Conference Flair: Conversation starter badges

Starting conversations with strangers at conferences is hard - but it's also one of the main reasons to go, rather than staying at home and waiting for the videos. If only there was a way of knowing what other people were interested in, just to make that initial hurdle easier to cross.

For SXSW, we're rolling out our own super-low-tech solution to this conundrum: conversation starter buttons!

The idea is simple: grab the badges that best describe your interests and expertise, attach them to your lanyard (even better if it's a handsome Lanyrd lanyard) and let the conversation come to you. Here's our own Tom Insam modelling a lanyard with a sufficient amount of conversation-starting flair.

We have badges for all sorts of different interests, and we also have badges that come in pairs - "Hire me!" / "I am hiring", "Investor" / "fund my startup" for example. I tried these out at the London pre-SXSW mixer earlier this week and they went down a storm - including starting conversations between a hirer and a hiree and an investor and a startup founder.

There are 51 different designs in various exciting bright colours, including some limited editions (we think the "I am looking for a technical co-founder" one will go fast!) So whether you call them "buttons", "pins" or are British and call them "badges" you will have better conversations at SXSW if you are wearing them.

If you want to pimp out your lanyard with these delightful colourful conversation starters, come and find one of the Lanyrd team: @natbat, @simonw, @sophystar, @jaffathecake and @tominsam. If you ask nicely you can also have a Lanyrd Lanyard! ;)

If you follow @LanyrdSXSW we'll tweet occasionally to let you know where you can find us.

Sometimes low-tech solutions really do work best!