I just finished attending my first ever South by Southwest Interactive Conference and it was an experience I will never forget. Thousands of people that work in digital professions such as digital agencies, web developers, app developers and others, descended on Austin for five days of learning and fun. I can say now that the learning that happens in sessions is only part of the experience. Some of the greatest things that came from my experience was meeting new people and having really interesting discussions with them in the hallways and parties.
Earlier this week, Mark Evans wrote a post looking at what talk was coming out of the conference halfway through. Now that the conference has come to a close, I decided to look back at all five days using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, and found a few different results than earlier in the week.
To get an overview of just how much talk was happening these five days I pulled up an activity summary. I was able to find nearly 1,800 blog posts, 540 news articles, 87 forum discussions and over 51,500 tweets mentioning “SXSWi”.
Walking around the convention center I met people from all around the world that had come to Texas just to attend this conference. A look at our Twitter geolocation map to see where all the tweets from the conference were coming from shows just how far and wide people came from to attend.
Not only did I meet people from all over the world, but also people of all ages that were interested in learning more about our digital world. While younger professionals between the ages of 21-35 seemed to be the majority at 52.3%, we can see from the pie chart that the digital world doesn’t only attract younger folks.
As well, conference attendees from numerous industries had come to learn how they could best use digital ideas and practices to help benefit them.
Looking at the talk from blogs in our buzzgraph, which shows the words most used in conjunction with our search term, we can see that people were writing about a lot of the new technologies, applications and ideas that were being shown off around the convention.
A look at the buzzgraph from Twitter shows that people were tweeting more about their experiences. While Mark’s post showed that a lot of Twitter talk earlier in the week focused around the parties that were happening, we can now see that parties has taken a back seat to meeting new people and making interesting finds. We can see that some things people were finding were “startups”, “apps” and the odd geek celebrity sighting.
All and all, South by Southwest Interactive was a great time. I had a chance to meet people I had only talked to through the internet before, as well as people I had never spoken with but will continue to for a long time. As well, the sessions provided some really interesting new ideas, concepts and applications that I’m sure people will be talking about until next years conference.
Were you at SXSWi? Were you not there but trying to follow what was happening there through tweets and blogs posts? Let us know in the comments what you were able to take away from SXSWi.
Tags: analytics, MAP, monitoring, Social Media, social media analytics, South by Southwest, SXSWi, sysomos
Thanks for this review.