TED vs. SXSW: The Value of Preparation
I’ve gone from the TED conference in Monterey last week to SXSW in Austin this week. The differences couldn’t be more pronounced.
From pleasant movie stars to honored heads of state to serial inventors on one hand (TED) to kids with stickers on their faces to dumb-luck entrepreneurs to social media geeks with to much video equipment (SXSW), the profiles of the attendees were polarized.
At TED, atomic particle theorists labor in advance to perfect their 18 minute presentations, neuro-scientists bring real brains for show and tell and a mycologist proffers mushrooms as a cure for our toxic planet.
At SXSW, poorly moderated sessions go on and on for more than an hour without a single, actionable insight delivered to the patient crowd. The lack of preparation is palpable. The low level of conversation is a bore.
The vacuous leading the vacuous in “Core Conversations” at SXSW.
It boils down to ego.
At TED, even Nobel prize winners work to please the crowd. At SXSW, the panelists are lackadaisical with no helpful agenda and a come-as-what-may attitude. Bloggers, vloggers and podcasters roam the halls cranking out microbytes of crap, having Seesmic seisures, generating Utterz gunk, and generally trying to suck all the fi out of the wi. The most inane conversations are recorded and everyone is hoping they’ll be a web celeb.
I had the good fortune of being in the Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) and Sarah Lacy keynote and was filled with horror at what went down. You can read plenty of recaps from CNET, Wired and (the incredibly poorly written posts at) Valley Wag.
Here’s my take.
It was the opposite of the charming, well-researched, intelligent line of questioning John Battelle employed the last time I saw Mark give a keynote interview at Web 2.0.
Sarah’s awkward interview literally had hundreds of people squirming in their seats. Thank god for the outlet of being able to commiserate over Twitter in real-time – the attendees found solace in their collective and painful Tweets.
In my estimation, here is what went wrong. And, because I’m not trying to be mean-spirited, but instead, helpful, I’ve posted both suggestions for remedy as well as my experienced advice about how to handle a stage interview.
The best panel at SXSW was The Suxorz
The Suxorz: The Worst of the Worst Social Marketing
http://www.ianschafer.com/ 2008/ 03/ 08/ from-sxsw-the-suxorz-the-worst-of-the-worst…
Per Ian Schafer of Deep Focus: These are the Suxorz. The worst social media campaigns of the year. Panelists were: Henry Copeland, Founder, Blogads.com Steve Hall, Publisher, Adrants Jeff Jarvis, Blogger/Prof, Buzzmachine/CUNY Rebecca Lieb, VP & Editor-in-Chief, The ClickZ Network Charlotte Selles, Global Brand Mgr, Jim Beam.
Mike Mathews said,
March 10, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
Well presented. Your comparison between TED and SXSWi matches some of the concern I had in reading tweets coming in by SMS and online. Seems that the atmosphere at SXSWi is extremely self-absorbed and some of the attendees may echo that in their ecstatic enjoyment of the event.
That self-absorption certainly seems to be the case with Sarah Lacy. The tweets that hit my phone during the interview quickly grew louder and steadier, so I turned the phone off to concentrate on the business meeting I was attending. Having myself worked with engineers, scientists, and developers for over thirty years, your notes to Sarah rang true in all respects and I hope she will embrace and enable the pearls of wisdom you laid out for her.
Some of this uncomfortable relationship Sarah surfaced may lie in the almost inherent animosity between anyone in the corporate world and the burgeoning social media world, especially when the social media world feels it is being co-opted. Josh Bernoff at Forrester Research comments on this today at http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2008/03/corporate-socia.html, while his colleague, Charlene Li, presented to SXSWi yesterday.
I just found your blog yesterday through tweets from another person, I’ll be interested in seeing your thoughts when they appear in my Reader subscriptions.
Mark Evans said,
March 10, 2008 @ 6:45 pm
Susan,
Great insight and advice on how keynotes, panels and conferences should be done. As one of the co-organizers of the mesh conference in Toronto, there’s a lot of food for thought there.
Thanks, Mark
Alexandre said,
March 11, 2008 @ 4:15 pm
The comparison isn’t unfair, especially given the (in)famous Web 1.0/2.0 comparisons. But it might be useful to broaden the focus.
