Instagram Your City For Social Media Week and Win A Trip Across The World

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Instagram Your City For Social Media Week and Win A Trip Across The World

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Over the past four years, Social Media Week has hosted conferences in more than 26 cities around the world.

To celebrate our sixth global event this coming September, we are asking people around the world to Instagram Your City. There are many photo programs such as Instagram, Nokia Creative Studio, Lightbox, Hipster and StreamZoo that enable you to make beautiful images and share with your friends. So, we’re asking you to use one of these platforms or any filter (or none at all!) to showcase the uniqueness of our host cities. We are looking for the Top 14 submissions to represent each of our 14 cities participating in Social Media Week this coming September, all from your perspective.

Submitting is incredibly easy (And don’t worry, you can still enter even if you don’t have the Instagram app):

1. Take a picture: Using any smartphone device, take a photo that captures the uniqueness and heart of one of the 14 host cities for Social Media Week. (Note: To qualify for the grand prize, photos must be taken with a smartphone and must be of one of the 14 participating cities.)

2. Add a filter: Using any social photography platform, such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Nokia Creative Studio, StreamZoo, or Lightbox, make your photo stand out. While a filter isn’t necessary to enter, it does make it more fun!

3. Tag & Share: Using #InstagramYourCity, share on Twitter with the city you’re capturing. For example, “Just submitted my entry to @SocialMediaWeek’s #InstagramYourCity for Berlin!”

There’s no limit to the number of entries you can submit, so get creative!

In the coming weeks, we will launch the Instagram Your City special website, which will feature the top 14 city shots. One “Best-in-Show” picture will then be selected from these with the winner being given the opportunity to travel to any Social Media Week city of their choosing during the September 24-28 event.

September’s Social Media Week, powered by Nokia, will be the biggest, most diverse and expansive to-date, with 14 cities hosting, including London, Glasgow, Torino, Barcelona, Berlin, Doha, Jeddah, Hong Kong, Seoul, São Paulo, Bogotá, Chicago, Los Angeles and Vancouver.

“As we continue to add new Social Media Week cities and expand to incredible parts of the world, we are looking to fulfill the adage of ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’,” said Toby Daniels, Founder & Executive Director of Social Media Week. “As a celebration of the uniqueness of all of our local cities, the Instagram Your City competition will provide a way to tell stories that cross cultural and geographic boundaries.”

The deadline for submissions is June 29, so grab your smartphone and show the rest of the world what makes your city unique and beautiful.

For full rules and guidelines, see here.

Images courtesy of @rocktheretweet, @vutheara, @shelserkin. This contest is not endorsed or certified by Instagram or Burbn, inc. All Instagram(tm) logos and trademarks displayed here are property of Burbn, Inc.

Tags: Contest, Instagram, september, SMW12, travel
Posted in Featured, global

A Look Back At February & A Look To September

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

February proved to be our biggest conference to date, with participation from more than 36,000 attendees, across 1,000 individually hosted events and with 2,500 speakers driving the conversation in 12 cities. Together, we reached hundreds of thousands of people in more than 180 countries.

We saw notable speakers like Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Alec Ross; Venture Investor Jalak Jobanputra; founder & CEO of Tumblr David Karp; Japanese journalist Toshinau Sasari; Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager of Facebook; singer and actor Nick Jonas; and Google Brazil’s CEO Fabio Coelho.

More than 120 brand partners and event hosts played an active role, including Microsoft, Ebay, Facebook, SAP, Cisco, Nokia, Telefonica, Twitter Japan, Buddy Media and Warner Music Europe.

We were witness to industry leaders unveiling new products and services, like Ogilvy & Mather’s Social@Ogilvy and Microsoft’s People Powered Stories.

Singapore sent Daphne to London to survive on social media alone and welcomed in London's Martin in our first social experiment, “Can Man Live on Social Media Alone?” and Hamburg pitted bands against each other in their online video competition. Sao Paulo hosted a live tweet rap session with Emicida, and Toronto went viral with “Future Hipsters.”

And that’s just scratching the surface of all that happened during SMW12. See the scope of the collaborative nature of one of the world’s most socially connected conferences with our infographic, created with global technology partners Dopamine and Bernards.

Most importantly, don’t forget to join us this fall: Social Media Week returns September 24-28. Share it. Tell your friends and get involved again.

