Tag Archives: SxSW
CM loves SxSW Interactive!
We always have a crowd attending, but in 2012, we want to find our place on stage. Help us get there by checking out our FIVE topic submissions in the SXSW PanelPicker systems and voting for your favorite (or all 5).
Why you should vote for us?
SxSW may be a mash-up of digital trends, but in these five ideas, we think we’ve got a little something for everyone. You can check ‘em out now, or let us prove it to you. This week, to show you how smart and fun our ideas are, we’re devoting our blog and our twitter stream to our submissions–5 topics, 5 days. Each day we’ll give you the chance to learn more about our POV on one of our submitted topics with a blog post AND get involved by sharing your own thoughts via a twitter chat.
MONDAY
Consumer Goods: The Next Social Channels
Panel, prototyping contest & demo led by CM’s Executive Technology Director, Scott Ross.
>Vote Here
Join our @CriticalMass Twitter chat Mon @ 2pm to discuss #socialgoods
Plus, enter our prototyping contest by emailing your own ‘socially-integrated consumer good’ idea to sxswcontest@criticalmass.com
TUESDAY
Confessions of a Community Moderator
Workshop and interactive “confessional booth” including moderators for Converse, Peanuts, Humana and Aveda.
>Vote Here
Join our @CriticalMass Twitter chat Tues @ 2pm to discuss #communityconfessions
Read More
SXSWi – it’s the birth of a proto-city: a hive of integrated people experimenting with the tools in the market that, without mass local adoption, would not have any poignancy. It’s where the early adopters can temporarily form a society of mutually founded infrastructure.
Obviously I like to consider myself a fairly early adopter. I am generally picking up the newest thing in beta and giving it a try. The proto-city certainly is a unique experience where these services just work and I’m not at the mercy of my family and friends to adopt the numerous new things I throw at them every week.
This week’s post is all about these services and how they work, a kind of preview to how they would work if a mainstream audience were to pick them up. There are some old and some new, but all based around the ever growing social–mobile & desktop–sector.
The prevailing theme this year was group messaging and location based services. Typically when you look back at SXSW there is one clear launch that will take hold and change the landscape of digital: Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. I would say that this year there was no clear winner. This may be perhaps due to development becoming easier and faster than it was a couple years ago, which would correlate to SXSW being fettered with startup after startup, creating so much noise that no single one stood out.
There’s four services that I looked at primarily while down in Austin: Convore, Beluga, Hashable, & Yobongo.
“I went to a talk that really inspired me today” was the sentence heard around Austin for the duration of the SxSW Interactive conference. Conversations overheard offered glimpses into the emotional rollercoaster of inspiration taking place. Dialogues turn philosophical when privacy or the implications of the great WWW on children are discussed and career paths are questioned. Outside of the philosophical, excitement is built in this really cool way when sentences start with, “What if I …” and end with a new idea.
I went to a talk that really inspired me the other day. The brains behind the3Six5, 6 Items or Less and Victors and Spoils held a panel on crowd-sourced projects that ask a community to be creative, but within the project’s parameters. I’ve been rolling a project like this over in my brain for about 5 months and came out feeling energized and excited. Inspiration is personal and can feel like you’re being pinged by the universe to do something awesome. The voices of the inspired rang throughout the conference locations, so I know I’m not alone.
On the way back to wherever we all came from, moving from inspiration into action is the tough part. My father, always quick on the draw with his words of wisdom, used to say, “It’s really easy to do nothing,” but why waste this kinetic conference energy on taking the easy road? Harness what’s making you tick, whether at SxSW or not, to help you get over the action-hump with a couple of intuitive, but useful tips.
1. Do something to put whatever it is you’re dreaming about into action immediately.
If your creative juices are flowing and nothing is there to catch them, you’ll likely lose your momentum. Do anything to move towards your goal and you’ll be closer than where you were before you were inspired. If you’re going to start a Web site that compiles Twitter photos with the same hashtag, buy the domain name. If you’re going to start a blog, register your Tumblr or Posterous. (By the way, is it P-oe-ster-us or P-ah-ster-us?) Make some sort of commitment to yourself via the Internet that you’re going to follow through.
Amongst the technology, digital natives, sponsors, parties, ideas, startups and even the SxSWi brand itself, there is something bigger and over-arching that embodies and represents the SxSWi event.
It is part culture, part people, part industry, part cyber, part promotion and part buzz… And while I give SxSWi full credit, it does seems bigger than them. I guess like all great brands, SxSWi builds on what is around them and while it may not be clear from time to time who is leading who, it still is the brand’s job to act as the guide and own it.
I think of SxSWi as a brand that is helping to guide us into the digital future, but more importantly I think of them as a brand that makes digital feel real. As you physically, mentally, and digitally take in the event, you can’t help but feel the ‘realness’ of digital all around you and appreciate that the borders are becoming more and more unclear.
A related note regarding these photos: The environment in and around SxSWi is plastered with promotion. In itself it is visually appealing and overwhelming at the same time, but if you sit and look at it closely for a moment, you can see that it is living and digital: QR codes, hashtags, urls, codes, etc.
15 of us CMers were heading down to SXSW. We all kinda new each other and we had met on the phone but we were more “part of the CM family” than “brothers and sisters in arms”. As we had learned from past SXSW years, it’s pretty chaotic and tough to keep everybody up to speed. Teams past have tried to use FourSquare, Twitter, Text messaging, and email…all of which kind of work but each has their drawbacks. We looked at a couple of group messaging apps and decided to go with Beluga (GroupMe was the first choice but it wasn’t available in Canada yet).
Group messaging is nothing new but the Beluga app (and web interface) makes it easy. There were a few immediate cultural impacts that we saw:
Constant communication breeds friendship in a hurry. Although the circumstances of the trip built an immediate connection between us all, the camaraderie was accelerated due to this fine little app. The culture of the group really took hold quickly and facilitated the face to face connections that really amplified the team spirit. Meet-ups, jokes, photos, observations, general news all flew around the group.
Sub-pods of the greater pods will emerge. Two sub groups appeared and they carried out their own messaging that was more appropriate for the smaller audience. Note: it can be really easy to message to the wrong pod (as somebody in our group quickly found out), so make sure you are going to the right pod!!!
Before:
The recycled air on this SouthWest Airlines flight to SXSW– or Austin, TX as the city is usually known – is filled with an excitement similar to what I remember of the bus-ride to summer camp. The parallels are unmistakable. Rows in front of me, I hear two people becoming fast-friends and exchanging stories from years past. Two dudes in the row behind me are engaging in what I can only term a game of “who knows more about what happened in social media and tech in the past three hours,” often peppering the conversation with, “Oh yeah I saw that” and “That happened like three days ago, dude.” To my left, in the window seat, an Austin native just sold me on his friend’s start-up, Tabbed Out and I’m already ready to evangelize the brand.
I can almost guarantee the 80 percent of us are attending the conference have started a conversation with, “I’m so excited.” These “kids” are going crazy and I expect them to break into song at any moment. Maybe that just happened at my camp.
Singing or no singing, as a SXSW newbie, I feel wide-eyed. I think the guy from Austin sees it on my face. He keeps asking me about the conference in that 30-minutes-before-a-first-date way a roommate asks about a guy.
I’m on board with these excited, laptop-filled rows of professionals sent away to camp for the weekend by our bosses. I am so excited, but when I’m excited, my attention span gets shorter and I flit around like a hummingbird, so I’ve set some objectives for myself. Further down, you can see how well I did in meeting them.
