Tech Tips for Creating Content at SXSW

Content Creation

Action is all around you at SXSW Interactive. You’re crazy not to capture the moments, try to make sense of it all and make a ton of new connections. Content creation and curation are some of the best ways to get the most out of SXSWi. This is a short guide on some systems that can help you capture and publish your content. This is my plan.  Let me know if you have some content tips to pass on.

Planning

Attending SXSW takes a ton of planning and your content strategy is no different. While your session, meeting and party plans may shift during the conference, you want to have a tried and tested way of capturing and publishing your content. It comes down to planning. Figure out your systems and test them BEFORE getting on the nerd bird.

Have a Homebase

You’ll be active on a ton of social networks, but how will you bring it all back together? For me, I’m using a dedicated page on my blog –> SXSW as homebase. Think about where and how your going to organize your content.

On my page you’ll find all my schedule, pins, photos, and eventually links to the content I create during SXSWi.

Blog It Up

If you’re going to be blogging while at the conference (my 2011 posts), plan ahead. Create your post template so all you need to do is drop your notes, video, pictures or whatever into the template and publish. Do the prep work up front.

Photo Op

I plan on taking even more pictures this year than last year so this is key for me. Here’s my process for posting pictures.

[important]DSLR –> Phone –> Posterous –> Autopost (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter)[/important]

DSLR –> Phone

Getting pictures off your fancy camera on to the web. It has always seemed you have two options. 1) Share so-so pictures from your smartphone (forget about night-time photography) or 2) Shoot with a good camera and download them later.

This year I’m trying to have the best of both worlds.  I’m using a Eye-Fi card to load pictures from my DSLR to my Droid over wifi automagically.

Phone –> Posterous

Once on the Phone I can do some basic editing and email them to a Posterous blog.  Here’s an article on how to post to Posterous via email.  It’s incredibly easy once you get the hang of it. I’m going to tag all my photos “sxsw”.

Autopost (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter)

You can configure Posterous to Autopost to about 25 different places. I’m posting my SXSW pictures to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr and I’ll have a link on my SXSW  page, again, I like to have one spot, my homebase, for all my content.

Posterous AutoPost Options

Contacts

You’re going to meet a ton of people.  So far I haven’t found a technology I like for capturing contacts. No one seems to use “Bump”. Card Muncher is iOS only.  Last year I tried Hashable but it felt too forced. My plan this year is to use a mashup of If This Then That (ifttt) and Storify.  Here’s a link to the IFTTT recipe I’m using. It works like this, ifttt catches any mention of me and puts it to my Storify storyboard. Later, after the conference, I can go in and find who I was chatting with during the conference.  Perhaps I’ll make that into a blog post afterwards. The only caveat is I have to ask people I meet to mention me in a tweet.

ifttt --> Storify

Video

I don’t have big plans for video but I will be carrying a flip camera.  If I shoot video I’ll rely on YouTube and embeds into a blog post.

[important]What are your tips and tricks?[/important]

Photo Credit [sxsw]