Finally, Social Media Week wouldn't be possible without the incredible support of our city partners: Hi-Life, cohn & wolfe-impactasia, Chinwag, brpr Group, La Netscouade, Beyond, SixPix, AKA Asia, Entrinsic, Cyber Communications, and iStrategyLabs. In addition, we are very grateful for our global sponsors behind it all: Nokia, Constant Contact and Ogilvy & Mathers; and our global media partners: The Guardian, the Financial Times and The Next Web.

“Buddy Media is proud to be a partner of Social Media Week,” said Buddy Media co-founder and CEO Michael Lazerow. “This is one of the few events that enables us to connect with our customers and partners globally. We look forward to continued growth and innovation from the Social Media Week team.”- as do we! Thank you to everyone for a wonderful SMW12!

Tags: Alec Ross, David Karp, Emicida, Fabio Coelho, February, Jalak Jopanputra, Nick Jonas, Paul Adams, september, SMW12, Toshinau Sasari
Posted in Featured, global

What We’re Saying During Social Media Week: Day 5

Monday, February 20th, 2012

The last day of Social Media Week has come and gone. I’m Sheldon from Sysomos back to look at what happened on this final day. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been watching conversations happening from around the globe all week. Today I’ll give a little insight as to what people were saying on Friday, the fifth and last day of Social Media Week.

I started with a final look at the general Social Media Week activity. When I say general, I’m looking at mentions of the general hashtags “#SMW12″ and “#SMW” as well as mentions of just “Social Media Week.” On this fifth and final day, I found that activity had calmed down a bit and came up just short of 10,000 mentions. While I can’t see a specific reason as to the drop off in mentions, I’m just going to assume that after an entire week of Social Media Week activities, people were just ready for the weekend (I know I was).

The buzzgraph from this last day also seems a bit general, although we can see a focus on some business talk. Right in the center we can see that the conversation is stemming from “socialmedia.” But around the outskirts of the buzzgraph, we have a wide variety of words that help to show the wide variety of conversations happening. One major conversation I found seems to be coming from within the US as people were talking about brands they thought were doing a great job in social media, such as “Intel,” “WellsFargo,” “Intel” and “Adobe.” We can also see talk about tools businesses and “brands” are using like “SMM” (social media monitoring tools) and “CMS” (content management systems).

Next, I started to dive into the conversations coming directly from activities and events in our 12 host cities. For our last day of Social Media Week I started looking where it all began, in New York City. On Friday in New York, the people still seemed to be very interested in the panels going on. We can actually see “panel” right in the heart of all the discussions. From the words around it, I found a lot of interesting panel discussions that focused on things like “leveraging” human capital, successful social media “campaigns,” and “platform” discussions around networks like “Pinterest” and “LinkedIn.”

Over in Hong Kong it appeared that a lot of interest was coming from one specific session that was run by Janice, aka @e_”ting.” From what i can tell, Janice is a food blogger and tweeter who seems to be quite well known in Hong Kong. During the session she talked about “food” and “restaurants” but she also went a lot deeper. It appears that she talked about the value of real “people” “sharing” their experiences and the “currency” that is now worth.

In my home of Toronto there were a few things that stood out in Friday’s Social Media Week conversations. First was a session that focused around the art of “storytelling” and how it applies to social media. From what i could gather, one of the main take-aways from that event was that knowing your “audience” helps to create an emotional connection, which then makes you “memorable” to them. The second thing that stood out to me was that people seemed to be greateful for their entire week. We can see that people were saying “thanks” (and “thx”) for all the “insights” they gained over Social Media Week.

Down in São Paulo their seemed top be a conversation that was leading towards two types of “socias” “mídias” (social media) users. Onone hand, I can see talk about the “agência” and “agências” (agency and agencies), while on the other we can see talk about the social media “entusiastas” (enthusiasts).

In San Franciso, we can see that the conversation for Friday seemed to center around the idea of “gamification.” Since San Francisco is a hotbed for social and tech start-ups, the conversation came around using gamification as a way to get users into new services. We can see them talking about gamification around “principles” of “engagement,” “motivation” “interest” and even “influence.”

Finally, I finished up my tour of the world in London. Here I found that the conversation focused around a pannel put on by “Likeminds” entitled The “Future” of “Social.” This panel seemed to be so popular that the hashtag “#greatpanel” even showed up in the buzzgraph. One of the good quotes I was able to find from the session was that “this is not a ‘technological’ ‘revolution,’ but rather about ‘human’ ‘interaction.’”

