South By Southwest: A Case Study In Community Building

How do you build a community that people are willing to get on a plane and fly out to be a part of?

Every March, over 14,000 smartphone-carrying, web-site building hipsters (like me) flood Austin Texas for SXSW Interactive.

They come to to talk business, to hear about the future of tech from people who help shape it, and to drink. Hugh Forrest is the event director for sxsw interactive. I invited him here to find how the event grew to be so big and influential.

Hugh Forrest is the Event Director of the Interactive Festival at SXSW (South by Southwest).

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders, the incredible new SXSW Trade Show and a lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.

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Full Interview Transcript

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Here’s the program.

Andrew Warner: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How do you build a community that people are willing to get on a plane and fly out to be a part of? Every March, over 14,000 smart phone-carrying, website-building hipsters (like me), flood Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive. They come to talk business, to hear about the future of tech from people who help shape it, and to drink. I like that part a lot.

Hugh Forrest is the Event Director for South by Southwest Interactive. I invited him here to find out how the event got to be so big and so important. Hugh, welcome.

Hugh Forrest: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Andrew: Hugh, who are some of the speakers who’ve spoken at South by Southwest Interactive? Give me some of the big names. Impress my audience.

Hugh: People who’ve spoken over the last five years range from someone like Malcolm Gladwell to Jane McGonigal, Will Wright. Bruce Sterling has spoken many times and is scheduled to speak again in 2011. We’ve had Mark Zuckerberg. So hopefully a lot of the thought leaders and creativity leaders in the “interactive space.”

Andrew: Now I’ve seen people who thought they were important in blogging and magazine writers who thought that they were important tried to get a guy like Mark Zuckerberg to talk and discovered that he’s just not that accessible. I want to find out how that happened, how you got these guys to speak. Let me toss in another name; someone I love watching at South by Southwest – Gary Vaynerchuk. Man, that guy will pump you up more than Tony Robbins, more than any musician. He’s good! But you were with South by Southwest before the Interactive part. I think you joined . . . was it ’89?

Hugh: Yes.

Andrew: What was going on back in ’89 when you joined?

Hugh: Well, in 1989, it was a music only event. My story is that I had a computer, and they didn’t, so that was my ticket into the organization. In 1994, South by Southwest added what was a combined film and multimedia event. Then in 1995, we split those off into two separate events. So the Interactive event has been around (named somewhat differently) since 1994. I think that we really found our voice over the last four or five years, meaning we had a very, very long incubation period and certainly probably would not have survived had we not been supported by South by Southwest Music, which was attracting lots and lots of people and able to support this smaller event that didn’t really know what it was doing yet. Hopefully, we have begun to figure out what we’re doing now.

Andrew: I can’t wait to dig into what happened during that slow period, why you guys kept it going, and why it started to move up about four or five years ago, as you said. But before that, at the very beginning, why did there need to be a music festival in Austin, Texas?

Hugh: The people who organized South by Southwest, and my boss, had been going to an event in New York for many years called the “New Music Seminar.” At one point, in fact, they’d had significant discussions with people who were organizing the New Music Seminar about coming to Austin and doing an offshoot event. And finally they decided, “Well, we can probably do this ourselves.” Austin has traditionally been a very, very strong music community, so it made sense to do it here.

One of the other interesting stories about when South by Southwest started way back when — and this was actually in 1987, two years before I joined — is that when they were starting this idea, this concept, no one really knew what to think of it. The ticket or entree into a lot of these clubs was spring break week. Austin is a college town, and you have 40,000 college kids leaving town during spring break. So it’s traditionally the worst week of the year for these bars. The entree into these clubs was, “We’ll do it spring break week. Look, it can’t be any worse than your bar totals are now.” That allowed them to get in a lot of clubs that might not have taken a chance. Now, flash forward 20 or 25 years later, or even 15 years later, and that spring break week has become the most lucrative week for most of the bars and restaurants in Austin. They do as much as 30 percent to 50 percent of their business for the year during that week, just because so many people come to town. My point is that I think that’s a lesson for all of us as entrepreneurs, in that you find something that’s a perceived weakness and make it a strength.

Andrew: I understand that there are some people who would otherwise go off somewhere else for spring break and are looking for something to do, or would be open to going to a bar or club to listen to music in Austin. But that doesn’t seem like it’s enough to get a big festival off the ground. What else did you do to bring more people in?

Hugh: Well, the founders were very involved with the “Austin Chronicle,” which is the weekly paper here in Austin. So they had connections with other weekly papers throughout the US, and leveraged those connections, asked these newspapers to bring the music editor or music writer to town. That helped create a degree of buzz, back in the day when we all used to read newspapers.

Andrew: Yeah.

Hugh: It was also pitched and visioned as a conference for music industry people. At that point, there were not that many of those type of conferences available. So, it was taking a traditional conference structure and taking it to an industry that didn’t typically have that kind of event. And certainly Austin itself is no small player in this scenario. People like coming to Austin. People particularly like coming to Austin in March. The weather is generally warm in the day. It can get cool at night. Spring has arrived here when it may not have arrived elsewhere. So the city is very much a part of that and helped attract a lot of people. That provided a good basis for what we started here.

Andrew: What was the conference, or what was the event at first? It was local bars and clubs where musicians would play. Was there anything else?

