SXSW 2014: A Battery Delivery Campaign

I was outside the Austin Convention Center Monday morning when I saw this poster:

Power On SXSW

And I thought: “Hey, actually I could really go for that. My battery is not holding a charge very well these days.”

And so, doing something I almost never do, I participated in a hashtag-based campaign. It went something like this:

Screen shot 2014-03-11 at 12.59.20 AM

So I sent them a direct message with my phone number. And then I got a text message telling me a bike messenger was on his way, and I would find him just outside the convention center. I went outside the convention center as instructed, and here was this guy:

IMG_1837b

And he gave me a fully charged Galaxy S3 battery, and I gave him my old one, and then he biked away.

It was a pretty interesting experience, but I have my doubts whether this sort of campaign could scale efficiently beyond a small geographic area packed with people who blog and tweet a lot.