Our panel, titled ‘The Last of the Launch-and-Leave-‘Ems’, will look at some of the questions we often discuss and debate internally. As a company, we conceptualise, design and build social sites for a range of clients. No two projects are exactly the same, and we try to apply our learning from one project to the others that follow. The key word here is 'try' - we admit openly that we're not always successful, and we'd like to discuss in this open forum if and how this can be achieved, given the speed at which technology changes and the rate at which the techniques and practices that the industry as a whole adopts (and sometimes rejects), change so rapidly.

This panel brings people from both the client and agency side of the equation to discuss the issues that accompany the increase in community-oriented sites and the decrease in Flash microsites that centre on the brand or product, as Tim elaborated in his last post. Once the site is built, who should have the responsibility to manage the community and ensure it doesn’t die a quiet death? How can an agency ensure the client’s business and profit interests are served at the same time as maintaining focus on the community? These are just some of the things we hope to chat about. Mel, Peter and Conrad all have distinct views on this subject and we hope to generate an interesting and hopefully useful debate.

If you have any suggestions for sub-topics we could discuss, do leave them in the comments and we’ll do our best to make sure we incorporate them on the day our panel is up at SXSW – March 14^th. For those of you that are travelling to Austin for SXSW, see you there!

Image by lloydi via Flickr, courtesy a Creative Commons license