South by South West in Austin, Texas is the largest web technology event in the world. I had been sponsored by the UK Digital Mission to go there and launch DASH our web app product for streamlining the process of setting businesses up online. Despite the global recession the event has grown rapidly over the last few years from several thousand to 15 000 delegates. This was the first time the event had taken over the entirety of the ACC - Austin's gargantuan conference centre.

Before I went I had a vision of distributing thousands of flyers, talking briefly to hundreds of eager new users desperate to blog and tweet about my stunning new app and returning victorious with a database full of new DASH clients. As you can probably tell I am normally the guy building the tools for other people to go out to market with. This was my first experience of product marketing and I was in at the deep end.

Unsurprisingly I wasn't the only guy out there with something to sell. In fact I think virtually every tech company I could name had a presence there and they were chucking money at it. The trade show felt like a busy Souk with every trick in the book (free t-shirts, Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, booze, celebrity endorsement) being employed to grab the attention of the delegates. Additionally this was a festival of learning, most people were here on their own time and money, so likely to be a little resistant to direct sales unless I was wearing hot pants and handing out beers.

By the end of Day 1 I had given out 10 cards and done 5 lengthy demos. Plan A - Connect directly to end users - Scrapped.

Practicing what I preach a little more I decided to try and target a selection of key influencers and journalists. The poster boy for the start your own business crowd (DASH's primary audience) is a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. The problem is that everybody wants a piece of him. Whilst I chased him from room to room I noticed a few regular faces, his support staff and PA, and although I actually got to my man in the end it will be those guys that I try and schmooze on twitter now.

I then started to look at the fringes of the conference and made appearances at events called "core conversations" where audience participation is encouraged and the speakers are the up and coming Garys of tomorrow rather than the social media celebrities of today. I used my insights as a web designer to contribute my thoughts on branding and technology which built a platform for talking about DASH. At the end of those sessions I was handing out 50 cards a go. (I should give a shout out here to the fantastic Ian Sanders for inviting me to talk in his Unplan Your Business session

I began to use the same tactics with journalists at the conference by effectively trading my personal commodity - content - in exchange for plugs on DASH. Look out for me on Techfluff.tv and Computer Weekly shortly!

Finally good old fashioned networking at the parties created some of the best opportunities. By not overtly thrusting DASH down peoples' necks and bonding with them personally I am pleased to say we will now be working with one of the world's top interface designers (who is also pals with most of the bay area startups), an advisor to angel investors who is bored on gardening leave and feels like a challenge and the promise of a few mentions on the larger tech blogs.

From a business point of view the success of this trip will be judged by moments in time rather than hours of hustle.

We are really pleased to announce the re-launch of our popular Twitter application - Twilert - at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin Texas as part of the UK Digital Mision.

Twitter search alerts via email

Twilert is a Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service... well any keyword you like really! In a nutshell, its like Google Alerts, only on Twitter.

Why the need to re-launch?

Last year Twilert was unfortunately a victim of its own success. It was featured in publications such as Twitter Marketing for Dummies, numerous high profile blogs, as well as being regularly mentioned on Twitter itself and it began to hit issues scaling against the demand of the number of users we had. Sadly we had to switch the service off and rethink the architecture.

The platform has been completely re-built to perform much better and scale efficiently against the Twitter API. We have also developed a more user friendly web interface to help you manage your Twilerts and add new ones really easily.

Have a look for yourself! www.twilert.com

If you have any suggestions or feedback please feel free to get in touch on support@twilert.com and we will do our best to help you out. Thanks to all our users for the support so far and we hope you enjoy using the new service.

I am very excited to announce a new business venture for codegent in 2010. We have partitioned the agency, focusing a small team of developers in our Bangkok office on building web applications.

Our ambition is to launch around four apps this year with a target audience of Entrepreneurs, Digital Marketers and fellow Developers. You can find out more on why we are doing this and what our initial ideas, such as DASH, are on codegent.com/apps. I will also be blogging and twittering frequently as things begin to take shape in the next few months so do keep an eye out for more.

STOP PRESS!

The apps business has already received a major helping hand in its quest for world domination by being chosen to represent the best of the UK Digital Community as part of the Digital Mission to South by South West Interactive in Austin, Texas. To quote the Press Release:

"39 of the UK’s leading digital companies have been selected for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. [...] The successful companies were chosen from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, journalists and industry pundits to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi."

We would like to thank chinwag and UK Trade & Investment (one of our clients!) for making this possible. Personally I can't wait to get out there to start marketing our work to the wider world.