How to Schmooze Like the Pros at SXSW

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame). Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. These are just a few tech world celebrities who’ve attended SXSW Interactive, one of the industry’s hottest ongoing events. These days, the likelihood you’ll run into one of these guys in a bathroom line-up at SXSW is pretty slim, but the annual Austin-based conference continues to offer incredible networking opportunities. With good reason, rising startups jump at the chance to schmooze and booze. After all, with a certain amount of luck, you could still end up chatting over a beer with the next Jack Dorsey.

One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and—above all—creativity go a long way.

After eight conferences, I’ve learned that the hard way. When my company was first getting off the ground, we were completely lost in the shuffle, despite our best efforts.

In 2012, however, we had a 28-foot-long, 15,000-pound secret weapon. To stand out amid the gala parties and blow-out bashes hosted by much bigger tech companies, HootSuite decided to take to the streets. We transformed a Ford E-450 shuttle bus into possibly the world’s biggest owl, in honor of our mascot—mounting a pair of giant eyes above the windshield and affixing enormous plastic wings on the sides.

Cheesy? Yes. Effective, absolutely. By the end of the conference, our logo had been splashed across the pages of USA Today, Mashable and Inc. The conference’s highest profile attendees were clamoring to get on board and party with us. And investors whom I didn’t even know were inquiring about the company. In the end, it cost us around $30,000 to buy and outfit the vehicle. Considering that hosting just a single party at SXSW can cost as much, if not more, that’s an absolute steal. This year, in fact, we’re bringing HootBus back for its third ride.

Of course, it’s not necessary to be quite that obnoxious to connect at SXSW. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way about networking at a big industry event:

No networking is sometimes the best networking. One of the most important principles I’ve learned is, every so often, just drop everything. Stop racing from one party to the next. (By the time you hear about it on Twitter, it’s already too late.) Stop pushing through crowds to meet the big fish. (They don’t need another business card, anyway.) Instead, take a deep breath, relax and let the action and the contacts come to you.

The reality is that SXSW is packed with brilliant entrepreneurs, investors and partners. They’re everywhere, zipping back and forth like thousands of atoms. Your chances of colliding with one actually improve just by standing still. The best encounters usually happen spontaneously—at a backyard barbecue, in a dimly lit pool hall, at some random house party over a six-pack of PBR and a take-out pizza. Conversations tend to be more authentic, subject matter more interesting and connections more lasting.

Create your own serendipity, with social media. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t do a little work to engineer serendipity. This is where a few basic social media hacks can go a long way. Twitter is, of course, the medium of choice for tech’s movers and shakers. I build different Twitter lists of the people I want to meet—potential investors, other founders, etc—then follow the streams side-by-side on HootSuite. Before SXSW, I’ll try to build a bit of rapport with everyone over Twitter, and during the conference I’ll keep up to date on what they’re doing. To stay abreast of the general scuttlebutt, I find it helpful to set up another stream that pulls in all Tweets hashtagged #SXSW.

Twitter’s geolocation features can also come in very handy. Type in an address on Google Maps and—with the help of an app like Hootlet—you can pull up a stream of all the tweets coming from the area. You’re able to see which influencers are tweeting nearby and do your best to cross paths.

Throw a party—with focus. And, when all else fails, you can always pony up for a party and have the action come to you. Again, a bit of creativity and panache goes a long way here. Anybody with deep pockets can lure a hot music act to their shindig and get bodies in the door with free booze. But that’s really not much to build a long-term relationship on. Themed events - that bring together people with shared interests—tend to be more fruitful. As a Canadian company, we partnered last year to bring hockey to SXSW. Our street tournament attracted a cross-section of like-minded techies with secret NHL aspirations. We may not have had Prince or The Flaming Lips on stage, but we had fun, body-checked everyone from CEOs to bloggers and made the rarest of things at SXSW—an authentic connection.