Hugh: From the start, on the music end, it was panels during the day, with the idea that it was music industry people talking to musicians during the day. Then, at night, it was showcases, where the musicians are then playing to those music industry people at night. The music industry was a lot different 25 years ago. The idea at that point, the goal was to “get signed.” I don’t think there were ever that many successes of bands actually getting signed in Austin as a result of South by Southwest. But the band stuff is very similar to what happens with the new media/interactive stuff now. Even if you don’t get signed, it’s about making connections, learning things, and being creative — things that can take your career to the next level. The people who are able to successfully do that, whether it be music, or film, or interactive, can get a whole lot out of the event.

Andrew: Okay. And so in 1994, as you say, you guys created South by Southwest Film and South by Southwest Interactive. Why Interactive? Why take this big, cool people festival, where they’re all listening to music that is cutting edge, that the rest of us still haven’t heard of, and say, “You know what we need to add onto this? Guys who want to just look down at their iPhones, or look down at their Treos,” whatever phone was around back then.

Hugh: It was pre-Treo at that point! That’s a great question. I was working on what was then “multimedia” back then. I was still very confused as to what this brave new world was. I think that in those days there was a significantly different or greater division between the people who were attending Interactive or Multimedia and the people who were attending Music. So I think that from the perspective of my boss, it was very forward thinking to have this technology event. Again, it took a long, long incubation period for it to really reach a point where it took off.

Andrew: Was it because there was going to be more money in it? Was it because, “You know what? We have the infrastructure in place, we have people here to help organize it. Who else has some money that we can bring in and sell sponsorships to, and then grow out?” Or was it because Interactive back then, or multimedia, was considered a new art, the way that movies were? Was the plan to tap into this new art form before it got too big? What was the vision? How did it fit in?

Hugh: I think the vision is more elaborate. The film side is very clear on why they did that. Two of the founders of the company were very involved in the film scene around the University of Texas, so they always wanted to do a film festival. The idea of including multimedia in this, which at that point were CD ROMs, and as you said Treos were visionary, in the sense that you could see that there was maybe something, somewhere down the line, but not yet. I think also what you mentioned about having the structure in place, that was a part of the idea. You had the structure in place of how to run a conference, or how to theoretically run a conference, and why not maximize that by putting in another event, which then has split into two events.

Andrew: Why did you guys decide to add more to the current location, the current event, instead of taking your event on the road and maybe having the North by Northeast, or any of the other conferences that others have created?

Hugh: Well, actually we have tried that, and it didn’t work! We were involved with an event in St. Louis for a while, called the Mississippi River Music Festival. We were involved with an event in Portland, Oregon, called the North by Northwest Music Conference and Festival.

Andrew: Look at how I nailed the name.

Hugh: There you go.

Andrew: I didn’t nail the research, apparently, but I nailed the name. Why didn’t those work?

Hugh: I think our big lesson from that is that we didn’t have the skill or the organization to franchise this thing. Of these other events that we’ve done, North by Northwest had a lot of moments, but it never hit a tipping point similar to South by Southwest. There’s still a North by Northeast in Toronto, which is licensed to the name of South by Southwest, but is essentially independently managed. That’s had a lot of staying power, so that’s still going pretty strong. But again, we realized trying to do these events in other cities we just did not have the manpower or the skill to pull this thing off and that we ought to concentrate more on our strength, which was Austin. That said, the event in Portland allowed us to explore a lot of things that were later brought into Austin, so it was a good place to explore new ideas, incubate those ideas, and then bring them back to Austin for South by Southwest.

Andrew: If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend a little more time on this. I love studying the setbacks, because I think there’s a lot more to learn from the setbacks than there is from success. With success, we often overlook all of the mistakes that we’ve made, or don’t notice what works, because we’re on a high. With setbacks, we have some time to evaluate. Do you have an example of something that didn’t go right with one of the other offshoot conferences, maybe an incident that captures what was wrong, or what didn’t work out?

Hugh: I was very involved with Portland. I’d spend half the year in Austin and half in Portland. One of the biggest challenges of doing the event in Portland was that we were perceived by the Portland music community as being people from Austin, Texas who were coming to Portland to run a music festival. You know, “What do you guys know about the Portland music scene?” I think we did a lot to try to integrate ourselves with that scene and tried to reach out, but ultimately were not that successful in those efforts. What I hopefully learned from that is just how important community is, whether it’s real or virtual. Ultimately, that’s one of the biggest secrets to success for what Interactive has managed to achieve in the last few years. It’s being able to tap into this very, very creative interactive community, carefully grooming that community, and carefully refining our role in that community. It’s knowing when to push, and knowing when to pull back a little. Again, that’s what I always say is that the biggest strength of the event is less the intelligence of the organizer and more the collective intelligence of all the people who’re coming to Austin.

Andrew: Let me address something for people who are watching the video, and not just listening to the MP3 (which I know most people do). There are a couple of things you guys have seen. First of all, this big device right here in front of me? It’s the mike. I’ve been getting a lot of noise from my computer that’s going into the mike, so I’m trying a new placement. It looks a little ridiculous here. The second thing is, I notice that you keep leaning forward to adjust your computer. You’re on a Mac, right? On a Mac, the screen dims every couple of minutes, and you have to move your mouse to keep it from dimming.

Hugh: That’s me.

Andrew: I’m always curious about this stuff. If I watch Leo Laporte, sometimes I won’t pay attention to what he’s saying. I’ll watch what’s going on behind him. What’s that doll that he’s got behind him? I’ll explain to my audience what the doll is in front of Andrew. It’s crazy old mcrophone.

Portland, how did it seem that you were out of the community? Can you give me an example? I want to understand how people could even feel that South by Southwest isn’t authentically Portland.

