I finally have an exciting handful of stories from South By Southwest based on the really neat people I met. Yesterday I wrote about the awesome attendees. Here’s a story about Twitter used in a way I hadn’t heard of before.
At Tom Parish’s social media metrics panel, I sat next to Summer Huggins, who works in Austin for Hammock, a media company based out of Nashville. We chatted about Austin, how I feel like a tourist in my own town when I come downtown, and laughed about the Compass Bank building when she said it looks like a giant nosehair trimmer. (Yes, it does.)
When she left the talk, she accidentally left her digital camera on her seat. I noticed it and asked both the guys in front of me if they caught her last name so that I could try to find an email address for her in the SXSWi attendee directory. None of us could remember her last name, though.
So, I took the camera in its cute case to the SXSW information desk to be placed in Lost & Found, telling them that someone named Summer from Austin would hopefully pick it up. They said they’d be open until 8:00 and it would be kept in a safe place overnight.
Later that night, I started searching on twitter for someone named Summer from Austin who maybe just maybe had talked about attending the social media metrics panel. Sure enough, SummerH posted a tweet marked with #SXSW saying she had lost her digital camera! I immediately sent her a direct tweet, clicked through to her blog, found her email address, and sent her an email telling her she could pick up her camera at SXSW Lost & Found. Problem solved!
Summer was very excited and also noted the power of the Twitter and SXSW attendees! The power of SXSWi attendees was certainly not lost during the metrics panel, but this story has a feel-good ending to it.