SXSW is upon us and it’s nice to have local food and drink recommendations. Here are three places for eats and drinks I’d recommend you check out while in town:

Black Star Co-op

“The world’s first cooperatively-owned and worker self-managed brewpub.”

Haven’t had a bad thing from the menu and I go often. Fish and chips are really good. You might also want to pick from the board of fresh and some local cheeses and house-made charcuterie. Watching the wasteline? Try the ‘local green salad’ and add grilled shrimp and blue cheese. The ‘seasonal vegtables’ are also quite good. It’s a brewpub and there’s beer of the Rational, Irrational, and Infinite variety (house beers brewed on-site) and a lot of others that would take too long to describe; so here’s more on the drinks.

It’s not downtown or close to SXSW happenings, but BUT MetroRail goes right there; letting you out pretty much at the door. Can’t miss it. Take the train from downtown to Crestview for $2.00 roundtrip. Here’s the SXSW special schedule for MetroRail (no service on Sunday).

Craft Pride

There’s this Texas local beer thing happening and Austin is part of the scene. Check out Craft Pride off of Rainy Street for the best selection of Texas beer in town. Something like 54 varieties on tap. Also, the Bacon truck is conveniently parked in the back if you get hungry. Limited menu compared to the restaurant but a good mix with salad, taco, chili, and biscuit options.

Swift’s Attic

Farm to table modern American small plate offerings that are creative, whimsical, and delicious. Swift’s Attic is on Congress and above The Elephant Room (excellent for dark room jazz, but I digress). I visited once last month and am eager to go back. I had chicken liver fegatini, warm brussels sprout salad, grilled oysters, pork cheeks, and quail [small portions great for sharing]. You should probably make a reservation.

I have a list of places that I haven’t been able to check out just yet. Here’s a cheat on a few others you might like:

Congress

Second Bar & Kitchen

The Carillion

Foreign & Domestic

Lenoirs

épicerie

And, here’s my post with recommendations provided last year.

Enjoy!

Join me in Austin for my “Understanding Your Market” and “Strategic Messaging” classes.

Understanding Your Market

Monday, March 18th from 11:30am-1pm

Register here

Understanding the context of your business is imperative for long-term success. We will start with the definition of market research. We will continue by identifying areas of interest and defining the usefulness of each area for your business. The session will conclude with considerations for continued market research success given the product life cycle model. After attending this session, you will have the proper context for gathering meaningful and relevant market research for informed decision making.

Strategic Messaging

Tuesday, April 16th from 11:30am-1pm

Register here

Did you know that what you advertise, sell, and make money on can be three different things? In Strategic Messaging, you will learn how to tailor your brand message for meaningful dialogue. We will start by understanding the relationship of your product to consumers and the marketplace. After a brief discussion and exercise on differentiation, each participant will craft their very own brand positioning statement. At the conclusion of the session you will have the tools to build and leverage your brand effectively across all forms of communications.

How exciting- I’ve been asked to lead a ‘Home Room’ at #SXSWInteractive at the Sheraton where most of the Social & Relationships and Health & Medicine programming will be happening.

Visit me at the Sheraton from 9:30am-10:30am, March 9th through March 12th to get the latest news for SXSW Interactive and to find out the 2013 SXSW Interactive trends from AlixCompany’s analysis of proposals and programming selects. We’ll also have an opportunity to answer questions and network.

Link to “Social & Relationships” programming:   http://schedule.sxsw.com/events?all_theme=Social+and+Relationships

Link to “Health & Medicine” programing:  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events?all_theme=Health+and+Medicine

Getting smarter by the day on SXSW Interactive 2013. Please reach out if I can answer any of your questions.

We’re cleaning up the SXSW Interactive 2013 data for analysis. Here are a few interesting nuggets for now:

• 733 programming events at SXSW Interactive 2013 (includes all themes, categories, and levels)
• 566 programmed events are based on proposals, or 77% of SXSW Interactive 2013 is proposal based
• Of the 3,256 proposals submitted, 17% were accepted for programming.

What we’re likely to achieve with the upcoming data analysis:

• pull forward trends in proposals to see what folks proposed upon (create segmentation if we can)
• pull forward trends in programming to see what we’re getting in 2013
• cross proposal trends with programming trends to see if we’re missing anything based on (a) proposal segmentation (b) professional know-how
• create ‘the perfect winning proposal’ for SXSW Interactive 2013 based on analysis of words/phrases proposed and words/phrases that were selected
• ‘Dialogue’ the analyst and share here

New News:

I’ve contracted someone to assist me in pulling the SXSW Interactive 2013 data for my analysis. I was able to complete one piece- the micro view of ‘Strategy’ representation from the 27 accepted proposals referencing ‘Strategy’. I’ve summarized those selected proposals below. I’ve uploaded the full data sheet (with proposal names and full descriptions) for easy access here.

