There’s a little piece of chaos at SXSW for everyone; and every year, some folks navigate the flood of people and sensory overload a bit better than others – the difference between a SXSW veteran and noobie is noticeable at first glance. In an effort to reduce apparent nerd-ism, I’ve put together some helpful tips and found some neat tools for first-timers at SXSW.

Tool #1: SXSW N00bies, start here.

Take time to dig the SXSW website — I often start here with clients. There’s a ton of valuable prepackaged content on the SXSW website. First-timers have a tendency to get overwhelmed at first glance and avoid spending the necessary time exploring the website fully.

To be honest, the SXSW website runs very deep, and requires some quality time to find all the gems that you might not even know you’re looking for. But SXSW is all about serendipity, so allow yourself room to be surprised, even in your initial planning.

Here’s the SXSW first-timers guide and general 101 – start here and take an hour or so for a deeper dive. http://www.sxsw.com/first_time

http://www.sxsw.com/home/news/sxsw_101_posts

True expectation: there’s entirely way too much for any one person to do at SXSW — exploring the website helps you see a better lay of the land and make better decisions.

Solid solution: plan to attend everything that sounds interesting and make the game-time decision when it comes down to it – you can’t choose wrong; it’s all good.

Tip #2: Use apps that are optimized for SXSW

It’s all about location this year.

It seems that every year at SXSW, the biggest problems are trying to figure out where to go next, and what the hell everyone else is doing and why. When I’m glued to phone at SXSW this year, these are the apps I’m going to be using to solve these problems:

SXSW (official app) – The official SXSW app called, my.SXSW, is a valuable tool for those who live the structured life. My.SXSW has some nice sorting and filtering functions that literally can show any and all of official SXSW activities.

If you have the time (and desire), log-in to my.SXSW.com, create an account, and add interesting films, shows, and panels to your schedule. This process forces you to explore the ungodly amount of content that SXSW has prepared over the past year.

The app also has a great map function. For those who have never walked the fine city of Austin, Texas, SXSW is practically a city-wide event – sometimes it’s helpful to actually gauge what’s actually “walking distance.”

Foursquare – Foursquare is a veteran of SXSW from last year. This service/app incentives you to “check-in” and awards you “badges” for personal exploration. Each check-in alerts all of your friends on Foursquare of your location (by venue). The virtual currency talk is an interesting one for another day, but the real value at SXSW is knowing where all your friends are without having to text, email, or call. Plus, they have some cool promotions running this year, like this one in conjunction with Spin.

Superglued – Superglued is real-time coordination/information app developed specifically for the live music experience. It delivers gig-specific tweets, meaning by location and band, to your phone and streams everything being talked about at the show you’re attending without the hassle of hash-tags.

This app also has a complete list of the showlistings (both official and unofficial) and can alert you when hot shows are trending. These features are especially helpful when you’re standing still and not really sure what you’re supposed to be doing. Superglued is also integrated with Foursquare’s API.

Sit.by.us – Sit.by.us takes the idea of a “check-in” to the next level. When you check-in to Sity.by.us, your friends are alerted of your exact seat or area within specific panels at SXSW. This seems like the thing that Scoble is definitely going to pick up on.

Gowalla – Much like Fourquare above, Gowalla is a fun, location-based game that alerts friends of your presence when you check-in. Gowalla is throwing a fun SXSW party and is distributing virtual VIP badges around the city that can be discovered via the app. They are also extending their virtual items to redeemable, real-world counterparts.

Bump – Networking mavens: perk your ears up! This app is a new comer this year and is actually a finalist in the SXSW Accelerator, SXSW’s start-up innovation competition. The Bump app trades contact info and/or attachments from iphone to iphone simply by lightly bumping the two phones together.

Most assuredly, if you do SXSW right, your pockets will be overflowing with business cards by the end of the conference. Bump simplifies the input process by auto-magically dumping a cohort’s info directly into your virtual Rolodex, and it’s pretty fun to do, too.

Siri – Also a SXSW newcomer and finalist in the SXSW Accelerator, Siri is a virtual personal assistant. Much like a real assistant, you can literally ask Siri to do things like, “Siri, get me a cab. I’m way too drunk” or “Siri, remind me to call my mother tomorrow and let her know how fun SXSW is.”

Siri’s smarts can help you locate a restaurant; find movies for downtime, and can try to answer knowledge-based questions. Siri goes beyond voice search and actually takes action on your behalf; meaning, actually booking a cab vs. finding you the number – pretty cool stuff.

There’s a plethora of tools/apps that are applicable for SXSW; these are the ones that I’ll be playing with the most this year. For more SXSW suggested tools, look here.

Tip #3: Trust in your friends when your phone dies

Conference goers, testify – you might as well count on your phone dying once (I know I keep my charger on me and have an battery-powered emergency charger just in case).
With crap-tactular AT&T going down every 10 minutes, your beloved iPhone constantly searches for signal which eats tons of battery. If/when your phone dies, or even before then, look to social media for information when you can’t talk.

