Recap of Day 3 at SXSW

Posted on Mar 15, 2011 in Social Media, Tech & Gadgets

Recap of Day 3 at SXSW

Day 3 at SXSW (March 13, 2011) started off with an early morning panel on Daily Deals: Where Ads Become Content. Panelists included the founders of the following deal sites: LivingSocial, Yipit, Group Commerce, and DailyCandy. After a brief introduction of each daily deal website, the panelists discussed the future of the daily deal space.

A few things I found interesting:

  • LivingSocial has grown from 30 employees in Jan 2010 to about 1,400 today.
  • DailyCandy has over 3 million subscriptions. DailyCandy also handpicks businesses to participate.
  • It’s important to know you audience. Deals for terrariums, blindfolded manicures, and sex toys were all  wildly successful on DailyCandy

Next, I was lucky enough to grab a seat in a solo presentation by Matthew Inman who is the author, artist, and founder of The Oatmeal (and if you haven’t heard of The Oatmeal, you’re missing out). This was perhaps one of the best presentations I experienced at SXSW this year. During his presentation, Viral Marketing with The Oatmeal, Matt covered several examples of his work and talked about how they were virally successful.

Some fascinating points from his presentation:

  • Matt started off by creating these crazy viral quizzes and he provided code for other publishers to put the quizzes on their site. Link building in action.
  • A fake dating site created by Matt called Zombie Harmony once out-ranked Match.com and eHarmony in dating search keywords.
  • The Oatmeal comics take random facts and present them in an interesting or funny way (e.g., How the Male Angler Fish gets completely Screwed).

The Sunday Keynote featured Christopher Poole who is the founder of 4chan. I was familiar with 4chan, but I had never really had a reason to visit the site. According to the SXSW guidebook: “4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board, which has grown from a niche site targeting anime fans to one of the most influential communities on the ‘Net. With over 12 million unique visitors per month, many popular viral videos, Internet phenomena, and memes get their start on 4chan.”

I find that most of the keynotes at SXSW are hit or miss, and this one, at least for me was a miss. It was just a dry, boring discussion and definitely not on par with the great keynote presentation from the day before with Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. Maybe it was because I wasn’t as familiar with 4chan as others, but I definitely checked-out of this one early.

Unfortunately, Day 3 was our last day at SXSW. I wish we were able to stay for Day 4 and 5 because there were some more great panels, presentations, and not to mention the trade show. I’m working on a follow-up post on the top things I learned at this year’s SXSW, but for now, it’s time for me to catch my breath and dig myself out of my email inbox.