Hugh: Is inauthentically Portland, or authentically Portland?

Andrew: Is not. Right, I had a double negative. How could they feel it’s not authentically Portland? How did it feel like a foreign community, or foreign music being brought into the Portland community?

Hugh: Again, most of the organization work was being done from Austin.

Andrew: But how does that impact the average goer? Frankly, this is the first time you and I have talked. We’ve exchanged e-mails. You could have been in Tahiti, you could have been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, could have been halfway around the world for all I knew. It didn’t matter to me that you weren’t sitting in Austin. How did people even know that you weren’t in Portland?

Hugh: This was 10 years ago, and our sense of virtual place was less strong than it is now. On a very real level, at that point for a music festival, people had to send in their tape or CD or whatever. And they were sending it to an address in Austin, which I think was a big mistake. We should have had a P.O. Box in Portland. It was something that really stood out as, “Wait a minute. I’m applying to Portland, but I’m sending it to Austin.” That was a mistake.

One of the things that we did to try to improve our relationship in the community was come up with a Portland advisory board that had a lot of input into the tone and flavor of the event. That’s something we’ve certainly incorporated into South by Southwest Interactive, where we have a 60 to 70 person advisory board that helps with the evaluation process. So we learned from that situation, or continue to learn that getting advice and input from people on the ground is very important. Maybe their advice is not great or something that you can ultimately use, but the process of soliciting, communicating, and seeking that advice opens a lot of doors that you need opened for you.

Andrew: Do you have an example of a door that opened because of the advisors and where they’re from?

Hugh: On the Portland end, I’m not sure I can process one of those memories at present. But for the Interactive end, the advisors play about a 40 percent role in terms of the decision making process on any given panel or panel proposal. The idea is that these people are evaluating the proposals in addition to the voting from the public, and that helps to counteract the idea that the panel picker is a popularly contest. It’s great to have these advisors, these people working with the event who are all over the US, and some who are based internationally that can give their input on what the trends are that we should be paying attention to, what the trends are that we should be paying less attention to, and who are some of the hottest speakers and hottest ideas.

Andrew: Let’s go back to 1994. You guys decide, “All right. We’re not going to syndicate this. There will not be a Dubai South by Southwest. Dubai will have to create their own.”

Hugh: [laughs]

Andrew: “We’re going to just add more to this one.” So you come up with South by Southwest Interactive. What’s the first thing that you do to get this off the ground?

Hugh: We had a really, really hard time getting it off the ground, partly because it was a very different model, a very different way of doing business, or thinking about business than what we’d done on the music side of things. Again, as I mentioned earlier, we had leveraged all these alternative papers around the US to help get the word out on the music event. It didn’t work so well for the interactive end of things, simply because it’s not quite the same audience. We tried to [interference] computer in the US, and I think none of those are nearly as successful as the alternative papers. We tried to do trades with other events. We tried to get our name out there however possible.

At that point, the bulk of panel programming was organized directly by me. It would be that I’d have read an article in “Wired,”‘ or “Industry Standard.” It was like, “Wow, that person sounds pretty neat.” So I would track him or her down to see if this person would like to speak at South by Southwest. That was the initial way to push forward on this. It had some good results, but nowhere near what we’ve had in the last four or five years.

Andrew: You said that the model wasn’t quite right. What was that original model?

Hugh: I am just saying in terms of how to market the thing. Using the model from South by Southwest Music to market this thing, by going to music papers certainly didn’t apply to this. It was certainly a different kind of person who wanted to attend Interactive than was attending Music. Again, my perspective is that 10 or 15 years ago, when we started this thing, the division between the geeks on this side who were doing multimedia stuff, CD ROMs, and whatever, and the musicians on this side, there was a gap there. Whereas now, it is much closer together and there’s a lot more overlap.

If you come to Austin for all of South by Southwest week, you see a bit of a sea change on Wednesday, when the music people start coming in. The jeans are that much tighter, and the tattoos become full-body tattoos and stuff. Otherwise, it’s hard to see a lot of difference between the creatives in the first part of the week for Interactive, Film, and the musicians who are in later in the week for Music

Andrew: Especially since musicians now are screaming out their Twitter handles. “Follow me on Twitter.”

Hugh: Sure; absolutely. We preach convergence a lot, and every year the two audiences are harder and harder to separate.

Andrew: How do you trade with other conferences? You mentioned earlier that there was some kind of trade that you do?

Hugh: Again, when we were in the phase of, “How do we grow this thing? How do we get this to create momentum?” we started taking a very open source approach. Maybe we can trade with other conferences where we can give them a badge to South by Southwest if they give us a badge to their event. We can go to their event and market ourselves there, and they can come to our event and vice versa. We tried to figure out any way possible to create more interest in the event. One of the things that we did somewhat differently on the music side of things is that it was very much an open source approach or, “We’ll help you promote your event, if you’ll help up promote our event.”

Andrew: So a few years ago, a younger Hugh was walking around other conferences with those little Kinko’s slips, maybe the laminated looking kind, and handing them out to people at conferences saying, “Hey, check out South by Southwest Interactive.”

Hugh: Yeah, and we still do that to some extent; go to other conferences.

Andrew: Really? But that was you walking around and showing the stuff?

Hugh: Sure.

Andrew: What was that like? I used to hand out those flyers for my dad as a kid. That’s what drove me. I said, “I never want to be reduced to doing this again!” This was in the ghetto.

Hugh: [laughs] It wasn’t that bad.

Andrew: What was it like for you to do that?

