On Thursday of last week, I returned from what turned out to be one of the most inspiring experiences of my short professional career: South by Southwest Interactive. Every year in early March, SXSW unites an eclectic group of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, CEOs of multinational advertising agencies, design gurus, marketing execs, and social media mavens.

First of all, I wish I had this beforehand. But, like any other SXSW newbie, I tried to jam as much I could into the four days I had in Austin.

I had heard nothing but rave reviews for SXSW going into it, but was still totally blown away by the content of the conference and the SXSW community in general - imagine the Web 2.0 geek version of Band of Brothers (and sisters). There was this really interesting mixture of creative energy fused with technological know-how buzzing around the city throughout the entire week. I felt like everyone I talked to was working on some incredible project and I was just trying to soak it all in.

I attended the conference with a colleague, Sarah Ingraham, and our original plan was to blog the entire event live. This turned out to be impossible. There was simply too much information to absorb and too many people to interact with. But, here are a few initial takeaways from the four days I spent in Austin.

New Finds
Backpack - Developed by 37signals, this handy little tool was my virtual notebook throughout the conference. It allows you to create pages, lists, and notes in a really clean, simple online environment. I’ve also found myself using it as a tool to stay organized day to day.

Twitter – Twitter helps its users answer one simple question, “What are you doing right now?”, and broadcasts that answer to a person’s followers. For a simple explanation on how this works check this out. This was the highlight for me in terms of new social technology – everyone was on it. Throughout the conference, SXSWrs were “tweeting” back forth on panels and speakers in real-time. It was pretty amazing to watch (and later participate in). Want to get all of the latest updates from trackchanges? Follow me on Twitter @mikearsenault.

Panels

Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where are they?

This panel was all about how B2B organizations can leverage social media strategy for business growth. This was a really nice question for me to begin thinking about early in the week. What I found particularly interesting was exploring the paradigm shift for organizations wishing to use social media to market themselves. The old marketing paradigm was the delivery of a controlled message in a controlled environment, with very little feedback from the intended audience. The new paradigm, to use blogging as an example, gives marketers no control and extremely fast feedback from the target audience. Basically, if you mess up – you will hear about it! This is no doubt scary for some organizations. We continued to talk about communicating the value of social media, in a tangible and measurable form – some thing that eludes most marketers in this space.

Awards – Do we lose by winning?

This was a really interesting talk (having just finished awards season) about the positives and negatives of competing for design awards. At what point do they become trivial? How important is it to keep the “award pipeline” flowing? There was also some interesting talk about going the extra mile on projects you know will be award worthy. Panelists argued that polishing project stories too much can erode margins and demoralize project teams. How do you deal with clients who won’t let you enter even though you have every legal right to publicize your work? The client will always win if you ever want to work with them again. The bottom line though; They are an extremely important sales tool for anyone in the creative services industry. The phone does ring when that list of Businessweek award winning firms comes out.

True Stories from Social Media Sites

This panel was moderated by entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki and was comprised of established bloggers/social media experts from the community building space. The bottom line was about staying true (and truly listening) to the voices in your community. How can we build and leverage communities here at Continuum? Our work with Communispace offers some very interesting possibilities.

For all of the keynote presentations, SXSW had a visual scribe taking notes on a large white board at the front of the audience. The scribe, Sunni Brown, does this for a living through her company called BrightSpot Information Design. Check these out they are really well done and are nice takeaways from each talk.

Keynotes

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Frank Warren of Postsecret
Jane Mcgonigal of Avante Games

When I got off the plan in Boston, my head was chock-full of ideas about how Continuum should be a part of this movement, and leverage this stuff to share our stories. That’s really what it’s all about right? Storytelling.

More on that later.