UPDATED: The SXSW Panel Picker has been released! You can cast your vote for this panel here! Voting ends September 4th.
So it is a very exciting time of year when the official Panel Picker form is released for panel pitches for the Interactive section of the SXSW festival in Austin, TX every March. The crunch time, once the panel pitch form is released, is a mere two weeks which can cause quite a flurry of ideas. The chaos is worth it for I have had the chance of participating in some really amazing panels at SXSW.
Last year at SXSWi I had a chance to moderate a China Business Panel with Christine Lu, Sage Brennan, Robert Scales and Andrew Liu. Our panel focused on incoming new businesses emerging into the Chinese business/tech economy and practical suggestions/advice for such business advances into such a potentially unknown market. The panel was really well received and the session was just jam packed with information. The year before that I moderated a panel called “Blame Canada: 7 Ways We’re Ahead in New Media“. In 2006 I participated in the “Snakes on A Mutha Fuckin Plane” panel.
Also last year at SXSWi, my good friend Dave Olson, aka uncleweed, gave his amazing presentation titled ‘Fuck Stats, Make Art‘ which gives practical advice to all artists everywhere of how to bypass the numbers and statistics and focus on doing what we love the most: making art. Dave is a fantastic story-teller, often utilizing props and hand-painted crafted signs to aid in his presentation. ‘Fuck Stats, Make Art’ was nothing short of a visual journey down the road of inspiration.
This year, the deadline for the panel picker was extended by an extra two days! The whole internet who was holding its breath to get it in for the midnight deadline, breathed a gigantic sigh of relief I am sure. Those two extra days gave me time to prep the finishing touches on the two panel pitches that I entered into the voting selection.
The first panel was titled ‘Robots have ears, too: Listening to the Internet’. This panel was pitched as a panel discussion with myself, Amber Case and Randall Fishkin as participants.
The (long) description of the panel:
This session discusses how to use listening to the internet as a strategy and move beyond the basics and into the advanced methods of using cyborg technology to do your work. By setting up personal dashboard for tracking topics across multiple channels, and automating advanced searches to surface conversations before competitors, you can actively participate expeditiously (and appear to do the work of 50 people!). Further, by fostering multiple publication streams, you can tailor and spread your message with significantly more impact than (yet another) corporate blog.
Listening and tracking strategically allows you to base corporate decisions on data, instead of relying on hunches. Once you engage in listening to the internet, the next step is building a concise strategy of how to listen to the streams of information that are coming in. Utilizing a personalized platform that brings the information to you, it is in your hands how you track that information, what dialogue is created from what you are listening to and how you weed out the unnecessary noise. This new approach to interacting with the digital world inverts and redefines the action of searching the internet. You no longer search the internet, for with robot technology, the internet searches for you.
The pitched (short) description:
A blog, google alerts and Twitter aren’t enough to compete anymore. We take social media beyond the basics and into advanced cyborg technology 🙂 Set up a personalized platform that will help you make decisions on data, not hunches. Filter out the noise and let the Internet build your brand.
Ten Questions to be answered during this panel:
1. Why would you want to listen to the internet?
2. How to train your “ears”?
3. How would you set up search aggregation dashboards?
4. How to make cyborgs/robots your friend?
5. How do we understand trending topics and popular vernacular?
6. How do I make sense of the information in the boardroom?
7. Besides the obvious, what channels should i track?
8. Why is this information important other than for PR?
9. How does this new way of “listening” change our way of “talking”?
10. What might the future of search look like?
After submitting, it is merely a waiting game. Voting begins in a few months!
Gets my vote