Hugh: Ten years ago when we were pushing South by Southwest Interactive, we’d probably say, “You may never have heard of us, but you’ve heard of South by Southwest Music. It’s a great opportunity to come down and talk about tech and see some bands.” That was kind of our entree to people’s attention, and gradually it has become more of its own thing, where people are more likely to just come down for the tech side. But I think with conference organizing, as with any other event or product, you have to learn and become comfortable with selling yourself, selling what you do, reaching out to people, reaching out to strangers and trying to persuade them to buy into what you’re doing. It’s not the thing I’m most comfortable with, but I’ve certainly done it at times. When I get into that mode or rhythm, I can be pretty good at it I think.

Andrew: By the way, are they chopping wood behind you? Are they drilling?

Hugh: [laughs]

Andrew: I can see them out the window.

Hugh: (________) a bundle of mail tomorrow. The late fall harvest.

Andrew: Hugh, I did a lot of events, and I remember ones having a major athlete. I won’t give the guy’s name, agreed to come out and speak at one of my events. I thought this was terrific, he’s going to be a huge draw, and people will love watching him. And sure enough, people did come who knew him from when they were kids. He comes in. The first thing he does is, “I’d like to bow down and say a word to Jesus.” He starts doing a prayer. I’m like, “This is a business event! Who knows if any of these people even believe in Jesus. Am I imposing religion on them? Where’s he going with this?” And from there it just went downhill, believe me. What did you do back then? I know you must have had bad speakers. What did you do back then when a speaker was bad?

Hugh: I think you can remove the “back then” from your statement.

Andrew: Are you saying it even happens now?

Hugh: Sure, sure.

Andrew: With who for example?

Hugh: Our most obvious example was the Mark Zuckerberg keynote from a couple of years back, the keynote interview with Sarah Lacy. That was a spectacular failure in the sense that Facebook was just beginning to break and getting mainstream attention. Mark hadn’t spoken many places yet. We were very honored that he came to South by Southwest to speak. We had a packed house to see him. We got him on stage, and the interview was a complete dud. The flipside to that is that it was right when Twitter was breaking. People in the audience were tweeting each other, “Is it just me, or is this not good?” And they said, “No, it’s not good!” Ultimately, it became a case study in the new dynamics of audiences, and got a lot of press that way and we were able to deflect some of the problems there. But I think, as an organizer, we stepped back and realized that we just did not prepare this person very well, or that they didn’t interview very well, and we’ve got to do a much better job of preparing.

We had plenty of duds at the 2010 event. And in every case, I think we can go back and say, “Wait, we thought we organized this enough. We thought the star athlete wasn’t going to give a prayer to start the thing, but we needed to go over that word-for-word.” So conference planning is like any other business. The more you prepare and the more you figure out every detail and leave nothing to chance, the better your chances of success. And even at that, who knows what happens?

At this year’s event, the first day of the event we had packed panel rooms and everything was going well. All of a sudden the fire alarm goes off at the Convention Center, and everyone has to evacuate the building. Now, we have a better contingency plan for 2011, but we didn’t have a contingency plan for 2010, and it was kind of a drag. But to everyone’s credit, they filed out of the building, and filed back in, and in 15 minutes all the panels were running again. Sometimes these things happen.

Andrew: I actually talked to Sarah Lacy soon after that panel. She considers the Zuckerberg interview a career enhancer, not because it went off especially well, but because people got to find out about her, people got to talk about her. There was debate about the future of audiences at conferences. Should you allow people to talk? If people are going to talk anyway, how do you deal with it? That was pretty good. But what about when someone’s just boring? What about when you watch them, and say, “Good lord! I’m just subjecting my people to this? This is what’s representing me?”

The thing about conferences is you’re not in charge of everything about it. You’re not the guy who’s on stage, and the guy who’s making sure the air conditioning is fine. You’re relying in large part on a person on stage to represent your brand. And when somebody’s not representing your brand well, what do you do at that moment?

Hugh: For that, you hope that the hour goes fast. The stuff you mentioned about Sarah is interesting, in the sense that I think her perspective on this is, for better or worse, where we are now. Whether it’s good or bad, we want publicity one way or another, and that got my name out. I think that we didn’t do a good enough job of preparing Sarah and talking to Sarah about what we expect and what the audience would expect. At the same time, and I say this with all love and respect, Mark Zuckerberg is a hard person to interview. In many ways, she took the arrow for him on that, in the sense that it’s a horrible interview. Again, he’s hard to get stuff out of, and it takes a very skillful person to make him more engaging, particularly three or four years ago, when he was that much younger, and that much shyer.

Andrew: Let me suggest this. For the conference, put my number on speed dial. If anybody is a dud, I’ll step right in there. I’m not going to take over, but I’ll ask the right questions that will get the un-dud stuff out. Like how much money they’re making. My audience loves me to ask that. I would ask Mark Zuckerberg who he was dating, how much money he took off the table. Good juicy questions, not like Sarah Lacy, who’s a good friend, but come on.

Hugh: And as always, Andrew, be careful what you ask for or wish for. It could come back to bite you.

Andrew: This microphone travels very well. In fact, that’s part of the reason it might be humming. I took it with me to Argentina. You’ve got to see when you go into an airport with a mike like this. It doesn’t even look like a mike; look at that. It’s supposed to be like an old-fashioned mike. Did you ever seen an old-fashioned mike that looked like this?

Hugh: That’s great.

Andrew: You prepare people. You prepare your panelists, you prepare your speakers. How do you prepare someone to be good?

