During the second week of July, Bogota became a trending topic in social media in Colombia; and it was not something that happened by chance. A whole movement was set in order to create a different view of the city.
Technology has almost deleted the gap between massive media and common citizens who have decided to construct themselves a new view of their own realities. This new system of communicating has given tools to some creative people who, by using blogs, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and all kinds of resources on the web have created a new network in which they can construct an alternative city. The city marketing strategy and city brand that Bogota is developing is using these new technologies to break the gap between reality and perception and show a new positive and real city.
An example of what was done in Bogota for the presentation of the city marketing strategy was the sound cartography of a typical music from the plain land called ‘musica llanera.’ Camilo Cantor, the creator of ‘Cartografias Sonoras,’ went to the streets of Bogota looking for sounds that identify the city. For this work, Cantor found a street group which represents the cultural diversity that makes Bogota so special.
Creating a city brand or implementing a city marketing project requires an enormous effort- not just from governmental entities but also from all citizens because they are the hearth of the city itself. During the past years, Bogota has become one of the most important places for business, tourism, and culture, and now, the city plans to put itself as a top five destination in these topics for which social media will become a major tool.
Over 20 major bloggers and social media contents producers worked together under the hashtag #marcabogota, and this innovative movement was the best way to put technology as an approach to achieve the big mean which is creates a strategy that helps to place Bogota as a new must visit destination.
About this Guest Blogger: Invest in Bogota is the investment promotion agency for Bogota and Cundinamarca, a public-private partnership between the Bogota Chamber of Commerce, the Bogota City Government and the Government of Cundinamarca. You can follow them on Twitter, @investinbogota, and learn more here.
Hello again fellow social media-ites. Sheldon from Sysomos social media monitoring and analytics here again to with another look at one of our host cities for the quickly approaching Social Media Week. This time we’re taking a trip back to South America to take a peak inside the social media world of Bogotá, Colombia.
Using Sysomos MAP, our industry leading social media monitoring and analytics platform, I delved into the social media activity coming from Bogotá. Looking back over the past six months I was able to find 35,700 blog posts, 20,800 forum postings and 7 million tweets all originating from Bogotá.
That’s quite a bit of social media activity. When I plotted out the activity over time we can see a trend that I’ve noticed across almost all of our host cities; that around April of this year Twitter activity picked up significantly. As well, like most cities I’ve looked at before, because Twitter is such an easy and widely used medium the number of tweets greatly out shadow most of the other social media activity going on. That’s not to say that 35,000 blog posts and 20,000 forum postings are by any means a small number, but when compared to 7 million tweets, they become hard to see on a graph like the one bellow.
A wordcloud shows us the words most being used in terms of a certain query subject. In the wordcloud bellow we can see the most common words being used through all the different social mediums Sysomos covers. However, because I used no search query and was merely looking for everything coming from Bogotá, these words have very little meaning, but can give us an idea of what kind of conversations are taking place in social media channels there.
Next, I took a deeper look into just who was creating all of this social media activity in Bogotá. By delving into the demographics of bloggers in Bogotá I was able to see that there is a significant amount of student bloggers in the city. Blogs that are claimed to be owned by students make up 18.1% of the blogs coming from Bogotá. The second most blogged about field coming from Bogotá appears to be on the subject of arts, coming in at 13.7%, and then education, which isn’t surprising given the amount of student bloggers, at 11.8%.
Not surprising, knowing that a good portion of bloggers in Bogotá are students, when I looked at the age demographics of bloggers I found that those that fall into the category of ages 21-35 make up 67.6% of bloggers. Keeping on the theme of student bloggers, those 20 years old and under then made up 15.2% of blogs. Bloggers aged 36-50 then made up 11.5% and those 50 and over only accounted for 5.5%. Then when I looked to the gender of these bloggers I found that males accounted for 64% of those blogging in Bogotá, while females made up the other 36%.
