This past March, we had some 40 Weber Shandwick team members from around the world at SXSW. As well as supporting some stellar client activations, SXSW is fertile ground for new ideas, emerging technology, and connecting with some of the biggest thinkers in the interactive world. It’s hard to walk away feeling anything but energized and just a little bit smarter for being exposed to such a cool experience.
It may seen ridiculously early for this, but the SXSW Panel Picker is already open for voting to decide the content of the official program for SXSW 2012. We’ve proposed a number of presentations with clients as well as those from our team who are executing great work on behalf of those clients. Here are the details for some of them – we’d love it if you voted for any that you think sound particularly valuable. (Voting closes September 2nd!)
Tanks and Tweets: U.S. Army Deploys Social Media will feature a discussion of the U.S Army’s ambitious, award-winning social media activities. As one of the largest employers in the country and with a workforce charged with national security, one would think the military wouldn’t take any risks when it comes to communication. However, the U.S. Army is leading the industry in transparency and authenticity in the social media space across social networks, building unfiltered Soldier blogs, interactive web experiences, and designing award-winning blogger outreach campaigns (e.g., throwing Twitter followers out of airplanes). Our Greg Swan will talk to those in the trenches on how these programs were established, access to social media when deployed, and how the Army has succeeded despite strict security, limited staff and stringent ROI. The panel will include Soldier panelists who are active in social media programs, the civilian marketer who designed them, plus a live stream from Afghanistan/Iraq to be confirmed (based on deployments in March).
So You Think You Can Manage a Community will provide practical guidance from Marcy Massura, who is digital community manager (on behalf of Weber Shandwick) for Oscar Mayer and Lunchables. In an area as new as community management, many who are doing this job are longtime bloggers and otherwise social citizens who may not have developed the habits and discipline to manage a community successfully. Marcy lays bare her tricks of the trade learned over a life spent in digital – both as someone who creates content for fun and as someone who manages online communities as a full-time job. Those tasked with hiring community managers and developing community management strategies will also get a whole lot of value out of Marcy’s shoot-from-the-hip presentation.
IRM: All the Right People in All the Right Places will tackle the area of influencer relationship management (IRM), backed by compelling key data from brands including Verizon Wireless and the Canada Tourism Board. Weber Shandwick’s Margot Sinclair Savell, a popular industry presenter for her sharp, evidence-based presentations, will show attendees the most sound methods of influencer identification and how to build an outreach and measurement strategy.
Again, voting closes September 2nd, so please, if you’re so inclined – vote early, vote often!