spotted at SXSWi: the best promos at the 2011 Interactive Festival

A recap from emfluence Marketing Manager, Jessica Best

Wow. My first South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience definitely lived up to the affectionate moniker "geek spring break" – there were famous people, sponsors, free food and drink, shiny things… the works! And I got to experience it all with 40,000 of my geekiest friends. Ahh, bliss.

From social media to widgets to guerrilla marketing, I had plenty to learn from. But as a marketer, my heart was captured by some of the best non-traditional promotions I've seen by an industry bursting with new ideas every day. Here's my "Top 8" list of the best promos at SXSWi 2011 (and the brands behind them):

8. Google & Lego Mindstorm Robot Sumo Wrestling

How do you engage smart, technically-savvy people at the most distracting conference in America? Challenge them to build sumo-wrestling robots from scratch. Google sponsored an event where teams built Lego robots and pitted them against each other à la Robot Deathmatch. Only a few of the robots did what they were supposed to by gametime, but every single one was amusing. Bonus for Google and Lego: 4 uninterrupted hours of attention and engagement from some serious smartie pants at SXSWi.

7. Play Foursquare with Foursquare for IRL Badges

It’s a simple idea (and one they had last year), but Foursquare descended upon Austin at various events, partnered with the Pepsi crew, to play actual games of Foursquare with attendees. For the record, no one remembers the rules of actual schoolyard Foursquare. We played something that looked kind of like Foursquare for a while and if you got to the “Mayor” Square, you got the nifty tee shirt. While tees are the big swag item at SXSWi, personally, I liked the temporary tattoo badges. Like a way to wear your check-in IRL (in real life) on your arm. Perfectly geeky.

6. FedEx Delivers… Lunch

Free food is apparently standard in Austin during SXSW. FedEx took this concept and made it their own, tying it into their brand (thus making this list), by taking their tagline “FedEx Delivers Around the World” and giving it a food spin. During the conference, they set up a food trailer near the conference center and gave out free “boxed” (in FedEx boxes) lunches themed for different countries around the world where they deliver. They encouraged you to tweet them about the lunch, too, tying it back into growing an online followship. Clever, right?

5. Frog Design Showcase

Frog Design’s party was one of the most anticipated of SXSWi, eliciting a 5-city-block-long line to get in. The reason? They show off their genius in a really fun way. Attendees can play video games or make psychedelic dance videos using their bodies as the playing pieces. The portable restrooms come equipped with sensors that display vacant/occupied and avatars that sit down when you do (yes, a little creepy, but it’s a simple motion detector – no cameras!). And the icing on the cake: as an homage to the millions of tweets generated at SXSWi, they created a Tweet Map, It’s like a heat map, but where tweets drop onto the map of Austin, changing concentration from green to blue to purple. Yes, I did tweet a pic of the Tweet Map that showed up on the Tweet Map.

4. Foodspotting Scavenger Hunt

Ok, so a scavenger hunt makes it sound like any of this was difficult to find. Far from it: Foodspotting, a foodie watch group, circled up the wagons… er, rather the food trucks and hosted a sort of parking lot cafeteria. Foodspotting gave you a list of foods you had to take a photo of and awarded prizes/swag to those who played. What do they get out of the deal? You can play faster if you download their iPhone/Android app to take the pictures and upload them to Foodspotting.

3. About.me Headshots

About.me is a simple concept: one place where you can find all of my social media links and a short bio on me. The design is fairly consistent across users: one big background headshot. One of the most simple, yet effective promotions I saw was in the TechCrunch lounge, where About.me was offering professional headshots for About.me profiles. This promotion rescued many from their previous MySpace-esque self-portraits or a Photoshop job to cut your friends out of your background picture.

2. The Ice Cream Man

This guy has a really great job. He gives out free ice cream. Seriously, that’s his job. He gets sponsors to pay for logos on the truck, the napkins or on fliers. Then he drives around like the pied piper offering free ice cream to Austinians on a warm, sunny day, talking up the services that sponsor the treat. You know he’s in the neighborhood because the truck will start trending on Foursquare or Twitter will light up with TwitPics of a spotting. Best of all, he’s giving away the good stuff: Ben & Jerry’s. Yum!

1. Chevy

Chevy had the hands-down best exposure and marketing at SXSWi. I won’t go into as much detail as this guy (he nailed it), but suffice it to say, they set the bar for sponsorship pretty high. They showed that they “get” attendees and offered services and swag that added to the SXSWi experience rather than distracted from it. From a free ride around Austin or from the airport to a comfy Charging Lounge, super stocked with chargers for every type of device humanly imaginable, to test drives for the convertible Camaro and the new Volt, every attendee must have said Chevy’s name at least once at South by Southwest this year. Well played, Chevy.

Did anyone see any others that were truly rockin’? Feel free to post them here or send them my way on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/emfluence

See you all next year!