While it seems March is long away, now is the time to pick which panels and speakers pique your interest for South by Southwest 2014. The Panel Picker process wraps up on Friday already!
For sure, it’s an overwhelming process, but I’ve committed, this year, to participating in the Panel Picker process.
Full disclosure: I have 2 proposed talks for 2014.
South by Southwest Interactive – Ticks vs Humans: Can Social Media Crush Pathogens?
South by Southwest EDU – Ticks Suck: These Social Media Internships Don’t
Learn best practices – and best-to-be-avoided – from the University of Rhode Island’s inaugural Social Media SWAT team. Smashing traditional internship models, the team leveraged digital and social media to squash ignorance about the disease-carrying, scary, and hard-to-look-at tick. Paid interns, social media pro mentors, and URI faculty share how to revolutionize career preparation with real-world experience, creating sought-after, highly trained contributors to the workforce.
If you find either or both worthy, please vote now … time is running out.
Here are the other panels I hope to see at SXSW Interactive
1. Foremost, I’ve been eager to see Nancy Duarte since reading her books, Resonate and Slideology, which are excellent. But imagine engaging with Duarte in her expert medium.
Pimp Your Pitch: Learn Visual Storytelling
Panel picker submission excerpt: Everyone’s got a story to tell or an idea to sell. But your audience has to understand and embrace it if you truly want to motivate them to act. Bring your pitch to Duarte’s two and a half hour long Pimp Your Pitch workshop and we’ll help you rework it to better connect with your audience – whether you want to secure funding from a VC, sell your story to a filmmaker, convince a prospect to buy your product, or land a gig as a speaker at the next SXSW conference.
2. And how can you resist Go Home Marketing, You Are Drunk?
But upon closer inspection, it’s top content strategist and Content Strategy for the Web author Kristina Halvorson:
Panel picker submission excerpt: Stop treating every day like a fire drill. Momentarily ignore the shiny new trends. Instead, take a look at the things that are (still) fundamentally broken. Your message is splintered. Your teams are siloed. Your technology is backwards. Your content still sucks. So let’s sit down together and talk about a whole new world of marketing, one where pragmatism and principle drive a new kind of innovation: fixing what’s actually broken, versus finding new things to break.
3. How to Market Your Infographic Like a Rockstar
Panel picker submission excerpt: While visual content offers powerful marketing advantages, there are many unfortunate pitfalls one may encounter while attempting to build a content strategy in such a heavily saturated industry. In this session, Killer Infographics Director of Marketing, Charlie Holbert, will guide you through the highs and lows of marketing your infographic online. Having promoted thousands of viral infographics, Charlie will show you how to prepare your visual content for success, what mistakes to avoid and how to measure your ROI. You’ll leave this talk a true infographic “bielieber!”
4. Multiplier Effect – Paid Social + Inbound
Panel picker submission excerpt: Many marketers are focused on inbound marketing as the most cost effective and sustainable way to drive new high quality leads. Using paid social channels to amplify existing organic marketing can be a great way to amplify your existing inbound marketing. Organic marketing takes time to build and complementing it with paid promotion can help you grow your audience faster and when done right, with a high ROI. We’ll explore how to unite paid and organic marketing teams, how to track effectiveness, when is the best time to promote and most importantly, of the dizzying array of paid social options, which seem to be the most effective in complementing organic and inbound marketing.
5. Visual Storytelling in an Omni-Channel World
Panel picker submission excerpt: The rise of visual social media platforms has resulted in a show, don’t tell era that’s redefining marketing as we know it. Shrinking attention spans, coupled with platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Vine, are creating consumers who welcome snackable bits of visual content over traditional marketing messages. The challenge and opportunity for marketers is to shift from broadcasting to curating a dazzling visual conversation which brings their company or brand’s story to life. – See more at: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/22970#sthash.2A8UJfqI.dpuf
6. Bootstrap it! Marketing Automation on a Budget
Panel picker submission excerpt: With 90 minutes of time every week and a total budget of less than $150 per month, you can get all your online marketing done easily and this talk will show you exactly how.