The Pontiflex Blog

Thoughts from South by Southwest

March 24, 2009 at 10:32 am Arun Krishnan Leave a comment

South by Southwest was excellent this year, well until the Monday night when I found out my apartment in New York was on fire. But now I have officially found a better apartment (it is a great time to rent in New York,) and I wanted to share my thoughts with our wonderful Pontiflex blog readers.

Walking around the Expo Hall, it is hard to find a company without the term “social media” written all over it. From twitter clones to social media consultants, it was unquestionably the focal point of the show. It is not a big surprise, with Twitter showing up on Oprah, the hype has reached a new pinnacle. Given the current market demand for performance, though, I have yet to really see any social marketers offer results – well beyond “interaction rates” which are very hard to connect to measurable sales.
Particularly interesting panels included: the overly crowded Moms who Tech, and the Presenting to the Brain keynote. Moms are getting into technology in a big way on the internet and they control a ton of spending dollars. As such, marketers are trying to find the best way to advertisers with tech-oriented moms (and a lot of moms are also trying to monetize their blogging). The discussion was focused on best practices for creating a conversation with moms. Sounds like the biggest problem is lack of transparency (sounds familiar to our solution), which means a lot of moms are getting paid to speak well about companies but are not telling their users about the pay. The audience all agreed transparency was the key, well that and spending branding dollars with mom-bloggers. The conversation continues on Twitter at #momsxsw or #momswhotech if you want to follow some good conversations. WSJ also covered it.

For everyone that finds themselves in front of pulpits often, Presenting to the Brain was an excellent example of the expert do’s and do nots of public presentations. It was geared more towards speaking engagements to diverse audiences (not the basic sales meeting that we all love), but still had some great pointers. I am already taking more slides out of my decks, and looking for more emotional images to excite my audience. Here is a quick liveblog of the event: http://catchupblog.typepad.com/catch_up_blog/2009/03/presenting-to-the-brain.html

As many SXSWers know, happy hour is where the conference really begins. This year’s top party was the Tumblr event – great outside venue at cedar street but low enough volume to talk. Hats off to the team at Foodzie for handing out smores to those of us waiting in line. Tumblr checked every person to make sure they had a tumblr account by using a laptop at the entrance, a neat idea. Digg was open to everyone in Texas, and I think everyone showed up for the live show. My crowd opted for some Stubbs BBQ then made our way elsewhere.
So big takeaway – social media is still the hottest topic but no one has yet to figure out exactly how to monetize it. In the downtown, marketers are still very focused on performance, and I got a lot of business cards interested in the Pontiflex solution for developing a passionate user community.

Brian Long, Director, National Sales, Pontiflex

Entry filed under: Lead Generation, Online Advertising, Trade Shows. Tags: .