Making Social Local at SXSW

I had an opportunity to meet with interactive leaders at the 24th annual South by Southwest® (SXSW®) in Austin, Texas, this month. It’s no surprise that social media, combined with advances in technology, particularly mobile, is changing the way people meet and collaborate.

This year at SXSW, there was a tremendous amount of chatter around the “off campus gatherings” being more popular than the actual convention. Truth is, even though the typical SXSW attendee loves meeting in the social space, they can’t escape the fact that humans need to connect in the real world.

During SXSW, we held gatherings designed to celebrate niche audiences. The three events we held at our offices in the Frost Tower were standing room only. And sure, everybody who showed up checked in to FourSquare and arrived with mobile phones and cameras ready. Still, I got the sense that the true value of a great gathering is the individuals in the room…not the technology. The technology may have brought them there, but it’s being together in one place that counts.

What I did observe at SXSW is that connections are currency and in the social media age, your relationships create your digital real estate. By the time these digirati congregate in one room, they’ve already interacted with one another, connected on multiple social media platforms and done their background research. It’s fun to see people greet one another by their twitter handle or recognize somebody by their blog posts.

While there’s no substitution for a good old fashioned meet and greet, we need to think differently about how we gather great minds. What happens “pre-connection” is a new thing for many but becoming increasingly important and beneficial. As the CMO of a company that hosts millions of meetings each month, SXSW inspired me to think differently about how people meet and why meetings remain a cornerstone of our work lives.