Hugh: Wow, that’s a great question. The bulk of preparation that we do, or a lot of our preparation, is very mundane stuff. Where they have to be before the panel, where they pick up their badge, where the Austin Convention Center is — that type of stuff. We found that even to get people to absorb that information is difficult. In terms of how to prepare people to be good, I think we’ve taken a more aggressive attitude in recent years about asking speakers exactly what they’re going to talk about, what angle they’re going to talk about, how they are going to do that. Again, that’s trying to learn from some of these spectacular failures in the past. At South by Southwest, we definitely try to run a balance of trying to get a lot of new speakers in the event; people who haven’t spoken before and people who have new ideas. I like new ideas. I think new ideas and creativity are very important. But at the same time, the more we do this, the more we realize that there’s a lot to be said for people who have that presentation factor.

Gary Vaynerchuk has talked everywhere, and lots of people have heard him or seen him on TV, but he knows how to deliver. You can see him 20 times, and that 21st time, you’re still saying, “Wow, he’s got the speech down.” I’m not trying to deflect or downplay our role here, but speaking is not an easy thing to do. I know that as a conference organizer and as someone who has spoken at panels. I’ve had to say, “God, that just wasn’t very good!” There is a talent to this, and a rhythm to this. In most cases, the more someone does this, the more they’re comfortable with it, the more they can give a compelling presentation. Often, a compelling speaker can talk about a less interesting topic and make it sound interesting, versus a speaker who isn’t compelling and doesn’t know how to deliver can talk about a very exciting topic and not make it sound interesting.

Andrew: You ask some speakers to not just prepare points they’re going to talk about, but to send them to you. That seems to help, right?

Hugh: Sure.

Andrew: What else do you do? What else do you ask them for ahead of time that helps speakers shine on stage, or at least keep the audience entertained?

Hugh: Again, there’s lots of very mundane stuff here, like photo and bio. If someone is organizing a panel, we’ll want to know obviously who the other speakers are and what each speaker brings to the table. One of the things we’ve found, or we think we understand, is that when panels are good, they can be really, really good. But more often than not, they have a tendency to go off track. That’s partly because there isn’t someone on the panel who is a real devil’s advocate. Conflict is good on a panel. Having someone who will strongly disagree with the others and challenge them on that point can be unpleasant, but it’s drama and we all like drama and conflict. Often we’ll go into a panel thinking that the devil’s advocate is John Smith, but it turns out that he just agrees with everyone else. That contributes to dud-ness. So before the event, it’s important to try to figure out who exactly is bringing what perspective to the panel.

Again, in recent years, we’ve really steered more towards solo presentations or dual presentations, simply because we find that people prepare for those more and therefore the sessions tend to be better and more in-depth. I think that when you’re on a panel, and when you’re a busy executive, as most of these people are, that there’s a psychology operating that says, “Well, I don’t have to prepare that much, because that guy’s going to do all the talking, and I can just follow along.” If everyone on the panel does that, then no one’s prepared, and the session’s a dud.

Andrew: The problem is everyone on a panel seems to do that. The moderator seems to think, “Hey, it’s not about me, I just need to ask questions.” Well, I can ask questions. I can just think of them on the spot. And the first question that a moderator like that always asks is, “Tell everyone what you do.” And then the panelists go into long commercials, or most people don’t even know how to explain what they do. So they try one direction, then they say but it’s not really that, it’s another thing. And the people on the panel, the panelists themselves, think that they don’t need to prepare anything. They don’t have any interesting stories. They don’t have a point of viewness necessarily. They’re just going to answer questions. And it just fails. I blame the moderator, frankly.

Hugh: [laughs]

Andrew: It’s true.

Hugh: Yes.

Andrew: It’s the moderator 100 percent. It’s the moderator’s responsibility to call the guests ahead of time, to take points from them ahead of time, to let them know what direction they’re going in. If it’s going to be a little bit WWE, or World Wrestling Entertainment, let’s figure out who stands where, and hold them accountable to that. Have a few statements from those guests, so that you can come back to them, and say, “But before we were sitting face to face, here’s what you told me about them.”

Hugh: Sure, yes. This flows into the more organized. The more everything can be somewhat scripted out, the better it can be. At my end, I’ve been on sessions before, spoken on sessions that I thought, “Wow, I have a great game plan for this going in,” and it just didn’t fly. That dynamic of bringing four people together is difficult to pull off. When it comes off well, it can be spectacular. But, more often than not in our experience at least, it doesn’t come off well. One person is not engaged, or one person wants to talk about iPhones when everyone else is talking about iPads. It seems like that will work, but to the audience it just comes off as a scattered conversation and not what they came to hear.

Andrew: What about payment? Who gets paid to speak at South by Southwest, and who just gets a free ticket?

Hugh: Good question. We do not pay anyone to speak at South by Southwest. It’s always been an issue where we give people a comp badge, and that works for a lot of people. For some people, it doesn’t work and I totally respect that decision. But with as many speakers as we have, we just don’t have budget to pay these people. I think it was a harder sell 10 years ago. At this point, speaking at South by Southwest can open up a lot of doors and is a prestigious thing. It can help someone get a book deal, or add more to the blog following or tweet following, or whatever. We don’t have quite as much of a problem with that as we had before, or as there was in previous years. At the end of the day, we’re offering people that grand concept of exposure.

Andrew: I actually had the organizer of Big Omaha tell me that he paid Gary Vaynerchuk, and he was pretty open about how much he paid him. You’re saying that you got the same speaker, bigger stage, bigger audience, no money.

Hugh: Correct.

