Saturday, March 10 … Day 2 at SXSW Interactive (SXSWi). It was loooooong day and the rain kept coming down hard.
The first session that I went to was Top Chef: How Transmedia is Changing TV . This session was tremendous and I liked it a lot. It was moderated by Andy Cohen, host of Watch What Happens Live and one of the panelists was Tom Collichio, a judge in Top Chef. Others in the panel included various senior executives from Bravo. They talked a lot about Social TV and the transformation that we are seeing and how Bravo has embraced media to drive ratings to their shows. While I don't watch any of these programs, it was still a very interesting panel. Andy also did a very good job of moderating and was taking questions live via Twitter. Sometimes questions came in and within a minute Andy was already pitching it to the panelists. The session was tweeted under various hashtags such as #bybravo and #sxswbybravo. My biggest takeaway from this session is that the future of social TV is content co-creation with the fans. Here are some notable tweets from that session:
After that, I headed over to Why Small is the New Big and Big is the New Small. The session was tweeted using #eggcellent as the hashtag. Kathy Mandelstein and Jason Stoddard did an interesting panel. Kathy comes from a big company called IBM and Jason typically works with very small companies. The panel covered what big companies are doing to be able to compete with the smaller ones and what the smaller ones can do to compete with the bigger ones. My biggest takeaway from this session was that social media/marketing sets a level field. Here are some notable tweets from that session:
After that session, I headed over to lunch and then over to the Omni Hotel to get ready to present for the first time to the SXSW audience. I have to say that I'm humbled by the experience. The room was packed for a 5pm session and the feedback from the session was extremely positive. Thank you all for coming and interacting with us. Hopefully we can continue the conversation on Twitter (or whatever your preferred channel is).
As promised, here are the slides from my presentation with Heidi Ambler. The session was recorded and will be available as a podcast. If I find that podcast somewhere, I'll share that here as well for those that couldn't attend SXSW.
The twitter stream for my session is #socbiz5 in case you want to see what people were saying.
Enjoy!