And now, let’s take a look at the activity levels coming from all 12 of our host cities on Friday:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

Well, that’s it for me and Sysomos. We hope that these blog posts have given you a little insight into all of the great conversations that were happening all over the globe for Social Media Week. We also hope that you all had a great time participating in Social Media Week wherever and whenever you could. I know that we certainly did, and we hope to be part of it again.

Tags: #smw, analytics, global, SMW12, social media, Social Media Monitoring, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Coverage, global, Reports

What We’re Saying During Social Media Week: Day 4

Monday, February 20th, 2012

Hi there! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again to take a look at what the world was saying on Thursday of Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to track all the social conversations going on around the week long event, I’ve compiled some of the interesting things that I was able to find on the 4th day.

As always, I started looking at the general mentions of Social Media Week. These were the conversations that mentioned Social Media Week with no particular city attached to the mention. These mentions also consisted of people using the overall non-city specific hashtags such as “#SMW” and “#SMW12.” On Thursday, I was able to find these general terms mentioned over 10,000 times across all social channels. This is also the first day I’ve seen the favourable sentiment rating less than 99%, but 98% is still pretty good.

I also noticed that on Thursday, the ladies seemed to be chatting a bit mote about Social Media Week than men. On Thursday I found that females made up 51% of the conversation while males made up the other 49%.

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to see what the general conversation was all about. On Thursday it appears as though a lot of the talk was coming from Toronto. I first clued in by seeing “Torontoist,” a local based blog about everything Toronto, in the buzzgraph. I then noticed that a bunch of Social Media Week Toronto’s sponsors were also showing up in the graph, like “BMO,” “Rdio,” and of course, “Sysomos.” We can also see there was some interesting conversations going on about “tweets,” but my eye was most caught by the word “ghostwriter.” There seems to have been a conversation around whether social media can be done by someone behind the scenes while someone else or a company claims it as their own.

Next, I started to dig into some of the buzz coming from individual cities. I started off in Washington DC where I found a wide range of interesting conversations happening with a political feel. Firstly, I found a conversation about using “social media” “strategies” in the “nonprofit” sector. There was also another conversation that specifically focused around creating a “hispanic” voice through social media in the US. One other thing caught my eye. There seemed to be a conversation about hairy animals, some of which may no longer exist. However, when I looked a bit further into the words in the buzzgraph I found that they were actually talking about event venues, the “Wooly” “Mammoth” Theater and “Buffalo” Billiards.

I then looked across the pond to see what London was talking about on Thursday.Here I found that a lot of the talk focused around two interesting events. There was a large event that was put on by the “BBC” which focused around the upcoming London “Olympics” and “socialmedia.” The second was talking about London Fashion Week. While it itself didn’t show up in the buzzgraph, I found that a lot fo the words I did find were connected to it. For example, “Aurasma” is a really interesting looking augmented reality browser that will be used to bring posters, advertisements, magazines and other media to life for Fashion Week.

In Tokyo it was a bit harder for me to get a handle on the conversation. This was because half of the conversation I found was in English, but the other half was in Japanese. Most of the Japanese threw me off as the words were too common, like “ら” which means “from,” or “加” which means “addition.” One Japanese word that interested me was “加” which means “augment.” I found that Japan was also talking about the future of augmented reality and how we can use it. We can also pick a few social networks like “Tumblr” and “LinkedIn” out of the conversation to know that platforms seemed like an important part of the conversation that day.

Meanwhile, in Miami, “fashion” seemed to be the topic of the day. We can see the conversation stemming from “FABB,” which was a large event focused around talking fashion and social media. Topics seemed to range from “blogging” to “beauty.” The main part of the event seemed to focus around a large “roundtable” discussion.

Now let’s take a look at the activity levels from each city for Thursday:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

That’s all for our look at day four of Social Media Week. I’ll be back again to see what people were saying on Friday, the closing day of Social Media Week.

Tags: #smw, analytics, global, SMW12, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Coverage, global, Reports

What We’re Saying During Social Media Week: Day 3

Friday, February 17th, 2012

We’ve officially made it past the half way mark of Social Media Week!

This is Sheldon from Sysomos back with another look at what people around the world have been saying through social channels about Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been tracking all of the Social Media Week online chatter using hashtags and keywords. I’m hoping that by combining some of the things I’ve been seeing happening during the week from our 12 host cities here on the blog that people can get a feel for what’s going on not just in their own city.