Andrew: Wow. So how do you get speakers? Let’s talk about Mark Zuckerberg. How do you get him to come out to South by Southwest and do a live interview with a reporter who’s going to ask potentially challenging questions?

Hugh: What we have to sell to a speaker is that they’re going to get significantly more out of the event by participating in the event than what they’d get by not participating.

Andrew: Was it you selling Mark Zuckerberg? I’m specifically curious about him because he doesn’t need the exposure — or maybe he does. He doesn’t need . . . I don’t know, but it seems like he had a lot going for him even back then. Was it you who convinced him? How did you do it?

Hugh: I was the lead on that, and found an internal Facebook PR person who was very interested in South by Southwest. I was able to sell her on the concept, and she was able to sell her higher-ups and Zuckerberg on the concept.

Andrew: How did you sell her? What’s the pitch?

Hugh: At that point, it was that we’ve got this great audience of cutting-edge web developers, technology trendsetters, digital savants, people who need to be sold on the value of Facebook. Some of them are very into it already, others are still on the edge. This is where all the smartest people come to meet, all the most creative people come to meet. This is where Mark needs to be to get this message across. And that was a compelling reason for them at that point.

Andrew: How’d you prove that you had the leaders, the savants, as you call them? The people who’re going to use a smart phone, before most people even know what a smart phone is?

Hugh: We certainly got a lot of press and publicity and buzz out of Twitter at the 2007 event. Twitter had actually released two or three months before South by Southwest, but . . .

Andrew: We might have lost the connection. Hugh, if we lost the connection I’m going to call you right back. You said, “Twitter just released, but,” and then the screen froze on your side.

Hugh: I’m here.

Andrew: Do you hear me?

Hugh: Yeah, I hear you.

Andrew: Sorry. So you were saying, “Twitter just released but . . .”

Hugh: Twitter had released two or three months before South by Southwest in 2007. They did a big marketing push at the event, meaning that they had paid for these big television screens that we had in the hallways that were broadcasting the Twitter feeds live. So for a lot of the people coming to South by Southwest it was the first time they saw Twitter, realized what it could do, and began to guess some of the possibilities here. It was one of the first big spikes in enrollment and interest and buzz about that service.

We’ve used that example as a way to get a lot of speakers in, a lot of companies in, in terms of look, this audience again comes to the event. They are very, very aggressive in terms of blogging about what they like, about having friends who they’ll talk to about what they like. So coming to South by Southwest and making a good impression, it’s a great way to, again, enhance your career, enhance the reputation of your product and get the word out to the people who will reach lots of other people.

Andrew: How profitable is South by Southwest Interactive?

Hugh: [laughs] I think it’s a comfortably profitable event now. Again, I think for the first 10 years, 12 years of our existence, had we had to survive on our own, we would not have been able to. Again, we were essentially funded and underwritten and supported by South by Southwest Music. But it finally, again, achieved our own significant revenue stream in the last five years.

Andrew: I think South by Southwest brings in $110 million of business to Austin. The whole conference, into the city of Austin, including bars and the hotels and everything else. But can you give me a sense of how much revenue it draws for itself, the interaction portion?

Hugh: I wish I could. I don’t have those exact figures.

Andrew: Is it over $10 million?

Hugh: I would guess so.

Andrew: Okay. And profit over five?

Hugh: I don’t know.

Andrew: Have you gotten rich enough that you can afford to walk around with a monocle and a top hat?

Hugh: [laughs] I don’t know how much monocles and top hats go for.

Andrew: No, it’s not the cost of them. It’s the ability to earn the monocle and the top hat.

Hugh: I see.

Andrew: Mark Zuckerberg, just so you know, he wore a monocle and top hat and white gloves for the whole interview here, when I interviewed him on Mixergy. But that’s a whole other category. He had a butler hold his mike. [laughs]

Hugh: Yes. Things have changed a lot at Interactive over the last few years in terms of being able to live a more comfortable living. But again, I don’t think people get into the conference organizing business to get rich. There are probably better ways to do that. And ultimately, I think that organizing a conference, you know, is a lot of work. It requires lots of sleepless nights and lots of worry, but it is a lot of fun. And when it goes well, and hopefully South by Southwest generally goes well, and you have people coming up to you and saying, “This is the highlight of my year. I had so much fun here. I met other people. I got a new job. I met my wife here.” That’s a boost.

Andrew: Are you allowed, as an organizer, and are the people that work for you allowed to date attendees of the music portion?

Hugh: [laughs] If we have the time, Andrew, if we have the time.

Andrew: Really? So all these people come in, and you guys aren’t allowed to date any of them?

Hugh: [laughs] I don’t think there’s anything that’s strictly forbidden on that. I think it’s that we’re attending to other duties aside from our social life.

Andrew: We’re about 50 minutes into the podcast. Nobody listens to podcasts in the first place. We talk business here, so even fewer people still listen. So this is pretty much a conversation you, me, your mother, my mother, and a couple of their friends. Have you ever dated anybody at South by Southwest? That’s one of the reasons I got into conference spaces, and I met my wife at an event that I organized.

Hugh: I have dated people on staff before. I don’t know that I’ve dated attendees, although I will say that part of the growth of the interactive event was learning to not date staff people.

Andrew: You dated someone on staff?

Hugh: Yes.

Andrew: Wow. For how long?

Hugh: Quite a while. Several years.

Andrew: So, it was a serious relationship.

Hugh: Absolutely.

Andrew: Wow. Wow. And so, when you guys broke up, and it sounds like you broke up, was it tough? Was it messy?