TED’s influence on the “geek crowd” is quite obvious. Insight from some of those presentations keep feeding the digital groupthink through the rest of the year. The TED conference is problematic in several ways (giving us Sarah Lacy’s own sour grapes about TED, as well as the development of BIL). But it functions as a mainstream event from which geeks may get inspiration. A bit like Social Forum or the social part of the WEF.
SXSW, which is sometimes called “Spring Break for Geeks,” isn’t really about insight. It’s about guerilla networking. Pitching ideas to VCs. Meeting Guy Kawasaki in an elevator. Pitching your startup’s latest comic-drawing site to Jason Calacanis’s Mahalo.
If you want unprepared people doing actual work, attend BarCamp. Plenty of insight, lots of networking, all done in an honest fashion.
Seriously, it works.
Emily said,
March 12, 2008 @ 9:33 am
Agree wholeheartedly that ego is to blame. Many of the “celebs” at SXSW think that they just have to show up and their job is done. This was especially evident in the Design Eye panel, where a disappointed audience was scolded by Andrei Herasimchuk for expecting too much from the panelists: “We have jobs, you know.”
Hey Andrei, so do we, and a lot of us are giving up our billable time to see you — and that’s after the $400 fee. The least you could have done was prepare.
Hugh Forrest said,
March 15, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
Susan,
Thanks for the extensive reporting on the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival.
I couldn’t agree with you more that the key to a successful presentation at SXSW is pre-event preparation. To this end, we spend a lot of time in January and February working with panelists and encouraging them to prepare extensively for their time at SXSW. Most of the speakers do make these efforts, although a few clearly do not. I am sorry to hear that the sessions you attended were ones where the speakers hadn’t fully prepared. However, I think the ego-related generalizations you make in the report above are a bit unfair and do not characterize the bulk of the content at the 2008 event.
Likewise, I am extremely flattered that you have compared SXSW Interactive to TED, which brings together some of the industry’s most incredible speakers. That said, I think that SXSW and TED are very different on many many levels. Theirs is an invite-only event that costs thousands of dollars to attend (while SXSW is open to anyone and fees are about 1/10 of this figure). Moreover, I tend to think that SXSW is less about presentations and more about an immersive experience in which everyone participates. Said another way, if you wait for SXSW to happen to you, then you probably will miss what so many people enjoy about the event.
Hope to see you back in Austin in Spring 2009!
Best regards,
Hugh Forrest
SXSW Interactive Festival
Steve Hall said,
March 16, 2008 @ 9:43 am
I only caught about ten minutes of this from the Day Stage then I had to run off to some interview. I guess I missed it all but I feel like I was there after reading all about it…days later after having come home and getting a terrible cold.
Nice insight Susan and yes, Hugh, SXSW is different. I can’t really comment as I wasn’t there. But I will say that this was my first SXSW and it was one of the greatest experiences I have ever had at a conference.
That is probably due to the notion that it’s an “immersive experience” and that, basically, I got to meet a lot of people physically I had only known digitally for years. That, alone, was worth the experience.
From what U heard, the interview was certainly a bit awkward but then again, I wasn’t there so I can’t fairly comment.
Oh, and thanks for the shout on my panel, Susan:-)
Katherine Druckman said,
March 16, 2008 @ 10:08 pm
I completely understand your perspctive on egos, the “interet famous” and the un-prepared seemingly calling it in. On the other hand, there is great value in the SXSWi experience in that the halls are full of brilliant and fantastic people. The trick is to get them away from the crowd and the hoopla, and have a great conversation. I agree with Hugh. The experience is what you make it.
Blogads for opinion makers » Blog Archive » Henry Copeland bio said,
July 23, 2008 @ 6:51 am
[…] Here’s audio from two SXSW panels Henry moderated in 2006, Cluetrain: seven years later and Revenge of the Blogs: politics and election ‘08. And here’s the podcast of Suxorz panel at SXSW ‘08, which former Ad-tech chair Susan Bratton called “the best panel at SXSW ‘08.” […]