I started looking at Wednesday as I always do; with the activity levels for the general Social Media Week chatter. When I say general, I’m referring to the people who are talking about “Social Media Week” with no specific city, or the general hashtags, such as “#SMW12″ or “#SMW.” From Wednesday I found over 11,000 of these mentions. I’m also happy to say that the mentions of Social Media Week have remained at a steady positive pace of being 99% favourable.

Since Wednesday marked half way through Social Media Week, I thought I’d do something a little different for today’s post. Instead of looking at buzzgraphs to see what kinds of conversations were coming from each of our 12 host cities, I thought it would be interesting to look at the big conversation drivers for the week so far. Because Twitter is the most used social channel producing talk, I explored the tweets we were seeing. Below you’ll find the Twitter user who has used the general Social Media Week references the most as well as the four most retweeted tweets we’ve seen in the first three days.

I then went and pulled up the same data, the person who tweeted the most and the four most retweeted tweets, coming from each of the 12 host cities over the first three days of Social Media Week. To be fair to all our Social Media Week attendees, I featured the user with the second most tweets in the cities where the official city Social Media Week Twitter account was first:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

And as always, here’s the activity levels I found for each city that happened on Wednesday:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at what’s going on around the social media world for Social Media Week on day 3. See you soon, and I hope you’re having as good of a Social Media Week as I am.

Tags: #smw, analytics, SMW12, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Coverage, global, Reports

What We’re Saying During Social Media Week: Day 2

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Hello again! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again with a look at what’s happening around the world during Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been tracking the online conversations coming from all over the world. Today I’ll be taking a look at some of the interesting conversations that happened on Tuesday, the second day of Social Media Week.

Before I dive in to some of the individual city conversations I looked at those that were using the more general Social Media Week keywords. These are things like “Social Media Week” and the general hashtags “#SMW” and “#SMW12.” On Tuesday I found that there was almost 11,000 mentions of Social Media Week in the general sense. 9,800 of those mentions were from Twitter alone. There was also 47 videos uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday about Social Media Week. I also found that the general conciseness around these conversations were positive with a second day in a row of getting a 99% favourable rating.

I pulled up a buzzgraph to see what the conversation was revolving around and found that a majority of the words in the buzzgraph were in German. This means that our friends in Hamburg were creating quite a bit of buzz. We can see that these German conversations had a focus around “Twitter.” It’s also nice to see that since Tuesday was Feburary 14th, there seemed to be some talk about “Valentines” Day in our Social Media Week conversation.

Since the main conversation channel for Social Media Week seems to be Twitter, I decided to dive a little deeper into it to see what was happening. I looked at what kinds of tweets were being sent in relation to Social Media Week and found that people were sharing the ideas that they were hearing or having on their own. 56% of all the tweets on Tuesday were regular tweets, as in people sharing with the rest of the world. 33% of the tweets we found were retweets, meaning people were sharing ideas that they were seing coming from others. Only 11% of the tweets were @ replies. This tells us that there may not have been a lot of back and forth about Social Media Week, and if there was, they dropped the hashtags for those conversations.

Because we saw a lot of German conversation in the general Social Media Week talk, I decided to start my individual city explorations in Hamburg. Here I found that there seemed to be an interesting “keynote” “vortrag” (lecture) given by “Thilo” “Weichert” the “außenministerin” (foreign minister). There doesn’t seem to be a lot of substance about his lecture in the buzzgraph, but we can see that a lot of people were talking about this event in general.

Over in Paris there seemed to be a very interesting conversation going on about governments, the people and social media. We can see that right in the middle of one of the main conversations is “tunisie” (Tunisia) which was the home of a revolution last year, and people say that social media played a huge role in that. We can see that the conversation branches off into the ideas of social media and “censure” (censorship), “détournement” (misappropriation), and being “anonymous.”

In São Paulo on Tuesday, one of the more popular Social Media Week sessions seemed to be one given by a local rapper phenomenon known as “Emicida.” It looks like his session focused in on how he and a few other artists (also in the buzzgraph) were using “sociais” “mídias” (social media) like “Facebook” and “Google” to their advantage to make a name for themselves and interact with their fans. One other thing I found interesting

Lastly, I looked into the city that Social Media Week originated, New York City. Here I found that a few panels were making people talk on Tuesday. Right in the center of the graph we can see the word “panel” because it appeared in many conversations coming from New York. Some of the panel topics we can see stemming from there included ones on “SOPA” and “PIPA,” online “syndication,” social “relationships” and “influence,” and also the role that social now plays in “NYFW” which is New York Fashion Week.