Next, I delved into the tweets coming from Bogotá. Using a Sysomos industry exclusive technology that is able to gauge the gender of Twitter users despite the fact that Twitter themselves ask for no such information, I was bale to decipher the demographic breakdown of those 7 million tweets. When I pulled up this information I was able to find that 59% of the tweets coming from Bogotá originated from males while the remaining 41% were tweeted by females.
The next step in my process was to look at what was actually going on in terms of social media talk through social media in Bogotá. While I don’t speak Spanish myself, I inquired and made a list of different terms for social media to look for and came up with “social media” OR “#sm” OR socialmedia OR “medios de comunicación social” OR “red social” OR “redes sociales”. Using these terms I was able to find only 800 blog posts, 13 forum postings and nearly 12,000 tweets. This number seems a bit low even for me, so if you’re from Bogotá please feel free to leave a comment bellow and let me know a more common way in which social media is discussed in Spanish there.
I then pulled up a buzzgraph using the same search terms to see what was being discussed about social media in Bogotá. A buzzgraph shows us words that are commonly used in conjunction with our search terms and how they are connected to one another. The buzzgraph bellow shows that users seem to be the main focus of talk as “usuario” is the word we find right in the center of the graph. We can see from the thicker lines that it is strongly connected to the words “herramienta” which means tools, “Colombia”, “contenido” which means content and “estrategia” which means strategy. From these few words, we can infer that there is a lot of talk about social media business going on in Bogotá.
Lastly, I’ve pulled out the top ten most common words I found in association with social media talk so as to inspire some ideas for types of talk may be most popular during Social Media Week. The top terms I found were:
Usuario (user0
Facebook
Twitter
Tweet
Herramienta (tools)
Mensaje (message0
Colombia
Contenido (content)
Tecnología (technology)
Plataforma (platform)
That’s all for this edition. I hope you’re all getting excited as Social Media Week draws closer because I know that I am.
I’ll be back shortly with a look at social media in another one of our host cities. And, as always, feel free to leave me comments about anything you see here or things you would like to see in a future analysis of other cities.
Following the success of our February 2011 events, we are delighted to announce the dates for the year’s second edition of Social Media Week, scheduled to take place this September 19-23, 2011.
The next iteration will again span the globe, with simultaneous events in cities all over the world.
Since February, the team have been working hard to identify and secure new cities, with a focus on building the SMW brand in the areas we’re already in, in addition to securing new partnerships in a number of significant emerging markets.
The initial lineup of confirmed locations includes returning cities Milan, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bogota, and São Paulo, plus new entrants from Rio de Janeiro and Moscow. Discussions are underway to add a number of additional cities, and the full and finalized line-up, including a number of North American cities, will be announced in May.
Far more than just a conference, Social Media Week is one of the world’s most unique organized events, providing through a series of interconnected activities and conversations across the world with a global perspective on emerging trends in social & mobile media across all major industries.
With each successive iteration, Social Media Week has grown exponentially, leading up to the February 2011 edition, which hosted simultaneous events in nine cities with over 600 events and 30,000 attendees worldwide. Taking place in eight countries and on four continents and generating more than 300M impressions online, it is the largest distributed conference in the world.
The September 2011 version is expected to have the widest global reach yet, with twelve or more cities participating worldwide.
According to renowned author and luminary, Douglas Rushkoff: “Social Media Week is like a collective mind getting in touch with itself – an autonomous being reaching for new levels of intelligence. The facts everyone exchanges – though valuable – seem less significant than the acknowledgment we’re all thinking and caring about the stuff that matters.”
Beyond its uniquely global format, Social Media Week strives to maintain a model where free access to content, programming and events is made possible by support from global and local brand partners. The headline sponsor for both 2011 conferences is Nokia, the world’s largest mobile device maker, and additional supporters include PepsiCo, Meebo, JWT, AOL, Oi Telecommunications and many others.
“Social Media Week is more than an event, its a movement. Such an innovative event that taps into the human networks of people across the world and encourages sharing and best practice will move us forward faster and more effectively than traditional event silos. Nokia is proud to be powering such an innovative movement through our #NokiaConnects solutions and helping people join the conversations and participate from every walk of life”, said Craig Hepburn, Social Media Week Global Advisor and Global Director, Social Media, Nokia.
