OtherThanThat

In the spirit of supporting the amazing people I know who have proposed some great content for SXSW 2013, I’m interrupting my Zappos & Downtown Project Adventure Blog Post Series to bring you a great laundry list of sessions for which you just have to vote.

First, a SXSW Panel Picker Primer. With three simple tips:

1. Get registered – In order to vote, you have to register. This means you must go to THIS LINK and sign up. It’s simple. Just your name and an email address – but it is a two-step process. You fill that form out, hit “submit” and then they send you an email with a verification code that you must click in order to activate your account and be able to vote.

2. No it doesn’t carry over – If you registered last year that doesn’t matter. The system does not save profiles year to year so even if you voted/registered last year you must still register this year to vote.

3. It’s not just about volume – yes, getting tons of “thumbs up” votes is important. It is equally if not more important to get *quality* votes. What does that mean? It means you need to (and encourage others to) post comments on the submission indicating WHY you think it’s a great addition to the program. Things like – you’ve seen the speaker before, you are interested in the content etc… IMPORTANT TO NOTE: the commenting system on the SXSW site is run by a company called Disqus (pronounced – Discuss). In order to post a comment you need to log in via one of the myriad social network options there. Easiest is probably Facebook though the Twitter integration is solid too.

A few things to keep in mind as you proffer your votes … be judicious. If a submission has type-o’s, grammatical errors and the like, that’s an automatic filter for me to say no. Why? It’s about the details. Doing a session at a big event like this is an intense, detail focused endeavor. At least it should be. The proposals for sessions aren’t long, we’re talking about 100 words for the overview and shorter than Tweet-length headlines. SXSW’s staff already has done a diligent job of filtering out most any that have such errors … but they’re only human and some do get through. One of my biggest complaints about last year was that not only was there too much content but it felt like the content was less, well … less. In my opinion part of that has to do with flaws in the filtering process. So let’s help the SXSW editorial team out and put our grown-up pants on when we review stuff. Just because your friend submitted it, doesn’t mean that it should be there. Just because the person is nice, doesn’t mean that it should be there. Just because the person promotes the crap out of their session, doesn’t mean it should be there. Think about sitting in a room and whether you feel the content proposed would be compelling, interesting, and something of value.

Okay, rant done. Now to the important stuff … recommendations. Without further ado, my present picks for content at SXSW 2013 (I will augment this list as others come up … As this is my blog, I’ll start with mine :
Don’t Suck. Make Money: Real Mobile Monetization
Shut Up & Breathe: Meditation & Storytelling FTW!
Here’s one that’s submitted to BOTH Film and Interactive. You can vote for the Film track version at this link From Crowdsourced Film to Social Movement … and to vote for the Interactive track version of the session please go to THIS link.
The X Factor: Women Innovators
Connective Consciousness: Influencer Back Channels
The Future of Porn
Radical 3D Animation: Ethnography will save us all
The Alchemy Economy: A $300B Craving for Change
Open Sourcing Accelerator for Social Impact
Hey A-Hole Stop Calling Yourself a Guru
Chicks Making Out: Monetizing Niche Content
How to Find the Co-Founder of Your Dreams

UPDATE: A new raft of sessions worth considering:
Tech’s Most Disruptive GEO’s
Your Business Sucks and your Baby’s Ugly
Labia Saturation: Are We There Yet?
Real Talk: The Social Customer Shift
Show us your Apps: What Music Marketers Want.
Super Fly Super Fans. Super Success Stories.
Herding Cats: New Digital Management for Artists
Solving the Pandora Problem.
Social Discovery or Online Dating, Who Will Win?
The Top 10 Web Music Companies of 2013
Amazing Things Will Happen
Curation + Crowdsourcing + Creation = Love
Three’s Not a Crowd for Startup Founding Teams
Distribution or Death: How Publishers Can Survive
The End of Trolls? New Ideas of Online Identity
Exit Fragmentation, Here Comes The New Social
Tactics of App Distribution Hackers & Cartels
DIY App Publishing and the SXSW Community Cookbook
Social Surgery: Live Streaming the Operating Room

Photo Credit:
Image in this post courtesy of Shutterstock