The 24th annual SXSW Music and Media Conference begins Friday, March 12, in Austin Texas. To take advantage of the enormous popularity of this music and technology festival, Chevy devised the Chevrolet SXSW Road Trip Challenge, with teams of SXSW and social media devotees from all over the United States supplied with various Chevy vehicle models.

The eight Chevy teams are now making their way to Austin, with plenty of socially-networked stops along the way. Each team has a blog, and / or site or Facebook fan page, and Twitter accounts, to keep fans and followers abreast of their trip to Austin. Most teams have all of the social tools and more. As each meets any of its social media challenges along the way, they’re given points, which will be published on the Chevy Posterous blog. The team with the most points gets a Tweetup in their home town, courtesy of Chevy. Chevy gets plenty of viral marketing.

Team Lansing, all decked out for social media with Facebook Fan page and Tumblr Web site,  is driving a Chevy Traverse from the town that builds the Traverse.  The Team is composed of TechSmith chief evangelist Betsy Weber (TechSmith will have a SXSW booth), Snagit product manager Tiffany Wood, Kathy Jacobs, Social Media Credit Analyst and OneNote MVP, and Kyle Mulka from Twilk.

You can follow Team Chicago on Twitter, as ChiChevySXSW, or on TwitPic, where team member and video journalist Tim Jahn is posting photos. Here’s another source, with comment capability. We called Tim and travel buds Michael Courier and Danny Trager in their Chevy Traverse (got the number from a tweet), and found them backtracking to Bloomington Illinois. They’d taken the wrong road. They told us they planned a stop and photo at a Dallas Texas auto dealership. “I was first contacted two months ago by Chevy via Twitter,” Tim told us. “They asked me to take part in the challenge. I said sure.”

Team NC, also on Tumblr, is driving the Chevy Equinox. You can follow them on Twitter with tag NCChevySXSW, or call them via Phonebooth.com at 919-200-0937.

Team Atlanta, with some financial support from AutoTrader.com, is driving the Chevy Equinox.  This Georgia team if made up primarily of founders and digital media gurus of social media and start-up blog Regator. Right now its home page is devoted to the Chevy SXSW challenge.

“We provided a cash donation to the team to make sure they stayed fed and gassed up along the trip,” an AutoTrader.com spokesperson told us. “For us, the benefits were obvious – it’s a neat program that supports one of our OEM partners in its further use of social media to market to consumers, and it is also an extension of the larger efforts AutoTrader.com is making to expose ourselves in the same social media space.”

As we write this Team NY Chaos, organized by social media-hub Roger Smith Hotel in New York City, is headed to Memphis in a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, where they’ll host a University of Memphis Tweet up at Coyote Ugly. If you have the UStream app on your smart phone you can watch them and talk with them live. Team members include PR specialist Jessica Randazza, who calls herself an Internetaholic, Food & Wine Magazine’s home cook superstar Sarah McSimmons , and event photograph Nick McGlynn . The social media director at Roger Smith Hotel is along for the ride as well.

The South Florida team, driving a Chevy Tetris, is lead by “serial entrepreneur” Tammy Camp. The team includes IndieGoGo’s Slava Rubin, the founder of ECorp, and journalism student Heather MacDonald.

Team San Diego, SDChevySXSW on Twitter, includes Marissa Brassfield, editor and head of marketing for TrendHunter, but it looks like they’re not yet on the road.

The final team, from Detroit, DETChevySXSW on Twitter, just got to Tennessee. Web developer Audrey Walker tweeted that they’ve completed several challenges – as bingo callers, and dog walkers. They’ve collected business cards at a Chevy dealership, got Chevy tattoos (temporary) and adopted a dog they named – you guessed it – Chevy.

While a manufacturer-driven event, the social networking effects some dealers as well, for one of the point-earning challenges for the Chevy road warriors is to take and socially share a team photo with the staff of a Chevy dealership. Hare Chevrolet was the dealership chosen by Team Lansing. The Indianapolis dealership, though yet to see its Traverse-driving team, is taking early media advantage, with a press release about this week’s coming visit.

Team Atlanta’s Regator blog explained the challenge concept, and the 50 challenges each team must meet. Challenges include interviewing a diner server about her or his most interesting customer, staging a Tweetup at a local college or university, picnicking on a farm with the animals or farmers, playing music on the street with a street musician, visiting a library to read to kids, cleaning up a local park, and taking a picture in front of a sports stadium, with a police officer, with a cowboy or cowgirl, and of the entire team in the vehicle’s trunk.

Another challenge is to interview someone who has just bought a new Chevy, and to bring back the largest piece of promotional material the team can find from a local Chevy dealership. Our favorite challenge: taking a picture of the most uniquely-customized Chevy vehicle the team could find.

All this is good fun, of course, but we can see the social networking value for the dealerships and for Chevy as the teams “see the USA in their Chevrolet.” (For those of you old enough to remember, Here’s the famous Dinah Shore rendition of that song, complete with kiss throw, courtesy of Betsy Weber and YouTube.)

While at first glance this might seem a whole lot of work, all it really took was finding the right social-adept and social-loving people, on their way to a highly-touted event, and the loan of several new vehicles. While it might be difficult to put a strict ROI on the Road Challenge, we can see how something similar could virally market many industry products, and the media groups that were smart enough to take part.

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