Why the SXSW Panel Picker is a great hack
By making the audience choose the talks, SXSW also turns every speaker into an insufferable promoter of their own session.
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a huge undertaking. Across weeks, they schedule a huge number of talks. Speaking at SXSW is aspirational—hundreds of startups and thinkers clamoring for the limelight (and the free badge that comes with being a credentialed speaker.)
But how they choose talks is a brilliant attention hack. Here’s why.
Most conferences (including those I run) rely on the organizers, or an advisory board, to review talks. We choose those we think have merit, and will be well delivered, and will be useful to attendees. But those things are all proxies for something: Will this talk get bums in seats?
This means that the content model for most conferences is a cycle like this:
There are a few problems with this. First, the content team may make bad choices. They may select a speaker the audience doesn’t enjoy, or want to hear from. But there’s a second, bigger, problem: The most important thing about an event is attendance.
Just Evil Enoughtalks a lot about the journey from attention to action. We live in a noisy world, so our minds are constantly filtering out messages by asking, is this for me? We triage relevant information, and one of the best signs that something is relevant is when it’s delivered by someone we know and trust.
Here’s the SXSW content cycle.
SXSW has a panel picker. The audience votes on the talks it wants to hear.
This solves the first problem: the attendees know best what content they want. Of course, there are also plenty of curated talks and invited keynotes at the event as well.
To prevent vote rigging, you have to create and verify an email address with SXSW. You can opt out of communications, but this nevertheless means they grow a huge database of everyone whomightbe interested in the content.
This also solves the second problem: The speakers promote the conference to their friends. Every speaker launches a secret campaign, messaging friends and posting to WhatsApp groups and cajoling co-workers into upvoting their talk. Everyone tries to game the system, and SXSW reaps the rewards.
In other words, the way SXSW chooses talks turns every speaker into a conference promoter. It’s a giant popularity contest, with the event reaping the real rewards. SXSW subverts the voting process, and we admire them for doing so.