Demo Day 2020 Round-Up

We don’t often get gushy but we figured you’d forgive us just this once. Our Tech Demo Day last week was a big milestone for TheSILab. It was one of the first times we really felt our vision coming true.

This was the social intelligence industry in full. We were able to see and showcase the strength and potential of the industry through the innovative technology platforms and providers that are so integral to all our work.

It was so inspiring to see the vendors side by side, working together to give us an overview of what the industry can really do. Through 14 different talks, we saw the variety of the work happening out there and just how wide the scope is for social intelligence.

As you may know, we’ve had a suspicion for a while that there is a hunger out there among social intelligence practitioners for more support, connection and access to learning. The support for Tech Demo Day helped to show that we’re onto something so firstly, thank you.

Access the playbacks here if you missed the sessions live, and here’s some other things we’re thinking about..

Our brilliant partners

Demos might look simple enough but they’re surprisingly tricky to get right. You’re trying to communicate complex tech and big, often new, ideas within a short space of time. And in this case to a wide, mostly live, audience with varied experience and knowledge and any number of uses.

For demo day, we gave our partners a task - present your tool via a case study. And boy did they deliver. We had some really interesting and memorable stories, bringing to life the concepts and practices behind social intelligence.

As said by Ryan Young at Talkwalker: ‘this is demo day not powerpoint presentation day’

YES 'this is demo day not powerpoint presentation day' #exactly #SITechDemoDay

— TheSILab (@TheSILab) June 18, 2020

Attendees

As well as being able to celebrate the vendors, Demo Day gave us a moment to reflect on the social intelligence community. Firstly, there is one. When we first started out the idea that there is a definitive bunch of people using social data to discover things as part or all of their work sounded daft to some people.

But here’s to say ‘told you so’ to that lot. You guys are not only there but you’re engaged and willing to come together. We had over 600 sign ups to Demo Day and every session had questions and follow up questions are still dropping into our inbox.

We think this is our dream coming true - a social intelligence community.

Virtual events

We like our face to face conferences. We’ve also heard from Brandwatch/Qriously that virtual events aren’t doing so well these days. So we were pretty nervous of doing a full event like this online.

Turns out, it works well.

So whether you joined as a partner or a practitioner or just because you’re nosey, thank you!

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