Hugh: Absolutely. [laughs]

Andrew: It was tough and messy?

Hugh: Yes.

Andrew: How was it messy? What happened?

Hugh: Well, all break ups are messy, and luckily, she, at that point, no longer worked for the event, so that made it a little easier. But again, this flows into learning better, maturing as a person, maturing as an organization, realizing that as much fun as it is to date someone who’s doing the same thing that you are and having something to talk about in that regard, that there are a lot of downsides to that, and maybe that’s not what you should do.

Andrew: Didn’t it kill you that all these girls were coming into this event, they were all getting drunk, they were all looking beautiful and wearing their flip-flops, they were just an a relaxed mode, and you couldn’t date any of them because you already had a date who was on staff? You couldn’t even really flirt.

Hugh: You have a much different perspective of the event than I do. Sitting here, managing, wondering how to spin the Mark Zuckerberg in the most positive way.

Andrew: Yes. How much spinning did you do of that?

Hugh: Honestly, we didn’t spin it that much. I think the community ran with it, and in some ways, as you mentioned with Sarah Lacy, she views this as a career changing event. This got the word out about South by Southwest to many, many, many more people who had never heard of the event.

Andrew: What do you do to juice that? What do you do to make sure that people hear about all the good things that are going on at South by Southwest? Beyond, I know they’re going to tweet about it. I know they’re going to blog about it. But what do you do to make sure that beyond the Twittosphere and the blogosphere, that word gets out?

Hugh: Well, I think at this point, I’m not sure that I agree with the beyond stuff. It has created its own media storm at this point. We’re not, at least I don’t think we have quite the sophistication to manage that. But again, over the last three or four years . . . I mean, again, ten years ago, we were begging people to cover the event.

Andrew: Tell me about that period, the tough period. It lasted how long, about four or five years?

Hugh: Well, I would say that it lasted from when we started to 2002, 2003. And to me the big change and kind of the watershed moment, tipping point if you will, to use the lingo, is when we started adopting the panel picker stuff. We had done a design contest with Threadless, and I was just totally amazing by how much buy in that contest got, how many people submitted, because we had done similar design contests off the South by Southwest website. We’d get 10 or 15 entries. This thing on Threadless got 600 entries. So we thought, can we do something similar to this with the whole concept of panel submissions or panel ideas?

So we were able to find someone who could build an interface, and the initial interface was a little bit clunky, and it’s gotten a little better every year. But basically, when you boil everything down, it’s a good way to communicate with our audience and to show our audience how they can be involved with this event. And it’s a great viral marketing thing where people are talking to their friends about, vote for my panel proposal for South by Southwest. So it has created a buzz for the event during the summer when there never used to be a buzz. It’s given us a wealth of content ideas, way more great content than we have room for.

And again, it’s kind of formalized a process that always occurred but just wasn’t very formal. By that I mean that somebody would email me and say, “Hey, I spoke at South by Southwest. I’m an expert on web development. Let me organize this panel next year.” And I’d by like, “Great. You know a whole lot more about web development than I do.” But a lot of people didn’t know how to email me or didn’t have my email address. So now, it’s a lot more transparent, a lot more people in terms of how they can get involved with the event.

And the number of proposals that have been sent into the panel picker has steadily increased over the last few years. And again, it’s kind of pre-identifying what your community is and reaching out to that community and pulling the best ideas in from that community, and being able to see the trends that the community likes or interests from the community. So again, I always feel that that’s really where we started to hit a tipping point is when we instituted that, or brought that in to determine a lot of our content.

Andrew: What was the before and after on that? How big was the event before, and how big was it after you did that?

Hugh: Before we did it, we had something like 1,000 people coming. And look at what you mentioned to start the interview off. Last year, we had more than 14,000. So it was just a big, big difference. And we didn’t really know how well this would work. When we first started doing this, we were thinking, well, maybe we can choose three or four panels like this. And now it’s 70 or 80 or even higher percentage of the programming that way.

And again, the point is, one of the strengths here is it’s getting people who are experts to organize sessions about what they are an expert in, as opposed to me or someone else on my staff reading a magazine article and trying to put together content based on that magazine article or web article or whatever. So again, leveraging the strengths of this community, the creativity of this community to help pull the event forward.

Andrew: There’s something that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to come back to. You said you’re carefully growing the community. I was wondering what you did to grow the community so well. It’s still an authentic community. It’s still one that people want to be a part of, and if they’re not physically there, they want to be a part of it remotely on Twitter or follow along on Leo Laporte’s show when he’s down there. How did you do that?

Hugh: I think that the panel picker was a great way to communicate and establish a base of communication with this community. I also being very strongly in a lot of the ideas a lot of the best speakers at South by Southwest have preached. I always talk to my staff when I’m asked to speak about this idea of markets or conversations, that the more we engage with our audience, by email over the fall and summer and spring, the more good will we’re building up.

I really like the Tony Shea opening remarks a couple years ago at South by Southwest. And his whole mantra and idea that customer service is the new marketing. So in terms of building a community, this has definitely gotten harder and harder to do, but I really try to preach to my staff and myself that we answer emails as quickly as possible. We may not be able to answer positively, but we treat people in a respectful way and say, thanks for your contribution.

And again, trying to be as open to the insights from this community as possible. The more we’ve been open to listening to this community about what they want, as opposed to us telling them what we think they want, the more we’ve grown. Certainly there are hiccups along the way, and there are challenges along the way, but again, I think that this whole idea of customer service, ultimately that’s what we’re, even less so than technology, that’s what we’re in the business of. Providing . . .

