I’ve spent a couple of days wandering in and out of the SXSWi Trade Show in between panels or parties, just to get a feel for it. As a company looking to continue growing our social media partnerships, it gives us an opportunity to look at some real and mostly functional products, and some exciting previews from bigger partners. Though the conference itself is filled with all manner of companies in every stage of development, the Trade Show is for the most part live and ready (or nearly ready) to go. As someone personally interested in design and social media, the show offers a great balance of things that interest me personally and professionally.

This year, a lot of services are the flavor of the month. The big pushes seem to be applications and services that allow you to self-manage specialized niche markets (like band and financial self-management), services to help push your application into a cloud, services to take advantage of crowdsourcing, and helpers to assist in extending social media with scaling. This seems to be in line with a lot of the tools that are being developed in the community as well. While it would seem like it’s creating clutter, the fact that some of these apps were developed in blind parallel, it can also be a sign of a healthy market.

99designs (http://www.99designs.com) is a company that many folks are familiar with already. Graphic designers have a love/hate relationship with 99designs, mostly depending upon how long they have been in the industry. Much like code of the generation before,99designs is a sign of the commoditization of the common tasks of graphic design. The company allows individuals to describe nearly any kind of item that can be graphically designed, from a magazine add to a flyer, to icons and images for applications, and pushes the workload into the crowd, allowing the process to be crowd sourced. The various images are presented to clients, who can choose the best design, or refine it and submit it again. 99designs works as a middle man, collecting payment up front so that the entire client-designer relationship is set in stone before the process starts. The obvious negative is that this work drives down the overall value of repetitive graphic design work.

Some of the work being done is very good, from a graphic design skill side. Sites like this will draw in individuals and companies who might not have used graphic designers for their projects to begin with, and will surely cannibalize lower and mid-tier graphic design projects. However, most good freelance graphic designers are part artists, part brand management, part consulting firm. Beyond a pretty picture, they are able to get into the “brain of the brand”, and take time to figure out the product, the message, and the audience with an intimacy that a 99designs style site can’t match. There will always be call for good graphic designers who are interested in more than what’s in a Photoshop window, but designers are right to worry about the value of this part of the skill. It’s not a bad idea to brush up and push your branding and consultancy skills as your real value add.

SocialTalk (http://www.syncapse.com/#socialTALK)  is an application by Syncapse that helps brands to manage their social presence across multiple communities, including Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and other social platforms. As a large company trying to grasp the social tiger, the effort of keeping up with streams that can be significantly larger than your everyday blogger can be a challenge. As we attempt to address social on it’s own terms, it is important to us to maintain an authentic voice, to always leave our consumer with the sense that a real person is talking back at them, and not a placeholder. Tools that can help us to filter, manipulate, sort, and work with our stream in innovate and easy ways are attractive services. From the demos that I have seen, SocialTalk is a well developed product that, used correctly, could help make the process of managing and diving into social media an easier sell.

Hopefully, this sector will continue to grow and push innovation to allow these tools to grow dynamically with the needs of big business, so we can culivate and maintain that real voice in the way we communicate with our consumers and partners.

What was your favorite application, service, or gear from the SXSWi 2010 Interactive + Film Trade Show?