I’m Attending South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2010

At the urging of one of my more advanced Tech Guru friends, I am attending SXSW Interactive this year. Matter of fact, I’m here now, at the Convention Center, killing time before my first round of workshops this afternoon. This is the Tech portion of the now three-part SXSW Festival. The Music and Film portions are the other two.

So, what can a Realtor learn by rubbing elbows with a bunch of geeks and techies at SXSW? A lot, I hope. The business of real estate is now very much a technology occupation. Yes, the “people aspect” and the relationships we build and maintain are still the most important factors, but technology now more than every provides the frameworks and tools that support those relationships, as well as the deal tasks that we perform.

So, even though I remain dubious about most “Social Networking” hype, this blog being the exception, I’ll start off by attending a workshop entitled “Social Media Marketing for your Business“, where hopefully I’ll “Learn solid strategies, how to measure success, and all the tools you need to succeed in the fastest growing marketing medium on the web”.

Yeah, whatever. I’ve still never received a lead from any social networking source other than this blog, but I nevertheless feel it would be a mistake to ignore this topic, especially knowing that my 17 year old daughter and her friends (the future generation of real estate customers) don’t even use email or talk on the phone anymore.

Later I’ll attend a course titled “What are Analytics – A Guide to Practical Data“and hopefully learn to make better sense of and interpret the massive amount of web traffic data produced by the visitors to our website and their behavior once here. I can see the stats and data for our web traffic in Google Analytics, but other than taking note of the number of unique visitors, time on site, search terms that bring people here, and the most popular content pages, I have no diea what to do with the gazillion other pieces of information that get captured ,or if it’s even importat.

I haven’t decided on the third and last workshop for today. Some of the courses have somewhat edgy names, such as “How to not be a *Bonehead* at SWSX”. I substituted the word “Bonehead” in favor of the actual, more offensive pejorative that was used. But I submit if one needs to attend a class on how to make sure you’re not a “Bonehead”, your attendance at said class already makes you one. I think kindergarten level manners will suffice, so no instruction is necessary for this attendee.

Anyway, more to come if anything interesting comes of these next 5 days.

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