If you want get booked to keynote SXSW, now's the time to start planning. And what better way to start then by listening to this exclusive deep dive interview with Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Office at SXSW, about how he goes about making that decision?
Welcome to my first episode of the new B2B Lead Gen podcast, hosted by yours truly, Eric Schwartzman. Many of you may know from On the Record...Online, an award-winning podcast I produced from 2005 to 2015.
Highlights include what it takes to be invited to keynote SXSW; how tech companies have leveraged the popularity of SXSW to launch huge brands such as Twitter and Airbnb; plus the challenges and surprises of his role, including how the festival became involved in the Gamergate controversy, and the ongoing importance of face-to-face meetings in the industry.
After this coronavirus pandemic winds down, I imagine there will be a ton of pent up demand for conferences and trade shows. Next year's SXSW could be the biggest gathering yet.
Show Notes:
Eric Schwartzman: Welcome, B2B start-ups, change-ups, scale-ups and grown-ups. This is the B2B Lead Gen podcast. I'm your host, Eric Schwartzman. Let's do this.
ES: You're the Chief Programming Officer at SXSW. It's definitely the most influential interactive conference in America. And technology's always changing, it's always moving. So when you're creating educational programming in an environment, I guess we have to do it I don't know how many months in advance, but probably a lot of months in advance. I guess you're part fortune teller, yeah?
Hugh Forrest: Part, but I hope not too large a part, because I'm not as good a fortune teller as I'd like to be. If I was I'd be in a different line of work. How about that?
ES: Do you have some sort of a process? I mean, how many years have you been doing this now?
HF: I started at SXSW in 1989, so I've been here roughly 30 years. In terms of a process, the process is just a process, meaning that we start meetings to plan for the next year, the next March, those meetings typically start in July, and we aim for the big name keynote speakers, the people we hope will fill the biggest rooms. We're talking and talking and talking. Someone nominates. The person coming to the committee that we have working on this stuff will nominate someone. Hopefully we have robust dialogue with someone saying, “I think this is a great person for the event,” and someone else will say, “I don't think this is a great person.” I certainly have learned, and learned the hard way, that the more you can discuss something, the more likely the result is going to be a positive one. I also am a huge, huge, huge believer in the power of community. So I get a lot of great ideas from the community. And that belief in the power of community is certainly one of the driving motivators behind the SXSW PanelPicker interface, which is how we choose a lot of our programming. And that idea being that the community has lots of great ideas that we might not have yet, and the more we can engage with that community, communicate with that community, interact with that community, learn from that community, the stronger the event becomes.
ES: Hugh, I'm particularly interested in the pre-qualification process. And I'm particularly interested in those panels and speakers that don't come from PanelPicker, that you decide, and you and your committee or group decide, need to be there to have a well-rounded event. Are there any lessons learned about pre-qualifying? Obviously, once they've pre-qualified, they still may not pass muster once you start talking to them, but what is it that brings someone up to the level where you say, “Wow, that's somebody we really need to consider”?
HF: Well, 60–70% of the programming comes through PanelPicker. The other 30–40% is stuff that we're curating that we're reaching out to. It was certainly at a basic level where we're doing searches on our favorite search engine to see if this person is in the news a lot at whatever time we're considering this person. That's certainly an indicator. We're also looking at their social media following given that social media is often some degree of indicator of relevance and in terms of where we are in 2019 and 2020. I've learned a lot about simply the power of celebrity over the last few years and whether you like that or not, we're constantly reminded that people who are celebrities have a better chance of filling a big room than people who have fantastic ideas but may not quite have that celebrity factor. So does that mean that you're limited to only talking to celebrities? No, I think that means that you try to be creative and perhaps pair someone with a celebrity-type following with someone who's got some fantastic ideas and get the best of both worlds that way.
ES: One of the great things I remember about being at the keynotes is often — maybe this isn't the case recently, I haven't been in the last five years — but I can remember going into a keynote not having any idea who the person is, and being blown away and having that be one of the wonderful things about the conference.
HF: Sure, I think we’re always trying to get a little bit of a mix of people who are well established and have a reputation, as well as up-and-comers who don't have that much of a reputation yet, and that can surprise people with their insights, with their inspiration, with their expertise. So, again, trying to achieve a balance there, although I think that as the event continues to evolve, and as the media landscape continues to change, we probably lean a little more now towards established names just because we know that that is what tends to attract more media attention, and media attention is one of the pillars of how the SXSW system works.
ES: Obviously it's curated. And one of the reasons it's great is because it’s curated, and partially curated by the community. But it's interesting you mentioned the up-and-comer. I'm curious to know, and maybe there's no answer to this, but I'll just throw it out there: How does an up-and-comer get considered? What is it about someone who doesn't have a following, isn't a celebrity, but maybe has an interesting idea? In that case, would you get someone like Tara Hunt to do a keynote? What a fantastic keynote! And I became friends with her afterwards. I loved it. And then there was Danah Boyd from Microsoft, who I didn't really know, and she was fantastic. What is it that gets somebody like that considered? Because there's a lot of people like that, but only a few of them are lucky enough to make it to there, or unlucky enough, depending on how you look at it, to make it to the stage at SXSW. So any thoughts at all on what differentiates that [breeders cap]?
HF: Well, for someone like Tara or Danah — both great people and have contributed a ton to this “interactive industry” — before they had risen to the keynote stage, or however you want to phrase that, they had participated in SXSW quite a lot. So I had seen what kind of audience they would draw, I'd seen what kind of positive response they had gotten from attendees. So for people like that, it's not completely out of the blue. We had had some experience with them in previous years. For other folks who may not be all that well known, I think it's a lot of myself and other people on my staff trying to pay attention to as many different inputs, particularly over the summer when we're a little less busy, and creating lists, however we create them, whether by texts, or by database, by sticky notes of “Wow, I read this really cool article about such-and-such and this person will be a great speaker.” And so, again, we typically bring 200–300 ideas to the table, and in our first meetings of the year try to go through as many of those speaker ideas as possible. If I think Joni Smith is a particularly great speaker and a particularly great candidate for SXSW, my job is to convince the other people on staff who are hopefully skeptical that Joni is a great speaker. Sometimes I can do that, sometimes I can't.
ES: Now, in your position, I imagine you receive a lot of pitches from PR people and marketing people who are trying to get visibility for their brands. And I imagine sometimes you've taken the bait, sometimes you haven't. But after 30 years you must have a thing or two to say about what type of tech services that are being pitched as hot actually make it, and which ones don't. Do you have any wisdom on predicting which types of technology services make it or don't, based on that experience of being pitched and featuring technology that didn't make it, or featuring technology that did make it?
HF: Again, my tips here are fairly limited. If I had better expertise, I would probably be in a different line of work, but I do know that the kind of technology innovations, apps, breakthroughs that have done best at SXSW are the ones that have helped attendees experience and engage and absorb SXSW. So if you think about our biggest success story as an event, which was Twitter in 2007 “launching” at SXSW, one of the reasons in my mind that Twitter was so successful was that people used it or could use it in its still embryonic form to understand what parties their friends were going to, where they were going for lunch, where they were going for dinner. Same thing with Foursquare, which launched in 2019. About this time, Airbnb got a big push out of SXSW. I think we were their first event that they did and they sold one bed, and that was to their co-founder. But again, it was something, that there was a hotel shortage in Austin during SXSW and people needed a way to find rooms: Airbnb. Fast forward to 2015 when Meerkat had a big push at SXSW. Same kind of thing was that it helped people absorb and understand what was going on at SXSW. And you may never have heard of Meerkat — it was short lived, it gave rise to Periscope.
