10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google+ for SEO. Oral History: Sex! Drugs! Apps! SXSW Interactive At 20. When South By Southwest Interactive launched in 1994, there wasn't much to it: a couple hundred participants and a handful of panel discussions, all crammed into a few rooms at a Hyatt in Austin. Back then, the festival was really only half a festival--as evidenced by its title, SXSW Film and Multimedia--and was eclipsed by the vastly more successful SXSW Music Festival, from which it had spun off.' Today, SXSW Interactive welcomes more than 30,000 registrants to Austin each March and has become a coveted launching pad for startups (including Twitter and Foursquare), a hunting ground for tech investors, a laboratory for forward-thinking ideas, and a lavish five-day party that's often referred to as “geek spring break.” But its two-decade history suggests the now-famous festival is quite a bit more than that.
Within SXSW Interactive's march from obscurity to prominence is the story of digital culture itself. The First Fest, CD-ROMs Rule, a Tragedy in the Family Gattis: CD-ROMs moved on. 16 Unique & Innovative Ways to Market your Business. Word-of-Mouth Marketing Evolution. BzzAgent is Redefining CPM. As time goes on, we learn a little more about the evolving BzzAgent word-of-mouth (WOM) model. At the International Word-of-Mouth Marketing Conference in Barcelona, Dave Balter, BzzAgent founder/CEO, gave a little more insight into the direction his company is taking. He talked about the current slate of media channels where marketers can buy TV, buy Radio, and buy Billboards.
However, when it comes to new media options such as Blogs, CGM, and Viral stuff … a media channel doesn’t really exist for marketers to “buy.” And that’s where the BzzAgent WOM model is heading—creating a media channel for marketers to “buy” word-of-mouth from the company’s growing list of volunteer BzzAgents. In many ways this is old news as BzzAgent announced this business strategy back in February with a press release [PDF link] saying, Whoa! I’m just now beginning to understand the reality of what BzzAgent is trying to do with word-of-mouth. What do you think?