If you want get booked to keynote SXSW 2021, 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,