Intrinsic Experience at SXSW

The ride to Austin wasn't very eventful but we knew this trip was going to be extremely relevant to business throughout 2010/11.   The relationships I had made the prior year were still flourishing with opportunities.   The main reason people travel from around the World to Austin isn't just to hear the 1000 s of bands that are scheduled to perform, its not even because of the great food and hospitality in the state of Texas.   The main draw to this annual event is the promotion and unveiling of new performance marketing tools.

The 29,000 or so vendors at SXSW all come to show off their marketing products.   This is one of the only venues that is mostly used by social media entrepreneur's and businesses that support the entertainment industry.   The technology unveiled as well as gadgets,widgets and services are developed to create additional revenue streams for artists.   In an economy where technology fuels the sales of products using online access and virtual uploads many artist and record labels are becoming more irrelevant on a major scale.     The indie artists and grass roots companies are making their way through use of virtual sales and online reach to consumers on a level that major corporations had no blueprint to compete with.     This year companies like Gowalla, (Gowalla.com), Foursquare (foursquare.com) and other mobile companies with factors relating to the networking of humans outside of the virtual world were the buzz around town.   In the past few years the online world has dominated the lives of millions of people.   Children hardly play outside anymore, entrepreneurs run their businesses from their home offices and use Skype for meetings.     Family members are more likely to keep in touch on networks like face book and twitter as opposed to using their phone to call each other or even to actual meet up to hang out.   I personally don t think that s a good trend for the future.   My mother has to text me in order to catch up with me nowadays.

I remember that not more than 10 years ago I used to get greeting cards in the mail, plan vacations and outing to visit friends and family.   In 21^st century we have used the Internet to communicate and keep in touch wow how times have changed.   How do we get back home from here?   To my astonishment the brands and products unveiled this year seem to be working hard to change the trend.

The human interaction factor was amazingly elevated by the social media companies whose ideas are to use today's available technology and virtual worlds to promote events and projects aimed at bringing people back together in public and intimate settings.   Bye bye Computer Love.