Why Social helps remote attendees

"Events are the original Social Media."
  - Liz Lathan

It's my mantra. :-) And on days like yesterday and today, I'm really living by it! South by Southwest 2012 (know as SXSW) is taking place in Austin, Texas, and my husband is attending live and in person. I, however, am home with our 4-year-old and our dogs who just had surgery. I'll get to join in the fun tomorrow, but in the meantime, I'm keeping up with the scene via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and the various live blogs going on.

The social pipe from SXSW is insane. Every refresh of my social tool Hootsuite brings up like 400 new posts. Every picture I see of sessions has 80% of the attendees looking down at their digital device (presumably taking notes or posting about the speakers' thoughts).

Tips that I'm picking up from being a remote attendee this weekend are:

Ensure that your hashtags are available to remote folks. I can find the hashtags of the sessions I like on the sxsw.com website, so I can filter the feeds for the sessions I want to follow. Yesterday, I spent an hour following #sxswi #whedon to keep up with the Joss Whedon session I so desperately wanted to be at.

Enlist in live blogging or live tweeting help. Thanks to the good folks at Snarkmarket, I was able to watch live blogging of the aforementioned Joss Whedon session of the conference. The blogger was a guy from NPR who did a great job of paraphrasing the fireside chat, the audience questions, and Joss's responses. Pairing that with the Twitter feed made me feel like I was there! I was privy to the floor seating outside of the session because it was so packed. And I even was privy to the high five that Joss gave an attendee on his SuperBetter quest!

Have a Pinterest board. Here's one I'm not seeing yet from SXSW. I search for SXSW and I just get a few results. I heard that some brands were doing Pinterest boards, but I haven't found them yet. From the Tweet stream, I know Pinterest is the hot topic at SXSW, so now we have to go figure out how to make it work, how to make it work for events...and how to monetize it!

Check the stats. The social pipe from SXSW is insane. I can't keep up. But the SXSW organizers must be loving it! Make sure your company has a Social Media Listening Center - doesn't have to be as sophisticated as Dell's (http://twitpic.com/8t7804), but someone should monitor the feed, the statistics, and the tone of the conversations happening at and around your event.

More posts to come after I actually get my chance to BE at SXSW tomorrow!