Social Media Week is managed globally from New York by Crowdcentric, who work with organizational teams in each city to create a globally interconnected network of themes, content and information-sharing. The city partners in each location provide a distinct local feel and flavor to the events that reflect an important blend of global and local interest points. In September, SixPix Content will produce the Brazilian conferences in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; Milan will be produced by Augmendy, also organizers of February’s Rome conference; Bogota by Zemoga; Buenos Aires by Socialatom; Berlin by DeskWanted.com; and in Moscow by the Strelka Institute.
Moscow city partner Katya Girshina, director of public programs for the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, said, “We are very happy that we have been chosen as partners for the Social Media Week in Moscow. It is a very exciting opportunity for us and for our local partners to be involved with such an exciting international event. There is a huge amount of interest among young people in Russia in the development of social media and a lot of new projects are being launched and developed. It will be interesting for us to share our experience and learn from other participating cities.”
While conversations are ongoing with many cities already about being added to the September program, there’s are still opportunities to get additional cities or brands involved if they haven’t been already. If you or your organization would like to get involved as a city partner and bring Social Media Week to your community, please let us know and visit us at http://socialmediaweek.org/get-involved. Please also visit the link above if Social Media Week is coming to your locale and you’d like to take part as an event organizer, host, speaker or brand partner, or contact Ben Scheim by email at ben@crowdcentric.net for more information.
For all press and media inquires, please contact Ben Scheim of Crowdcentric/Social Media Week at +1-347-224-3996 or by email at ben@crowdcentric.net.
La Casa Editorial El Tiempo se ha sumado como Media Partner al evento que se realizará en Bogotá del 20 al 24 de septiembre, simultáneamente con Buenos Aires, Ciudad de México, Milán, y Los Angeles. Participarán en un panel con otros importantes medios, así como prestarán sus instalaciones para la realización del último día de la agenda.
Anunciamos la agenda en la que hemos venido trabajando todas estas semanas.
La agenda está fundamentada sobre tres ejes temáticos:
“Backend of social media” será el eje en el que se tratarán temas con contenido técnico, el funcionamiento detrás de las redes, las implementaciones, etc. Serán talleres y conferencias que hablarán sobre procesos y metodologías para desarrollar estrategias de Social media. Se llevarán a cabo los días lunes y martes y por ser su contenido meramente académico y ser de interés para especial interés para este público, los realizaremos en reconocidas universidades de Bogotá.
“Social media en las empresas colombianas” será el eje de los días miércoles y jueves. Trataremos temas dirigidos a tomadores de decisiones y personal involucrado en la implementación de estrategias de socail media en empresas. Veremos cómo lo han hecho en otras partes, cuales son las tendencias, y se hará un taller para aprender a diseñar una estrategia que se ajuste a sus necesidades. Se realizará en auditorios empresariales y en HUBBog.
El viernes será el día de los medios. El eje se llama “Mass-social media” y contará con experiencia y paneles con la participación de los medios más importantes del país. Tendremos un panel donde conoceremos lo que se aprendió de las pasadas campañas políticas en boca de sus protagonistas, y cerraremos el evento con un panel con la participación de los principales medios de Colombia, sobre la realidad de ellos y su visión de como evolu
La próxima semana se podrán hacer las preinscripciones para asistir al evento. Serán pocos cupos, y no sobra mencionar que la entrada el libre.
No olvide revisar la agenda completa y seguir nuestras cuentas de twitter y facebook para estar enterados de todo lo relacionado con este importante evento internacional que por primera vez se realiza en Bogotá.
This is the second in a series of posts zoning in on the various cities of Social Media Week September 2010 and taking a look at the exciting things going on there.
Following up on the release of its schedule yesterday, here are some updates what’s happening during Social Media Week in Bogotá this September 20 to 24.
The week’s agenda for Social Media Week Bogotá will be based on three main themes, split up over the days of the week:
On Monday and Tuesday, events will focus on the “Backend of Social Media”, featuring discussions that will go in-depth on technical content, operation behind networks, deployments, and more. Workshops and conferences will discuss processes and methodologies to develop behind-the-curtain social media strategies for companies.
