SXSW 2012 - Brand Your Friends: Social Asylum at SF Embassy

Brand Your Friends: Social Asylum at SF Embassy
Event	Interactive 2011
Format	Panel
Organizer	James Home – SF Embassy
Description	With a bag of one inch round buttons featuring San Francisco's Sutro Tower and the promise of bacon and a band at brunch, the SF Embassy helped a couple hundred people form instant, powerful, trusted connections at last year's SXSW. By branding a group of connected apartments in the madness of 6th Street as a place of social asylum, the SF Embassy gave this spontaneous community a framework to navigate the conference and their relationship with it and each other. Brand has played a powerful role in identifying and differentiating our communities for as long as we've had community. Increasingly, this identity is provided not by tribe or nation, but by lifestyle brands, technology companies, and rock bands. In this panel, we'll explore the hunger for cultural identities unmediated by corporate interest, how the SF Embassy satiated that hunger for its citizens, and discuss how to apply several design patterns to strengthen ad hoc communities of all kinds. Towards the goal of creating a United Nations at SXSW, we'll also provide downloadable templates and tools that you can use to establish your own embassy!
Questions Answered	How are corporate and cultural branding different? What do they have in common? What responsibility does a branded community have to make it's intimacy gradient (how inclusive or exclusive it is) clear? What came out of SF Embassy, both during the week of SXSW and in the year following? What went horribly wrong? How can I start my own embassy?
Level	Intermediate
Category	Community / Online Community
Tags	branding, community building, sxsw embassies

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Brand Your Friends: Social Asylum at SF Embassy