Now, here’s the activity levels we found coming from each Social Media Week host city:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at what’s going on around the social media world for Social Media Week on day 3. We may even try something a little bit different as a mid-week, half way through, round-up. See you then!

Tags: #smw, analytics, global, SMW12, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Coverage, global, Reports

What We’re Saying During Social Media Week: Day 1

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

And we’re off and running! We’ve officially began another exciting Social Media Week and Sysomos is super proud to once again be part of it. I’m Sheldon, the community manager for Sysomos, and I’ll be using our industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to track what’s being said through social media. We’re tracking the conversation using hashtags and keywords provided by the Social Media Week global team to see what people are saying about their sessions and parties in Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington DC and by those watching the live streams around the world.

I started by looking at Social Media Week in general. These were mentions that contained things like “Social Media Week” or the general hashtags, such as #SMW12 or #SMW. On just day one alone I found over 14,000 mentions throughout various social channels. 12,300 of those mentions came from Twitter, which will most likely be the key medium driving Social Media Week talk all week. I also found that all of this chatter had a favourable rating 99%, which is a fantastic way to start the week.

What’s even cooler than the 99% favourable rating is what I found when looking at some demographic information about the general Social Media Week chatter. Here, I found that 51% of the talk was coming from men and 49% women. That means that we’re getting equal participation from both sides of the gender fence. I also found that people of all ages are taking part in the conversation. The greatest concentration was coming from people aged 36-50 with 40% of the conversation. Another cool thing is that our other three age categories, 20 and under, 21-35 and 51 and over, each made up for 20% of the conversation.

I also pulled up a buzzgraph to get an idea of what the general conversation was about. A buzzgraph shows us some of the words that came up a lot in conversations about Social Media Week and how they’re interconnected with other frequently found words. For this buzzgraph we can see that “social media” is right in the center of conversation. Around it, we can see all kinds of interesting topics related to social media that people were discussing, such as “business,” “mobile,” “algorithms,” and of course popular social networks liek “Facebook,” “Twitter” and “Pinterest.”

I then started to dive into the conversations coming from the individual host cities. In San Francisco we can that “social media” is again smack dab in the middle of the conversation. However, here we can see that the conversation around social media seemed to center around “business” as people were talking about thing like “experience” and “tools” as well as “results” and “value.” This is no surprise as San Francisco is home to many social media and tech start-ups that become large businesses in the area known as “Silicon” “Valley.”

In Singapore I found that one of the more popular Social Media Week sessions was put on by Trendwatching.com. The session, hosted by “Henry” “Mason,” seemed to focus on actually “defining” what makes a “trend” and how to do trend “spotting.” It also highlighted some interesting trends, like one they called “faux”-real, which is the altering of something real, and points towards “Instagram” and its filters as an example of this. Another interesting one we can see people were talking about was a “Brazilian” trend of “lingerie” for men.

In Hong Kong I found a few key conversations taking place. One of the main ones seems to be an event that was put on by “Ogilvy.” However, I was quickly distracted by noticing that another conversation happening around an “Openbar.” While at first I thought there must have been a really good party in Hong Kong, it actually turned out that Openbar was a “winner” at a start-up competition. From what I could find, Openbar is app for finding interesting night spots in Hong Kong by seeing activity from other social users at the venues and also giving coupons for near-by hot spots.

Back in my home town of Toronto I found something interesting that I didn’t see in any other city this day. Here there were two main conversations. One was coming from a session about “ROI” in social media. However, the other conversation had nothing to do with an actual session, but rather people saying “thanks” to sponsors of Social Media Week Toronto. We can see some sponsors like Via-”Rail,” “Chobani” “Yoghurt,” “Rdio” and, of course, “Sysomos.” I guess we were really feeding into the Canadian politeness stereotype (because it’s true).

These are just a few of the interesting conversations I was able to find on the first day of Social Media Week.

Now let’s take a look at the activity that was coming from each of our host cities for day one:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

That’s all for me for today. I’ll be back again tomorrow with a Sysomos look at some interesting things going on around the world for Social Media Week on day two. Feel free to leave a comment below if you saw something really interesting in here or you’d like to see something particular in my investigations over the next few days.