“Social Media in Colombian businesses” will be the focus of Wednesday and Thursday. Conversations will hit upon issues aimed at policy makers and personnel involved in implementing social media strategies in business, including what has been done already, what are the trends, and where will things go. Included will be a workshop to learn how to design a strategy that fits your needs. The events will take place in selected auditoriums around Bogotá on Wednesday and at HUBBog on Thursday.
On Friday, the week’s final day, the focus will be the media featuring panels with the participation of many of the most important media leaders of the Columbia. One panel will cover what has been learned from past political campaigns, and the event will be closed with a panel of the main media outlets of Colombia, on their state today and their vision for evolution with social media. Columbian news leader El Tiempo, one of the global media partners of Social Media Week, will participate in this panel and provide facilities for events on this last day of Social Media Week.
See the entire schedule for Social Media Week Bogotá at bogota.socialmediaweek.org. All in all, it looks like a great week. Next week registration will open, so please check back then. And please follow their Twitter and Facebook accounts to stay updated on this important international event in Bogotá.
Ben Scheim is vice president of partnerships and communications for Crowdcentric and a director of Social Media Week. Please reach out to him if you are interested in discussing brand partnerships or sponsorships for Social Media Week. He can be reached at ben@crowdcentric.net.
Along with Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Bogota complete a trifecta of Latin American cities featured in this edition of Social Media Week, all lead by Andres Barreto and the Socialatom team. City leads for Mexico City are Antonio Salgado Leiner and Fernando Soto, and Rafael Bayona is leading the charge in Bogotá.
About Social Media Week’s involvement in this fertile region of ideas and people, Andres has this to say: “We are very excited to see this event happen in Latin America, as not only brands, but also educational institutions, media outlets, and entrepreneurs come together to share best practices that open up a wave of opportunities for the region as a whole.”
There are still ways to participate in Social Media Week in each of these cities beyond attending events, so make sure to check out the Mexico City and Bogotá pages to learn more, or go here to get involved: Mexico City / Bogota.
There are many more announcements to come in the weeks ahead, so keep checking back to socialmediaweek.org to learn more!
As you all know Social Media Week is just under four weeks away and we’re incredibly excited to see the depth and diversity of each cities program of events–and best yet, there are still many opportunities for you and your brand to get involved.
The teams in LA, Milan, Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Mexico City are pulling together a global program consisting of more than 200 events, covering industry sectors such as politics, publishing, film, education, music and also topics such as the rise location based services, social media monitoring and metrics and social graph optimization.
This year the conference is supported by some of the world’s largest media companies, including the New York Times, The Financial Times, Fox Latin-America and El Tiempo. Also, we are delighted to be working with the US State Department on a very unique event that will be live streamed around the world, which aims to celebrate US technology innovation.
To fulfill our goal, which is to connect people globally around emerging trends in social and mobile media, we are looking to provide a number of unique services, which we are looking for brands to support. If your brand or perhaps one of your clients is interested in supporting any of the following initiatives, we would love to hear from you:
- Live streaming: We have secured a company to be announced soon as our global streaming partner, but we are looking for a brand to be the global sponsor of our live streamed events, which will be watched by more than 50,000 people in 80 different countries.
- Location Services: We are looking to launch a real-time application that allows visitors to our site to see who is checking in to Social Media Week events, where they are on a map and what the primary hot spots in any given city are. We are looking for a brand to support this application.
- WiFi & Mobile Connectivity: Providing WiFi is always a challenge, especially given the distributed nature of the conference. We would love to be able to provide mobile hotspots at multiple venues throughout the participating cities.
- Real-time Conversation: With literally thousands participating to help make Social Media Week a success, the level of real-time communication and collaboration is incredible. We will be building out an solution that aggregates everything into one application and delivers the real-time feed in a compelling and visually interesting way. This application could be branded by one of your organization or one you know.
