SXSW Interactive Festival - THE Place to Be.

Some quick stats from the SXSW Interactive Festival, to give you some idea what it was like:

• Verbal NDA’s given, between Lance and myself: 6
• Movie stars seen: at least 5 that we know of
• Tradeshow schwag items gathered, each: about 500,000
• Tradeshow schwag items that were actually cool: 3
• Best - but least effective - tradeshow schwag item: magnetic buzzing balls handed out by a company whose name I can’t remember
• Internet-related company founders, coders, financers, and top executives seen: hundreds
• Best sessions: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, talking openly about how the company reached the success it has; Jared Spool, illustrating with magic tricks the importance of illusion and magic in meeting users’ needs; Guy Kawasaki, moderating a panel discussion on social media.
• Lance’s top memories: meeting Guy Kawasaki; dinner at Vespaio; screening “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”.
• My top memories: Seeing Helen Hunt speak; watching the Zappos.com team appear out of nowhere to hand out hundreds of rain ponchos when the weather turned bad
• Minutes of boredom: 0

Many people have heard of the SXSW (South by Southwest) Music Festival, which is where many bands have been discovered and gone on to fame. Newer and somewhat less well-known are the SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive Festivals. Lance and I were lucky enough to attend both the Film and Interactive festivals last week, due to having our pitch to present on our book, Web Design for ROI, accepted.

SXSW Interactive is a festival of doers. This is where programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, executives, and financiers all gather to meet, exchange ideas, and have a great time together. It’s a gathering of people who make things happen, and the energy is intoxicating.

An example: During Jared Spool’s talk, he showed a screenshot from a large, well-known site of an interactive solution he especially admired. From the back of the room came an excited shout — “I wrote that!” and Jared had the young man stand for applause.

Another example: During a frustrating round-table discussion on how to measure the success of social media/Web 2.o marketing efforts, one of the participants burst out, “Isn’t this what we’re here to do? Isn’t this what we come to SXSW for? To get together and come up with a solution?” Heads nodded in agreement.

Some images from SXSW

Lance and I presented on our book Saturday morning at the Adobe Day Stage. Here we’re waiting for the moderator to introduce us. (Photo credit: veesees, on Flickr).

Austin’s 6th Street, which is lined with eating, drinking, and live-music-listening establishments. You can see a crowd of people waiting to get into a theater to screen one of the Festival films.

A top-down view of the popular Interactive Playpen Area, full of legos and other building materials. Every day would see new towers and other strange creations rise and fall.

Guy Kawasaki moderates a panel on social media. In addition to being an all-around cool guy with books and companies to his name, he’s also super-funny. “I believe a presentation should first be entertaining, then informative,” he grinned as he introduced the panel. “So you may not learn a lot, but you’ll sure have a good time.”

Helen Hunt answers questions about her new film, which she directed and stars in, “Then She Found Me.” Classy lady, and awesome movie.

In a brilliant demonstration of how Zappos.com is “a customer service company that happens to sell shoes,” when the weather turned into a nasty rainstorm, dozens of Zappos.com employees, including CEO Tony Hsieh (pictured here), appeared out of nowhere to hand out hundreds of branded rain ponchos. Within minutes, the Zappos.com brand was everywhere you looked, covering dry and happy people.

Jared Spool’s popular session included several magic tricks. Here, Jared works with members of the audience to demonstrate the power of illusion.

Sunday afternoon Lance and I were interviewed by our publisher, New Riders Press, for a video podcast - now available free (what else?) in two places: iTunes and Peachpit.com (tip: iTunes is a much faster download).

We were interviewed by a fellow New Riders author, the irrepressible Charles Wyke-Smith, author of Stylin’ with CSS and Codin’ for the Web

SXSW 2009: Here We Come

For those of you who missed SXSW Interactive this year, here are some SXSW Interactive Podcasts. We’re already seriously entertaining the idea of making SXSW our annual Closed Loop Marketing company party. Of course, as our ever-vigilant John Evans pointed out, that might mean no Christmas/New Year’s party for us this year, right? Hmmm. Might be worth it.