South by what, now?

South by Southwest is a series of three festivals and conferences that take place in Austin, Texas, in March. There’s a music and media conference, a film conference and festival, and an interactive festival — this is the one we’re headed to.

SXSW Interactive is pretty much Mecca for anyone who does anything digital. It’s a five-day info binge that covers just about every aspect of interactive technology, communication and the business of digital and social media.

According to the people who put it together, SXSW Interactive is where

the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators, content producers, programmers, widget inventors and new media entrepreneurs… [take part in] provocative panel sessions, hands-on training, and big-picture analysis of the future of this industry.

So yeah, Mecca it is.

Everything’s bigger in Texas… including logistical challenges

The conference manages to squash hundreds of sessions — non-representative sample: Revenge of Kick-Ass Mash-Ups With Punk Rock APIs; Do Cool Kids Leave When the Suits Arrive?; Chris Brogan’s I Don’t Trust You One Stinking Bit — into five of your  common-or-garden variety, 24-hour days. On top of these, there are all manner of chats, demos, meet ‘n’ greets and barbecues (please, it’s Texas — there’ll be at least one a day).

The MxM folks who attended last year’s festivities have warned this year’s first-timers that the biggest challenge is fitting it all in… and this brings us to an important question: how do we make SXSW work for us?

There’s no doubt that the conference is a huge opportunity for us to pick up skills, make connections and just generally become better at what we do. But pulling it off in a way that benefits us as a business and as individuals, and serves both present and future clients, is going to take some doing.

To get the most out of combined SXSW experience, we’re going to need to share our individual experiences. But how we do this is a bit tricky. It’s impractical to schedule in extended nightly catch-ups, and impossible to prepare take-home reports on everything we do — after all, we have work to do before, during and after the conference.

A little idea we’re quite excited about

Our website is designed around our blog, which offers a manageable way to read and share anything between one and five posts a day. However, at SXSW we won’t just be blogging. There will be 18 people tweeting, taking photos, live blogging and filming interviews. And that’s a completely different level of need — our current set-up just won’t do it justice.

So over the next few weeks we’ll be working on a way to bring all this new information together into one place, and make it manageable and meaningful. We’ll use our existing site, some tools already out there, and a new presentation layer to create something that will bring what we do, as it happens, to you.

We’ll provide updates on this project as we go, so if you’re curious, keep an eye out.