I have heard people from the SXSW newbies to the social media elite talking about the content at SXSW not being up to their standards. It makes me wonder if we were at the same conference. Sure, some of the sessions I went to were duds, but I found presentation gold on more than one occasion. I think it’s because I “created” and always follow the Cardinal Rule of SXSW.

The Cardinal Rule of SXSW

“If something sucks, go someplace else.”

SXSWi is an exercise where you try to drink as much as you can from a fire hose. It’s impossible to consume all of the content and I found conflict in every time slot. I went to SXSW to learn and also happen to have diverse interests so it was really hard for me to decide where I should go. I selected between 2 and 5 sessions in each time slot and made my choice based on how important the content was to what I want to accomplish with my career, personal interests and what people I trust think of the speakers.

On Saturday I went to a 9:30am presentation that was not what I thought it would be. I started checking twitter and found trusted friend, Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot tweeting the applesauce out of Chris Messina’s presentation on activity streams. I hightailed it to the Hyatt at top speed and sat on the right side of the wall and got a very meaningful 30 minutes from Chris. 4/5 stars

Don’t Sweat All of the Details

We are not doing much with Drupal for any of our clients right now, but I have a pretty good command of the platform and found out that expert, Josh Konig was speaking on using Drupal in the cloud. He had a modest sized crowd and gave a presentation that everyone who needed to know something about the cloud could have used. Sure, there were some Drupal specific examples, but it was full of estimation, case study and useful takeaways. Had I gotten hung up on the Drupal piece, I might not have gone to the presentation and it was 4/5 stars.

Be Two Places at Once

Sure Gary Vaynerchuk asked me to come to his session, but it was up against (my brother) Gregory Ng’s session on Attacting Sponsors with a Super Niche Webshow. Gary started at 12:30, Greg was 12:50. So I went to both. Hell, Greg went to both! Greg gave 15 of the most impactful minutes at SXSW. Just ask Justine. She was there.

Don’t Get Stupid Drunk and Miss the 9:30 Session

I said I was going to the conference to learn and learn I did. I was at 9:30 sessions every morning (even the day after drinking enough Dogfish Head, 512 Brewing and Live Oak Brewing to kill a small horse). The 9:30 folks are maybe willing to work a little harder. They know they don’t have the prime slot or the big audience (because most of you could not get out of bed due to still being drunk on Tequila) so they bring the heat to turn up the volume. THE best session I saw was one that I attended simply because I am a music geek. 14,000 songs in 28 days had 100 to 400 level content and it was at 9:30AM. The presenter, Burr Settles, is an (accidental) authority on community creation and management [he's actually a machine learning and data mining wizard], but not a marketer so he ended up with about 40 people. He should have keynoted. Everyone could have benefited from his 4 principles of community and analytics rich case studies.

Leave the Convention Center

The Blippy presentation on publishing credit card data was also great, but it was over at the Radisson so few people made the trek. The point is that SXSW isn’t easy. You do have to work for it. Maybe the people who are complaining aren’t able to work the way I can, I don’t have 100s of people coming up to me so I can move around with relative ease, but I would suggest that if you are not looking for content, do not complain that you cannot find it. It is there.

Oh. Margot Bloomstein killed it with Content Strategy and Baked Goods on day one, but you probably were there because at least 500 people showed up.