LA Sends Some Angels to SXSW

A team of 5 new media savvy ladies will represent Los Angeles in Chevrolet’s social media challenge to roadtrip to Austin for the Interactive portion of SXSW, and the team includes one of our own — KCRW’s Social Media Manager, Betsy Moyer. I let Betsy borrow the blog to talk a bit about the trip before the SXSWAngels embark on their journey south.

Thanks Kaj!  So…. We live in a radical age. I was simply scanning some @replies to my twitter account when I saw a mini-proposal from the Team Captain and PR/digital media Pro, Kaylee Hawkins – to join her in representing Los Angeles along with 10 other cities in a Road Trip challenge to Austin for SXSWi.

I love a road trip and was already planning to attend SXSW so I jumped on board. It was with blind faith and adventure though – I didn’t have ANY details, no knowledge of who I’d be crammed into a car for several days with, or exactly what the “challenge” part really meant.

Our sponsor, Chevrolet wasn’t pulling the wool over my eyes. They amassed 10 teams from 9 different cities to travel down in one of their fully loaded vehicles – tweeting and blogging the whole way. I thought it was a great ploy to get a lot of content in the social sphere with their name attached. But, what sold me on involvement was its fantastic bent towards non-profits. We hit the road on Tuesday, ready to live-update online and we will be giving back to the communities we pass along the way. The other girls and I are all happy to jump on board due to this philanthropic element. We’ve already raised close to $1,000 for Adopt-A-Classroom and are looking for more dollars through fun sponsorships. Please check out our sponsorship opportunities here.

Part of the challenge is to push out creative and compelling content, not just high quantities of content! To raise funds, we created several sponsorship packages that represent canonical aspects of the Road Trip. Our digital media sponsor, Retrollect purchased the SILLY SOUVENIRS package. So, we will be using their super cool new iPhone app (which will make its big debut at SXSWi) to collect content around souvenir shopping throughout the SouthWest. In addition, I decided to auction off my Burger Habit on Facebook. The winning bidder (which is looking like KCRW’s Eric J. Lawrence so far) gets a picture and review of the burgers that I have for every meal on the road, breakfast, lunch & dinner – 2.5 days. The joke is on the winning bidder though – as this is no challenge for me. (wink!) I love burgers! (No seriously, I think this might hurt… but it should be fun).

I hear that last year’s challenge brought in more than 61 million digital impressions. I’m excited to see how this all goes down. We’d love to have you follow along with our progress and get to know us through our site, SXSWAngels.com Full bios of the team and links to our social media accounts can be found on the team’s about us page.