Tags: #smw, analytics, global, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Coverage, global, Reports

On The Move- Nokia and SMW12

Monday, February 13th, 2012

We’ve been hinting at it and now it’s time to reveal. Global Headline Sponsors Nokia have been quite busy preparing some amazing activities for SMW12. Our heads are awhirl with everything going on! From Singapore to London to New York, see Nokia in action

New York
Swing by the Global Society Hub at Big Fuel to see Agora, Nokia’s social visualizer. With 6 screens aggregating data as it comes out, displaying the latest videos, photos, and texts, it’s truly a sight to see. And it’s right next to the Global Nokia Stage, hosting our daily Guardian interviews with select keynotes.

Then, catch the Nokia Cab! Need a lift around town? You’ll want to follow #NokiaConnects to hear where the Nokia Cab will be stationed.

Finally, Nokia was behind SMWNYC’s opening party, with some fun surprises in store for those in attendance. Checking in on Foursquare released a special task in order to gain access to a magical performance.

Hong Kong
Photo fan? Like a good scavenger hunt? Then, check out Hong Kong Fashion Geek Photo Hunt, powered by Nokia.

Then, since it’s Valentine’s Day, you knew it was coming. Dating + Twitter = DWITTER. On this night reserved for romance, we’ll be pairing up attendees. Bring your smartphones!

Wind down your week with a little trivia fun! Fashion Brands vs Fashion Bloggers Quiz Night Mixer will pit Hong Kong’s most hip fashion bloggers with the most tech-savvy brands in a quiz night to find out who knows more about the Hong Kong fashion scene. The night has some amazing surprises in store for the winning team and participating audience members. Don’t be shy!

Finally, cap off SMWHK with the SMWHK12 Wrap Party, Powered by Nokia! This closing party will feature the first SMWHK12 Awards. SMWHK and Nokia will award the most active communicators from the city, looking for the Best Photo, Best Video, and Most Active Sharer. Get tweeting!

Singapore
Singapore and Nokia are bringing the activity online and want you to participate in some rather unique ways!

Start off by telling us what makes your day amazing. Amazing Everyday Singapore, powered by Nokia, is an online collection of the amazing things happening everyday in Singapore. Post your favorite images to Facebook or tweet us with a caption and the hashtags #amazingeveryday #smwsg. Each day, pictures will be collated, printed and added to the Nokia Amazing Everyday Singapore photo wall.

Then, help discover if Man Can Live On Social Media Alone Experiment. In conjunction with Social Media Week, Can Man Live on Social Media Alone? powered by Nokia, is a daring cross-city social experiment to evaluate whether one intrepid traveller can depend on nothing but the goodwill of locals and the power of social media to survive in a foreign city for one week. From 9 – 15 February, Daphne (#CanManSG) and Martin (#CanManLondon) will trade cities, power up their social media channels and prepare for the best (or worst). They’ll need your help, so don’t be afraid to get involved!

London
Nokia Lumia House Open Weeklong / Hosting Social Surgery Sessions is providing drop-in surgeries for businesses with social media questions. This one-on-one time with experts on various aspects of social media – from managing Facebook pages through to analytics, social media policy, using Twitter effectively and all stops in between- will run Mon 13th – Weds 15th Feb 2012 (9am – 5pm) at Nokia Lumia House in Central Soho.

Nokia also was behind the SMW London Opening Party at SNR Denton.

A very social company, indeed. Want more? See Nokia at these events around the globe, and keep up with the conversation by using #SMW12 and #NokiaConnects.

Monday, February 13

1-3pm in London: Bridging the Social Media Skills Gap at Design Council
1-3pm in New York: Keynote: Valerie Buckingham on This is Your Brand on Ziplines: Authenticity through Social Media followed by Beyond Borders: Impact of Social Media in a Global Economy (Livestream)
6:30-8:30pm in New York: SMW Global Opening VIP Reception. Making it magical and amazing, Nokia has some surprises in store for these attendees.
6-9pm in San Francisco: SMW San Francisco VIP Kickoff Party, Powered by Nokia at Project One

