greening your conferences, people! (constructive SXSW feedback)
So I have a bunch of feedback for the conference organisers of SXSW (in particular the interactive part). I hope you can take this as constructive criticism as I mean it well (and I think your conference is one of the best in the world – well apart from the shift conference)
Go Green!:
I mean there was a couple of “sustainability and social media” panels (where largely everyone disagreed) but I was a bit disappointed with the approach to the climate problems which was non-existant and I kinda would have expected more from a cutting edge ( yes you are guys!) conference.
The schwag bag:
paper, ads, glossy paper, more paper, more ads etc. and a crumbler bag, 2 stickers and some more pretty unuseful stuff. I see the schwag bag of SXSW as a missed opportunity. I think I speak on behalf on a large part of the interactive conference goers when I say: everything went to the bin. Mostly – I kept the schwag bag itself, the crumbler bag and a firefox pin.
This could be a really valuable marketing thing both for the companies who wants to be in the schwag bag, but also the conferencegoers. Mostly everything was trashed because commercial messages in bags are not useful or fun, they just want to get inside our heads and as real clever interactive conferencegoers, we have a really hard time fitting it in.
How about letting a couple of companies co-sponsor a real cool aluminum drinking bottle that everybody could refill with tab water?
Why not get the companies who wastes a couple of thousand $ on having commercial printed on paper, to sponsor a starbucks coffee, a meal, or even a cupcake or chocolates ? And keep it local.
The parties:
Where great, but a setup of smaller crowds (max 30) would be great for us “elderly” who likes to have deep networked connections instead of not getting a persons name 3 times after the bar was closed and we have been queing for 1 hour to get into the party (where we can only stay in the same spot because there’s so many people.
I think there room for both.
The conference in itself:
Mostly rocked. I really got good information and networking. The venue was really great. However maybe measuring how much energy there’s used to run the conference compared to other years is a good idea ? and maybe only have aircondition on half of the time.
that’s all =)
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