Facebook – “friends” tend to share real(er) details about their actual SXSW plans via FB. There are also some fantastic groups and fan pages that track and regularly update SXSW-related info targeted for attendees that intend to experience SXSW badgeless.

Here are the best SXSW pages I’ve found, thus far:

SXSW – This is the official SXSW Facebook page. This fan page hosts the official updates of SXSW and also doubles as a forum for folks looking to meet up and/or discover new aspects festival.

Unofficial SXSW 2010 Events & Parties – This guide updates regularly, features performers, and is geared towards the music audience. For those who look to get the most of the day parties, subscribe to the email list to receive a spreadsheet with all RSVPs. Proceed at your own risk – I’m building my own.

SXSW Badgeless – a Facebook fan page dedicated to the badgeless activities to participate in during the Film, Interactive, and Music festivals.

SXSW Baby! – Activity-based fan page that highlights SXSW’s activities as well as focusing on the logistical side of the festivals — i.e, food, lodging, navigating, etc.

Other Great Websites:

Do512 provides a complete guide to SXSW’s official/unofficial parties in addition to all the other fun stuff happening in Austin at the same time. Pretty much a daily unique in my book.

Plancast is another great tool. Plancast allows users to plan out their SXSW experience and share that plan with friends who are interested in checking out the itinerary. They recently announced one of the more complete SXSW guides I’ve seen recently and I’d highly recommend checking it out here:

Mashable’s Austin Realtime is an online directory that recently launched. It’s a place to connect with other social media fans. You can tag your interests, connect it with Foursquare, Twiiter, Gowalla, Youtube, etc. to share your social networking sites.

Twitter – a great way to digest a quick overview of SXSW chatter.

Tweeples (un)intentionally “leak” A LOT of sensitive information via twitter during the course of SXSW. Following the right people, i.e., the party organizers, the event organizers, influentials, bands, bloggers, etc., can help you beat everyone to the secret shows and hot parties before they close their doors due to capacity.

Don’t just use hashtags, discover them. Everyone is going to use #SXSW, #SXSWi, etc. but you never know what new conversations you can find with some quick searching.

[See my list of favorite ATX twitter peps below.]

Tip #4: SXSW Parties? RSVP! RSVP! RSVP!

What to expect? Nothing. What to get out of it (other than the free beer)? Everything.
There are film parties, music parties, interactive parties, happy hours, day shows, night shows, secret shows, unofficial shows, official shows, afterparties, etc. – point being, there’s plenty to do. The true challenge of SXSW is making sure you have an idea of what’s going on, and are prepared enough to get into the shows you want to attend.

Going back to my original point above, plan to attend everything that sounds interesting and make the game-time decision when it comes down to it – you can’t choose wrong; it’s all good. Here’s how you plan:

Do512’s SXSW-related Calendar

Austin Showlist

SXSW 2010: Austinist’s List of Day Shows, Afterparties, and more

How to find parties in the SXSW website – click on the conference that you want to attend (either Music, Film, or Interactive), select the “Parties and Lounges” sub-tab on the right of the tool bar, scroll to the bottom of page and select the day you are looking to party. From there, each party should have the respective click-through links to RSVP.

Once you identify everything you want to see, you can either add it to your my.SXSW calendar or create calendar invites for yourself and your friends – share the wealth, everyone needs help – it’s SXSW.

Great people follow for SXSW Rumors:

Music Twitter Handles:

@covertcuriosity

@happn_in_austin

@do512

@C3Austin

@Andylanger

@paramountAustin

@socialTNT

@mohawkaustin

@waterloorecords

@rare_caitlin

@pushermania

@superglued

@endofanear

@coolinaustin

@austinsound

@AustinChronicle

@atxhipsters

http://twitter.com/abusedgrymatter/sxsw

Film/Interactive Twitter Handles:

@sxsw

@joshdilworth

@BryanPerson

@austinist

@Rebfef

@Scottland

@PN_ATX

@dtotheryver

@johnrobertreed

@whurley

@rwwmike

@austinstartup

@joshuabaer

@omarg

@bjheinley

@laniar

@prhacker

@bmenell

@chelseabot

Some good blogs to look to for SXSW-related info:

http://republicofaustin.com/sxsw-party-rsvps/

http://do512.com/

http://ultra8201.blogspot.com/

http://austinist.com/

http://www.sonicitchmusic.com/

http://sideonetrackone.com/

http://ticktickbang.tumblr.com/

http://covertcuriosity.blogspot.com/

Parting thoughts:

Drink water. Don’t forget to eat. Wear comfortable shoes. Bring earplugs. Don’t drink and drive.

Have fun at South By Southwest this year! I’ll be running around like a mad man but would be happy to chat at any of the parties above!

[Disclaimer: The SXSW Accelerator, Superglued and Siri are all current or former clients of John Robert's]