Wednesday, February 15

9:30-11:30am in Hong Kong: Social Commerce for Brands & SME’s
4:30-6:30pm in Hong Kong: How to Create a Successful Media Competition
11-1pm in London: Social Media: Teenage of the Species at Design Council
9-12pm in New York: Social Business by Design
2:30-4pm in London: The Nokia Social Innovation Lab at Design Council
4-5pm in New York: The Future of Sharing: An Analysis and Prediction of Online Sharing Trends
7-9pm in New York: COMMON Pitch Event, sponsored by Nokia

Thursday, February 16

11-2pm in Singapore: Can Man Live On Social Media Alone? (panel wrap) at Rajah & Tann
4:15-5pm in Singapore: Afternoon Speakeasy: How Nokia Got Social at Rajah & Tann
9-11am in London: The Future of Sharing: An Analysis and Prediction of Online Sharing Trends at Design Council
11-1pm in London: Inside the Firewall: The Social Business Revolution at Design Council
8pm in Singapore: #TweetJams- Sixx and Syndicate present Singapore’s first crowdsourced gig
9-11am in New York: Brands as Publishers: Writing and Publishing Content at Scale at JWT
6-10pm in London: SMW London Closing Party at The Penthouse
1-2pm in San Francisco: The Future of Sharing: An Analysis and Prediction of Online Sharing Trends at San Francisco State University
4-5pm in San Francisco: VC/Startup Office Hours at San Francisco State University. Take a chance and give your best elevator pitch to founders and VCs from around Silicon Valley.

Tags: can man, hong kong, london, New York, nokia, Singapore, SMW12, Valerie Buckingham
Posted in Featured, global

How To Follow SMW12

Monday, February 13th, 2012

It’s time! Social Media Week has arrived. Kicking off today in 12 cities around the world with over 1000 events taking place, this February may prove to be our biggest, boldest and best SMW to date. And we want to make sure you keep up with it all- from the conversations to the events to the interactivity.

Now, you don’t have to be in Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Toronto or DC to participate! In addition to physically attending events, join the conversation virtually!

1. SMW RealTime : You may remember it from previous versions of SMW, but you’ve never seen it like this. Powered by Nokia and presented by The Guardian, SMW RealTime has drastically evolved into a 5-page data aggregation dashboard, pulling all the real-time data from Social Media Week globally and locally. Not only does it track all official hashtags on an event, city and global level, it also looks at trends, largest contributors to the conversation, Foursquare checkins and a daily poll!

See the global view:

And now on the event view:

See our daily poll:

2. Twitter: The staple. We couldn’t do without it- and neither could you (Admit it). Plus, this year, there’s a little competition as to which city can generate the most online conversation. You’ll want to use these global hashtags and handles- game on.

Global: @SocialMediaWeek & #SMW12, with our activities with sponsors & partners at @Nokia & #NokiaConnects, @ConstantContact & #SMWCC, @OgilvyWW & #SMWOgilvy, @SMWLoveMessenger & #CanManLondon, @DeafKnee & #CanManSg, #FutureHipsters

Hamburg: @SMWHamburg & #SMWHamburg
Hong Kong: @SMWHK & #SMWHK
London: @SMWLdn & #SMWLdn
Miami: @SMWMiami & #SMWMiami
Paris: @SMWParis & #SMWParis
San Francisco: @SMWSF & #SMWSF
Sao Paulo: @SMWSP & #SMWSP
Singapore: @SMW_SG & #SMWSg
Tokyo: @SMWTok & #SMWTok
Toronto: @SMWTo & #SMWTo
Washington DC: @SMWWDC & #SMWWDC

New York: @SMWNYC & #SMWNYC, with major events at #SMWBusiness, #SMWBigFuel, #SMWHealth, #SMWHearst, #SMWJWT, #SMWReuters

3. Social Media Week Live: Another feature that has only gotten better with time! This year’s livestreaming is built around Livestream’s new platform- and you’re going to be impressed. With the ability to incorporate photos and comments in a feed format, SMW Live is easier to use and keep up with events from afar. Plus, you can see all events that are slated to be streamed in advance!

See the schedule page:

Test it out! Watch our press conference- all on SMW Live:

4. Social Media Week Blogs:  We are stepping up our coverage in a big way. Not just on our global blog but also on the city level. With students from Columbia University to dedicated editorial teams, we’ll be bringing back the best stories from our cities. Get the RSS feed or check in every day to see the highlights: Global, Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington DC

And don’t forget to visit our Future Hipsters tumblr and keep up with our international social experiment with Martin in Singapore and Daphne in London’s Tumblr.