Notes:  (1) You’ll see the list below doesn’t add up to 27, that’s because there are two books and one Meet Up. (2) Once the data comes in with the 3256 total proposals I’m going to go looking for trends in the programming selections and trends in the proposed topics. I also want to look at proposed topics against accepted topics; you know, just for fun.

Sources:

1) SXSW Panel Picker / Vote / Event: SXSW Interactive 2013 / (Search) Strategy

2) SXSW Interactive Programming

SXSW Interactive 2013 Selected Proposals Summarized by Alix Representing “Strategy” for SXSW Interactive 2013:

-The U.S. Army a national leader in social media engagement

-The first Mason Zimbler creativity abroad program

-W+K joins forces with Graeme Devine of GRL Games

-Unicorn Booty’s blog-to-brick progression

-The role of social media in the success and sustainability of the series “Deadliest Catch”

-Intellectual property strategy

-The problems with social media

-Diagnosing the disease of inflated importance

-WWE’s social engagement

-Foster social booty shakers

-Growing a non-social network

-UX methodologies

-Sales strategy

-Responsive design

-The new major minority

-Mobile patient experience

-Art of storytelling in the digital age

-Be prepared for new domain endings. the most sought-after endings include .app, .home, .art, and .shop

-Social media and storytelling

-China is the new battleground

-Position your startup for acquisition and negotiate a sale

-A new definition for API: Apps, Partners and Income

-Unlikely, surprising and curious partnerships

-Content strategy

Net Net for me:

-Lots of great topics covering a wide variety of interests

-Case studies are wonderful; I think several will be case study heavy which is good

-Outside of case studies, I don’t agree problem/solution is the necessarily the best approach for understanding ‘how to’ integrate strategy in the interactive world. A lot of these selects are problem/solution oriented.

-I need more info on who attends SXSW Interactive. I wonder if SXSW has a published survey on outcomes and interests. I can share my POV (below) but it would obviously be one dimensional without knowing more about current and prospective attendees.

-IMO, I don’t see the fundamentals of strategy being represented at SXSW Interactive 2013. What’s represented is ‘at-stream’ and ‘down-stream’; the ‘up-stream’ piece lags for me. Up-stream is grounded in understanding why consumers care or should care. We don’t need to reinvent the connecting with consumers’ wheel. We need to understand what the wheel is made of, where the parts come from, what the wheel is designed to produce, and again why folks care (or might care) about it in the first place.

Thought I’d do a little analysis on the 2013 SXSW Interactive selects. I’m working through the selections as data to compile insights from the proposals selected. The part that will take me the longest is copying the submitted proposals (3256 total) into Excel. From there I’d like to provide some insight based on who got in and who didn’t.

So far, I’ve compiled a list of all 2013 SXSW Interactive proposals using the PanelPicker search term”strategy”. This produced 732 proposals. I then copied the list of those selected proposals and cross referenced against my list of “strategy” proposals. Of the 3256 proposals submitted, 732 had a reference to strategy (23%). Of the 732 proposals with “strategy” referenced, 27 were accepted (3.7%). You can also look at it as 5.5% or 27 of the 495 total accepted mention strategy.

Where is the prominence? I then copied all of the selected proposal titles and created a word cloud using Wordle.com (that’s the picture here). In 2013, the hot topics, or those words most frequently used in the title anyway, include:  social, media, digital, design, and new. This makes sense to me. I just wish strategy were up at the top as well. Afterall, centering on strategy helps advertisers and marketers connect social, media, digital, and design in meaningful and ROI driven ways.

Next steps:

– Copy all of the selected proposal content and analyse to see if other big percentage buckets of content pop to the top. I’ve just analysed the titles- does selected proposal content offer more insight?

– Pull forward any other big proposal spaces and determine the SXSW representation. In other words, are there other big spaces like strategy that were largely proposed upon that have a similar low percentage representation? Working here from that 23% of submitted proposals that used “strategy”, yet 3.7% or 5.5% actually got in.

– Share my analysis here providing a close-up look of those strategy related selected proposals (proposals referencing “strategy”) for SXSW 2013 Interactive. I’m curious how strategy is being represented and if that matches with my professional know-how as a strategist. I will need to cross strategy as it applies to creativity provided SXSW Interactive 2013 Programming shares, “The one common thread amongst this programming is massive creativity, which serves as the ongoing currency of conversation in Austin in March.”  (http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/programming)

More to come shortly…