Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > March > 15 > Entry
SXSW Panel: The SXSW PanelPicker - Can It Predict the Future?
Time/Date: 11 a.m., Tuesday (hashtag: panelpicker)
Panelists: Jonathan Spillman, UT McCombs School of Business; Juan Moreno, University of Texas; Lindsey Simon, Google; Tony Wallace, University of Texas student.
The gist: Organizers who worked with South by Southwest Interactive to create the PanelPicker, which allows people to suggest and vote on panels for the festival, talked about its origins (it began as a McCombs School of Business MBA project at the University of Texas) and how it’s changed since it was introduced in 2007. The panelists spelled out a few trends, such as the clear rise of social-media related panels, a shortage of design panels, the re-emergence of web-related panels. They said that 8,000 ideas have been submitted since PanelPicker started. It has 105,000 registered users, has collected 87,000 comments and 405,000 votes. Top keywords in 2008 included “Users.” In 2009 it was “Phones, mobile and applications.” And in 2010, it was “People, web, interactive and apps.” Panelists say they’re looking at data from panel submissions to try to peek at emerging trends based on the panels start-ups are submitting, trends in what social trends are happening at the festival from year to year and other data that can be mined from so many PanelPicker submissions.
Quotes: “If you ever submit an idea to a conference, it goes into a black hole.” - Simon. “We need to work on the user experience through the whole process.” - Simon.
Takeaways: Poor grammer and misspellings are common in panel submissions, making it hard to collect data (since many keywords aren’t spelled right). Be careful. Specialize your content with PanelPicker and be specific; don’t just submit something about “Social media.” (Incidentally “social” is the top keyword for 2011’s festival in panel descriptions.) Don’t submit a panel description that’s funny but won’t make sense to someone who’s reading quickly or on the go. Opportunities for PanelPicker that people submitting should think about include “Automation,” “content/video,” “springboard effect,” “integration with music and film,” “case studies” and “white papers.”
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