Panelists at Festsaal Kreuzberg in Berlin
Ich liebe Deutschland! Ich liebe #SMWBerlin!
After a memorable and successful Social Media Week beginning in Glasgow, I wasn’t sure what Berlin would have in store for me, but having been there a number of times I had an idea what to expect. Nonetheless I was sad to leave Glasgow after a mere 24 hours there—the city had earned my heart and the SMW Glasgow program had been memorable and impressive.
DAY 2:
Alas, the show must go on and so at 7am on Tuesday I jumped into another cab for Glasgow airport to find out what Berlin had in store for me. After enduring the standard EasyJet hassles (note: they are VERY serious about the one item of hand luggage rule), I got to Berlin safely. I left Schoenefeld Airport and boarded a train for the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, site of both the day’s Main Event as well as the awesome flat I’d been given to use by SMW Berlin partner 9Flats.com. I had more work to do and I thought I’d head to the flat to do it before heading over to the day’s venue, Festsaal Kreuzberg. Of course, my plans were foiled when I missed my transfer and instead got off in Friedrichshain. At this point a revelatory thought also occurred to me: given that I wasn’t staying in a hotel but instead a flat, how exactly would I be able to get in? Hmm.
It was a good thing I thought of this before heading to the apartment because, well, I wouldn’t have gotten in. A quick review of my 9Flats.com account told me that I had in fact needed to arrange a time with the owner ahead of time to pick the key up. Whoops. The one potential drawback to the flat-sharing experience.
My 9Flats room in Kreuzberg
After some back and forth and confusion, I finally sorted out a meeting time with the owner later on that night and headed on my way to Festsaal Kreuzberg, site of the day’s main event.
One of the things I love about Social Media Week is the way that each city and each city partner is able to put their own stamp on a conference: the plan for the day involved seven consecutive hours of programming in the space, which involved a music venue style theatre and courtyard with bar. Now, if you asked me to put together an SMW program, I would probably not consider putting seven straight hours together, but impressively the SMW Berlin team had created a balanced and well-thought out program of interwoven panels, presentations and talks, ranging from 90 minutes down to 5 minutes.
Titled “Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy”—taken from a quote by American comedian Louis CK—the evening and everything about it, from the conversations, to the venue, to the attendees, was totally awesome. Among the highlights included a presentation by Sam Burke (@samuelCNN) of CNN on social tv engagement around the world and “Kreative und Social Web”, featuring Yousef Hammoudah (@yokomono) of MTV Networks and others from the creative industry discussing social media’s role in the growing and promotion of creative material.
I also loved the fact that the events flowed in and out between German and English, sometimes within the same event. Again, this is another distinctive piece of local SMW flavor, as Berlin is uniquely positioned in the world with a significant portion of bilingual professionals. There was even a point when a speaker said, “OK, so the following session will start in Deutsch [German]” and then proceeded to speak unthinkingly in English before realizing. The crowd laughed and smiled. And everyone learned and no one had a bad time.
Markus Angermeier leads social promotion efforts for SMW Berlin, spreading the word about the conference through Twitter, Facebook, SCHED* and FormSpring. When he’s not hard at work on Social Media Week projects, he’s a design professional, blogger and social web evangelist. You can follow Markus on Twitter 