5. SMW Official Mobile App: Yes, you’re hearing a lot about it, but that’s because we really think it’ll change your experience with SMW12. In the convenience of your hands, you can now keep up with all the conversations. Available on 5 platforms and in 6 languages, you can follow the feeds of all cities and our global team, as well as getting the latest social and digital news from The Guardian! You can also access livestream, locate event venues and register for new events- all in one place. Download SMW Official Mobile App today!

We look forward to hearing from you this SMW12. Watch. Attend. Participate. Shape Social Media Week this February.

Tags: app, blog, Hashtag, livestream, real-time, RealTime, SMW12, twitter, watch
Posted in Featured, global

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: New York

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

Hello again! Sheldon from Sysomos back with one final look at what the social world is saying about our host cities before Social Media Week officially starts tomorrow. I’ve been using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to find out what kind of talk goes on in social media about our host cities. Today I’ll be looking at the last city in the series, and also the original home of Social Media Week, New York, New York.

Doing a search for people mentioning New York or the much used NY in social mendia yielded a lot of results. In the past six months I was able to find 6.2 million blog posts, 6.7 million online news articles, 3.8 million forum postings and 14.7 million tweets talking about New York.

I then trended those mentions over time to get the popularity graph below. New York is one of the most known cities throughout the world and it shows by looking at just how much people are talking about it. Twitter, as usual, seems to be the channel creating the most talk about it. Something interesting in this graph is noticing just how much New York also gets mentioned in the news. This is likely because New York is home to a lot of activity including tourist destinations, big name sports teams, large media outlets and the New York Stock Exchange.

Next, I looked at where all the talk of New York was coming from. Naturally, the majority of mentions were coming from right within the United States (60.7%). In most cities we’ve looked in this series we have seen the US, UK and Canada as top country sources, but here I found that Indonesia mentions New York (5.9%) more than the UK (4.1%) and Canada (3.9%).

When I pulled up a buzzgraph to get an idea of what all the conversation was about I found it hard to pinpoint any real substance. As I said above, New York is home to a flurry of activity, and this is represented in the buzzgraph. In it we can see all kinds of random words that have no real connection to one another. People are talking so much about New York in different ways that it’s hard to find a single theme in all that conversation.

I then wanted to look a bit deeper in to the people that were doing all of the talking about New York. I found that when it comes to bloggers talking about New York, women actually mention it the most at 53% and men at 47%. I also found that bloggers between the ages of 21-35 make up over of half all the mentions of New York in blogs (57.1%).

On Twitter, the gender split of people mentioning New York was very similar to blogs, but opposite. Using technology exclusive to Sysomos, I was able to determine that 52% of the Twitter mentions of New York came from males and the other 48% from females. I also looked at the top Twitter sources that were talking about New York. Here I found that the majority of these top sources were news accounts like @TweetNewsss and @NYLiveNews. An interesting one in this list was @DatingMobi, which is some sort of mobile dating site. I also found @NYGiantsNation in this list, which is fitting, as the team just won the Super Bowl a week ago.

Lastly, I looked a bit deeper into some of the larger activity spikes we saw in the popularity graph. I started with the largest spike in the graph which occurred between August 26-29. Looking at the buzzgraph for this time period I found that the talk was centered around “Hurricane” “Irene.” This was a huge storm that made its way up the eastern “seaboard” of the United States in August hitting cities like “Carolina.” The storm was supposed to reach a peak when it hit New York and there was even talk about having “Manhattan” “evacuated.” Luckily, by the time the storm hit New York it was nothing more than a little storm.

The second spike I looked into happened on September 11 and 12. Here we see that there was a large rise in talk about New York on Twitter, blogs and then news. A quick look at the buzzgraph for this time period showed that the spike was because of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. While the talk mostly mentioned New York as that is where the twin towers full of people came down, we can also see that tribute was paid not just to New York, but also to “Shanksville,” “Pennsylvania,” and “Washington.”

Well, that concludes my lead up series to Social Media Week. We’ve some interesting things about what the world has to say about each of our Social Media Week cities. But this isn’t the last you’ll hear from me. All during Social Media Week I’ll be using Sysomos to monitor what is going on around the world and I’ll be providing daily updates right here on the blog. So be sure to keep checking back to keep up on everything that’s going on for Social Media Week.

Tags: #smw, analytics, New York, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports