We are delighted to announce that more than 7,000 people and 150 individual organizations participated in the second annual Social Media Week, which took place between February 1st and February 5th simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo.
Sponsored by our global headline sponsor Meebo and supporting sponsors Pepsico, the week was host to more than 200 events covering such topics as social media’s impact on health care, technology, higher education and politics, PR & brand communications and the non-profit sector. Across the six cities, the conference also tackled emerging trends such as open design, crowdsourcing, social graph optimization & social media monitoring and metrics.
It’s clear from looking at the coverage from each city that the breadth, depth and diversity of subjects tackled truly underscores the far-reaching impact that social media has on society.
Of the 7,000 or so attendees, it’s estimated that tens of thousands more were able to follow the events online via Twitter and through live streaming. Attendance certainly far exceeded our expectations, however participation and engagement on our website was also extremely high, with nearly 100k visitors from over 100 countries visiting the Social Media Week website during Janurary alone. Much of this should be credited to the individual cities and their coverage of the conference and also to the wider communities who embraced the opportunity to take part in the co-creation of the conference program.
So what happens next?
Now that the dust has settled, we are excited to announce that we will be adding another conference in September, focusing this time on 6-10 new cities. Our goal is to continue to advance our understanding of social media and further build on our aim of becoming a global platform for connectivity, learning and collaboration.
We will be going through an extensive selection process in the coming months in preparation for a May/June announcement, however, the selection process has already begun and those organizations that are interested in hosting a Social Media Week conference in September can register their interest by visiting http://socialmediaweek.org/getting-involved
We are also excited to share more content and coverage from the February conference in the coming weeks.
Thanks again to all the event partners, sponsors, advisory board members, staff, volunteers and everyone else who worked so hard to make Social Media Week such a huge success.
Toby Daniels
Founder & Executive Director, Social Media Week
