Side Tour Extends Intimate One Of A Kind Experiences To Their SXSW Events

The founders of Side Tour just posted their re-cap of the company’s South By Southwest experience in Austin Texas this year. Before we dive into that we need to tell you about Side Tour so you understand why their events at SXSW were a great reflection on exactly what they do.

By now many people in the United States are familiar with Richard Petty’s Nascar Experience. Petty’s Nascar Experience lets everyday race fans take a stroll around a Nascar track at nearly 200 mph. It’s a one of a kind experience that has now seen hundreds of thousands of customers. While the Petty Nascar Experience isn’t part of Side Tour, it’s that type of experience that makes this start up so unique.

More after the break
So if you’re looking for something to do that’s ultra cool, fit to your interest and one of a kind, Side Tour is the place to look for it. Piano lessons from a piano virtuoso, a hip hop tour of New York with a celebrity beat boxer, a intimately prepared dinner for two by an award winning chef, or a legal graffiti lesson from one of the city’s most prestigious artists, are all the kinds of experiences you can buy at sidetour.com

These personalized experiences cost in range between $25- $100 with some just a tad bit more, but all of the are once in a lifetime unique experiences where you can perfect a hobby or learn a new one. It’s really a great idea especially if you’re say headed to New York and looking for something less touristy.

You sign up for Sidetour, pick your experience, and with the push of a button and the payment, you’re in. You can communicate with the host, leave feedback and view feedback from other people who have done the same experience.

So now that you know what Side Tour is all about, they were looking for something to do at SXSW to introduce more people to Side Tour. Side Tour Founder Mark Webster, was perplexed as they were planning SXSW, how to you cut above the noise. On the Side Tour blog he even confesses to considering some kind of promotion with a commercial airline.

So a open bar party with ice sculptures and scantly clad women doing jello-shots off each other didn’t seem quite like the activity to go with a company that creates or hosts one of a kind experiences.

What they did instead was offer a series of well, Side Tours, with some of the top minds in the start up community.

As Webster said in the blog post, they got commitments from the likes of Tumblr, Birchbox, Etsy, HowaboutWe, and SecondMarket to commit to 30 minute “Drinks with” series. Mini fireside chats if you will.  What SideTour did at SXSW was a natural expansion of what they do in real life.

So often companies try and compete with the Party, Party, Party aspect of SXSW.  Don’t get me wrong we had a bunch of drinks and long nights at many many parties but the promotional efforts that stick out are the ones that are often close to a companies meaning.

Take our friends at Trover for instance. Trover is about discovering places, things and experiences. So Trover’s big promotional activity were hourly walking tours of Austin led by a Trover staffer with a giant balloon and encouraging people to use the Trover app to show their discoveries.

I helped RFA Brands/Power Bag with their 2012 SXSW promotion. Instead of hosting a party for thousands of dollars we gave away thousands of dollars in powerbags to people just for needing a charge. By far this promotion solved a big time hurt at SXSW.

Oh and the effort to educate people about homelessness by letting homeless people be hotspots, that was another great promotion.

Next year as you’re debating what to do for your company at SXSW consider sticking to exactly what it is you do.

Find out more about SideTour here

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