Visiting SxSW this year, I was invited  by Samsung to be part of a small group of people to learn about their SxSW aggregation project, their media wall and their new Samsung Tab.

What I found, was a brand that was betting on the real-time web bigger and better than any non-media company I have seen to date.

If it’s true that every company must become a media company, then Samsung is certainly a leader the pack in that transformation.

The Samsung SxSW website and media wall is a breathtaking example of what can be achieved when a brand aggregates, curates and visualizes the real-time web and – in this case – intersects it with a particular time and space.

Echo is very good at providing the infrastructure to build this kind of thing very quickly. And as brands begin to explore the possibilities, we believe the trend will progress to a point where these kinds of experiences will be embedded into the core website – against every product, product category, evangelist, marketing campaign and more.

More than that, though, these experiences are becoming interactive (something also well supported by Echo StreamServer). They must allow users to like, reply, share and flag. And they must include data that is not just from the wider social web, but comes from within the company’s own data stores. Purchases, return rates, support email sentiment, ratings and more are all viable (and valuable) social activity to surface as part of the complete picture.

Ultimately though, this is not about pretty pictures, it’s about declaring to your users that their voice is a first class part of your business. Not only are you listening in secret social media war rooms, you are facilitating the conversation live and in public.

I was excited to see this kind of very visible investment in the realtime, social web. What will you do to take it to the next level?