Andrew: What other kind of customer service do you do beyond . . . I know you answer emails really fast, and it’s not just you. It’s intimidatingly fast.

Hugh: Present company included. We’re trying to . . . the email thing, the improving the experience when people check in, being friendly to people when they check in, helping them with other stuff. And again, we know and understand that when these people have a positive experience in Austin, they’re going to blog about it, they’re going to tweet about it, they’re going to write about it on their Facebook page, and that generates a mountain of continued interest in the event.

By comparison, if they come to the event and they don’t like the panels, or they feel like they got treated rudely, or they didn’t have a positive experience, they’re going to broadcast that as well. So again, it’s this whole idea that your customer has a megaphone now, and we’ve got to be conscious of that, and we’ve got to be attentive to their wants and needs.

Andrew: All right, final question. Big shocker. Andrew Warner’s panel, designed by Hugh Forrest, did not get picked for South by Southwest. What up with that?

Hugh: This is a true record. The real truth there is Andrew Warner’s panel did not make the first round of announcement, which was the first 200 that were announced on September 20th. We still have about 300 or 400 more ideas to announce. The next announcement will be November 8th. I hate to sound like clichéd or marketing speak, but what is hard to convey to our audience and to people who submit these ideas is that the process of going through these ideas is incredibly difficult and incredibly time consuming. If we just relied on those votes, it would be easier to do. But again, we’re trying to mix those votes in with what our advisory board says with how we want the tone and feel of the event to be.

Andrew: How could I not be part of the tone and feel? I’ve asked money questions and relationship questions. What else is there? Help. I’ll bring a dying person out there. I’m willing to do that.

Hugh: [laughs] You’ll bring a dying person there.

Andrew: Dying person or a totally fit person. Yes, hot women who are totally fit. I will talk about money, and I will wear a monocle and a top hat.

Hugh: See, if you’d only included those . . .

Andrew: You see, I should’ve listed it.

Hugh: Yes, that would have put it right over the top immediately, and you would’ve been in the top of that list.

Andrew: In all openness, and understand that I can edit this interview at this point anyway I want. But in all openness, what was it about the panel that didn’t get you guys excited right away? I want to understand. Believe me, I don’t take things personally. I wouldn’t have brought up that I didn’t make it if I take anything personally. I care more about the answers than anything else.

Hugh: Actually, I searched on our list before we had the interview, and I thought we had accepted the thing, because I know we talked about it a lot. Which is again to say, I don’t think it’s out of the running yet. I think it’s something that we’re still talking about, or we thought it was a good idea. Again, what is really, really difficult about a panel picker is this year we have about 2,500 total ideas.

There are about 150 of those that you can slice off the top immediately in terms of, this isn’t very well organized or doesn’t seem like a topic for our audience. But beyond that, there are a hell of a lot of very good ideas by very creative people that on any given day, you could make an argument, wow this is a great thing. And again, I’m not trying to deflag too much. I’m just saying, these are very, very hard decisions. When we look at the community voting, it’s like the ski race joke. The difference between the person who’s at the very top and the person who didn’t score quite as well tends to be very small.

And again, we’ve made some colossal mistakes, some things we didn’t pick in the past, and we’ve made some really good choices. So my long answer to your short question is, your particular proposal is something that’s still very much in the mix, and certainly if we don’t take this session, the concept itself is something that’s certainly perfect for South by Southwest. Finding your tribe and leading your tribe, this is very much in tone or in flavor with the event.

Andrew: All right, all right.

Hugh: [laughs]

Andrew: I am going to go edit this to make it look like you don’t like puppies and South by Southwest grills puppies. I don’t know. Thanks for doing the interview.

Hugh: And cats also. Don’t forget that.

Andrew: Please, Joe, edit that in twice, cats. And have some lolcats from Ben Huh’s website just flash across the screen. All right. Well, thank you. I won’t push any further. I was curious. I wanted to bring it up, but I’m not looking to make you feel uncomfortable, and I’m certainly not looking to make the audience feel uncomfortable. Audience, please, it’s your job to make you feel uncomfortable at this point. What’s your email address?

Hugh: I am Hugh, Hugh@sxsw.com.

Andrew: All right. Fire away people. I really love South by Southwest. One way or the other, I hope to make it out there, if for no other reason than just to see the people who walk out in the streets. Beyond the conference itself, when you’re out there just hanging out and you run into people who you’ve worked with or you’ve read their blogs for a long time or whose companies you admire, it’s good to have that one on one conversation. As helpful as it is for me to do these interviews, sometimes one on one conversations are even more insightful, even if they’re three minutes. So, what I’m trying to say here before I choke, thanks for putting the conference on. Thanks for doing this interview. I’m looking forward to meeting you in person.

Hugh: Sure. Thanks so much for having me on, and thanks so much for the nice words. And again, to echo what you’re saying there, we do a lot of work in terms of trying to do a compelling slate of panels, but I think we all are very understanding that at the end of the day, it’s all about community. It’s about those serendipitous connections you make with the person who’s in the bathroom line that you find out is the author of the blog you read every day or whatever. And again, it’s bringing this community of very, very creative people together and just watching the connections and ideas that flow forth from there.

Andrew: I’m looking forward to flowing forth with your audience March 2011.

Hugh: [laughs]

Andrew: Thanks for doing the interview.

Hugh: March 15th. Thanks Andrew.

Andrew: You bet. Bye.

This transcript brought to you by www.SpeechPad.com.

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