If you are attending SXSWi, look for me

Each March, I* go to the gigantic gathering in Austin, Texas called South by Southwest Interactive.

In the years I’ve attended, it has grown from a small conference that was held in a small corner of that city’s convention center to a sprawling mega-convention that spreads out over the entire convention center and hotels around the center. There’s also a film festival taking place at the same time — and, the real main act, the music festival gets cranked up immediately after the Interactive festival ends. In other words, for a few days in Austin, there’s a mass gathering of lots of very creative, entrepreneurial, tech-savvy, pop-cultural aware men and women who gather to create offline community with those they’ve met on sites like, well, SmallBusiness.com.

For most users of SmallBusiness.com — nearly all, to be accurate — the site is a reference source, a great place to find a definition, or, more likely, some knowledge and links to other websites related to a topic on which they need to make a decision.

However, there are a few folks who use this site who have reached out to me, assisted me, complained to me, asked me questions, made brilliant recommendations, or who have inspired me in some way — and most importantly, clicked on that “Edit” button at the top of every page to add or fix something.

Many of those people attend conferences like South by Southwest and lots of other off-line gatherings throughout the year. So I’ve decided that during the next 12 months, I am going to attempt to attend several of these events in order to meet with as many people as possible who would like to do the following:

1. Talk about anything related to small business.
2. Ask me about this site — especially the parts that are confusing to use. (There are many – but so is Wikipedia.)
3. As me how to use the site to help you raise the visibility of your small business, your blog, your website, book, small business service, etc.
4. If you’re in public relations, marketing or other promotional business, for me to explain the appropriate way to promote your clients on SmallBusiness.com.
5. To let me do a short video of you explaining how-to do something.
6. For me to give you a five minute tutorial on some aspect of using SmallBusiness.com that is related to the quirkiness of editing any MediaWiki-platform wiki — say, Wikipedia — that you’ve never quite understood.
7. To talk about wikis.
8. To hang out.

For those of you who will be attending SXSW — or who live in Austin and would like to get together outside the SXSW bubble — I’ve set up a special entry on SmallBusiness.com that can be used for several purposes, one of which I hope is for you to talk with me.

Thanks. And soon, I’ll let you know where the next stop on the SmallBusiness.com mystery tour will be.

*I’m Rex Hammock, creator of and head-helper at SmallBusiness.com. You can learn more about me on my SmallBusiness.com user profile, or on my ten-year old blog called RexBlog.com or on Twitter, where I’m @r and @smallbusiness. Or just e-mail me: Rex@SmallBusiness.com.