come back now, ya hear!
It’s pretty fun to walk down the street or through the convention center and recognize so many faces. I agree!
I agree on the transport issues… and I also think the whole registration process is pretty stressful for a first-timer. It’s really not clear what to do/how to do it, unless you spend a lot of time studying the process (I didn’t). That was part of my reluctance on attending… because I felt overwhelmed before I even GOT there.
Me, too. I wrote this post, didn’t I?
This is a great description, thanks for getting it out there. I feel similarly about SxSW. I was a little nostalgic for the years that I listened in to more sessions. This time I had way more more work connections to maker, which means the marketers have indeed arrived in mass. I was very glad to meet you in person for the first time. I think I met Mack there for the first time as well. But Valeria, I had to get to her neck of the woods to meet her the first time, but was thrilled to see her again
Really great to meet!
I missed a lot of people (the scope and scale are definitely difficult), but grateful you weren’t among them!
What an awesome SXSW first time experience. Hope to see you there next year! Thanks for the mention about SXSWcares — far from perfect, but full of passion and impact.
-Rob Wu, CauseVox
Exactly, Rob. And seriously – great job! I talked to Leigh for a while last night about your efforts at SXSWCares. As I told her, I’m totally impressed/in awe of/amazing/insert over-the-top adjective here!! I’d love to have you write a piece for MarketingProfs with your lessons learned, at some point, when things calm down.
Nice, I did NOT go but lived viscerely through tweets and postings of other participants. It is a one of a kind, so hope to go next year before it gets to commercialized. I have spent a ton of time eating BBQ in that airport and hanging out on 6th Street so I am not surprised by the vibe. Remember, sugar free Red Bull is slightly better for you
Hey Dan! I hope I see you there next year! (And yes I’ll check out the sugar free Red Bull!)
And to think I was one of those questioning whether you should bother going. Bad friend! BAD! ;>}
Nah – I sought YOUR counsel, remember? Anyway, I could definitely see your side of it. The compressed time frame helped keep my energy and attitude up. I’d have to rework my strategy otherwise.
But yeah — I loved the networking. Great time. Which surprised me, I admit.
This year was also my first sxsw. I summed it up as such: it’s like the first week of college, except the people are smarter, the sessions more interesting and all the parties are sponsored.
By the last day my mind was so blown I just wanted to o home to my wife
. The most amazing and exhausting experience in a long time
I think you and I had a similar reaction!
Ann – I was sad to have missed you. My schedule conflicted with where I knew you’d be. I brought my Content Rules book all the way from Montreal with me for you to sign, alongside CC’s quip to commemorate grabbing the last one from Amazon.ca. (Or did I? #QVC). This was my 3rd sxsw (08, 10, 11) and like Mack said, it is a great opportunity to meet so many people in one place (I met him there in 08). It is overwhelming and chaotic and exhilarating and exhausting. That is its magic.
Wow – I’m so bummed we didn’t meet F2F. Well… next year? If not before? Yes?
Great post. Perfectly stated. Could not agree more with the summary. Exhausting, overwhelming, energizing were the three words I used in my blog post summarizing my experiences. (Btw — your observation of the pencils at registration were fantastic — brought back painful memories from long ago of Service Merchandise.)
It was all about networking and connections. I ended up missing a ton of the panels due to client meetings, and many were hit or miss. But I LOVED the Boston in Austin bash…amazing to see so many Bostonians there, and to realize there were hundreds who didn’t make it.
Last — despite other comments in other posts, I thought you and CC did exactly the right thing in the book reading vs. assuming no one had read it.
Thanks, Glenn. And I’m still laughing at Service Merchandise. (A brand I haven’t thought of in a dog’s age….!)
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