SXSW Notes II: Who wasn’t there?

March 23, 2009
by Alex Hoye

So, who was there?

• Leaders and creators of a new pantheon of leading global firms who are trying to keep true to their agile roots despite their scale : Facebook, Google, Salesforce

• Purveyors of the proverbial picks and shovels to the trade who have evolved in these cloud-strewn, open source times: Sun, Microsoft, Adobe

• Aspiring game changers with transformative models: Zappos, Yammer, Etsy

• White House advisors (I couldn’t imagine a Bush delegation feeling at home here, even in his home state – times have changed)

• Press and pundits-at-large who blog, video and even some proper writers: Guardian, BBC, BSkyB, TechCrunch, Mashable

• A growing rank of web-celebs who make it clear to me that the social networking world will, indeed, hit the masses – it’s got all the Britney written all over it and geek starlets now rarely code

• And in every corridor, at every panel, in every conversation was Twitter - despite the fact that their management team was too busy plugging in new servers to make the event that got them ‘discovered’.

Who wasn’t here?

Absent en masse were S&P 500 companies, consumer brands, financial institutions, travel companies, retailers and their ilk. In fact, aside from Best Buy who has a compelling partnership with Mashery, I saw exactly none.

But if there is anyone who could benefit from being there –to see just how quickly the marketing revolution is accelerating - it is the ranks of venerable companies that are now feeling pressure.

Most of the formal and informal discussions that I participated in were about reaching out to the consumer, using the evolving tools and working out how to work with user behaviours that are becoming less one-way and whose points of contact are increasingly diffused.

One corporate who made a reluctant appearance was AT&T - If you type AT&T and SXSW into a Twitter Search app, you will see reams of coverage. Mobile coverage was appalling for a day and a half. After a blogstorm of protest, AT&T rolled out more repeaters, and made a press announcement indicated that they were caught flat-footed for the massive surge in iPhone users surfing the web at the event. That worked for me, and it seemed like a relative victory – until the second half of SXSW has kicked in wherein thousands of music aficionados and college kids have taken over the city, breaking the system again.

While the SXSW crowd are earlier adopters than most – the fact that the non-interactive portion of the event put more pressure on the system than the interactive portion certainly makes me increasingly confident that the mobile web is here and now, with all of the marketing opportunities that come with it.

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