I don’t think there is any amount of preparation that could have prepared us for the chaos & excitement that is SXSW. 

We were sent down by the Michigan State Alumni Association to film a documentary on experiencing the conference for the first time. (We’ll post when it debuts).  We then got to Skype with students back at MSU and share our experiences. It was pretty cool, John Hill & Tim Brograkos filmed startup and tech allstars: Chris Baccus from AT&T, author David Meerman Scott, John Windsor & Gary Hoover.

One of our favorite companies, Techsmith even did a blog post about us! They were kind enough to let the MSU crew share their booth to chat with MSU students. Here’s a live 2 minute video using Jing, check it out!

One of the best talks at the conference was by Rey Junco who spoke about using Twitter to improve college student engagement. You can see the blog post here and the PDF full version of the study here. An interesting takeaway you’ll see is that the students who used Twitter had significantly higher grades than the control group. The Flickr stream is here

We also got to meet Rahim, John and Danielle from the Twilio team.  We’re overdue on a blog post for this but that’s who sends our text messages! 

There were so many amazing startups and entrepreneurs at sxsw. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The biggest lesson from the three day event for us? Focus focus focus. We need to do better at focusing on our users. 

Any feedback on how we can create a better experience for you, please feel free to leave a comment! 

Thanks to @JPFreed for reviewing this post.