- Social Scheduling: Over the coming weeks, tens of thousands of people will be interacting with our social scheduling tool as they plan their personal program. The scheduling tools, run by our partner SCHED*, receive a huge level of traffic and can be branded in a number of different ways. We are also considering launching a iPhone version of the schedule, which can also be branded.
- Translation: Social Media Week will be hosted in Italian, English and Spanish languages. We are building out a number of tools to help share as much of the content as possible in as many languages as possible. We would love to do more and finding a way to align a brand with this opportunity would be terrific.
As you can see we have some amazing ways for brands to play a vital role in helping to support Social Media Week’s mission of connecting people globally around emerging trends in social and mobile media.
If your brand or one you know might be interested in discussing any of these opportunities, or any of our other partnership packages, please don’t hesitate to let us know. You can get involved with Social Media Week on a global level by going here, or by contacting me, Ben Scheim, at ben@crowdcentric.net!
You’ve waited for it and now and here it is: starting this week, schedules for Social Media Week this September 20-24 will be announced on SocialMediaWeek.org for each of the five participating cities.
In total, we’re anticipating over that the conference will play host to over 200 individual events over the course of the week and our partners in LA, Bogotá, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Milan promise to bring their own unique culture and flavor to the SMW lineup–so stay tuned as schedules are released to learn more from each of our city organizers right here on the global event blog.
And of course, we hope that hearing about all of this activity will make you want to get involved with Social Media Week. There are many ways to do so beyond attending events, and to find out how to do so on a global level, please go here.
For specific involvement in each of the five cities, follow the links below:
If you are a member of the press and would like to learn more about Social Media Week or request a press interview with sponsors, partners, speakers and/or advisory board members, please contact Ben Scheim (me) at ben@crowdcentric.net.
We’re very excited about Social Media Week this September and we hope you are as well–so check back over this week to find out what’s happening near you!
Well, we promised an update was soon to come and here it is now: Crowdcentric–parent company of Social Media Week–is ecstatic to announce full details for the second 2010 Social Media Week conference, to be held in five cities over the week of September 20th – 24th, 2010.
These five new cities of Social Media Week are (drum roll, please)…
Bogotá
Buenos Aires
Los Angeles
Mexico City
Milan
Global sponsors and partners for the event will be announced in the coming weeks, but we are also pleased to announce that Meebo is once again returning as a global sponsor following its sponsorship of Social Media Week last February.
The city partners running each region’s conference have been carefully selected based on the depth of their experience, the strength of their network, and the extent to which they contribute to their local business community.
Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City, are not only important as the first Latin American cities to take part in Social Media Week, but also as representives of some of the key digital centers of one of the world’s most rapidly expanding cultural communities. Milan is significant as the tech centerpoint of Italy, a country currently featuring the world’s largest Facebook reach and second largest social networking reach. And, LA, the America’s second largest city, represents along with New York the most important media hub in the US.
City organizers for Milan, Marco Montemagno and Marco Antonio Masieri, say, “In Italy, the use of social and mobile media is growing at a incredible pace, and consumers and industry alike are beginning to recognize the significance in the way that consumers, brands and organizations communicate. Taking part in Social Media Week allows us to bring together industry at a local level, while also being able to share with a global audience the creativity and innovation that’s happening throughout Italy.”
Other city partners include Erick Brownstein, Media 3.0, for Los Angeles; and in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Bogotá, efforts will be led by a team at Socialatom headed by Andres Barreto. Leaders for each of these cities are Maria Del Carmen Lara-Dillon in Buenos Aires; Jorge Arredondo and Fernando Soto in Mexico City; and Juan David Vargas and Rafael Bayona in Bogotá.
Event schedules will go live for each location at the end of August, but please check out each city page to learn more.
Social Media Week is made possible through its framework of globally-connected organizations and individuals who are responsible for putting on the bulk of events and activities throughout the week. With these efforts, Social Media Week is able to move beyond the standard conference model and into a new realm of event experiences.
If you would like to get involved as a city partner, event organizer, volunteer or attendee, or if you have space you would like to provide for events, please visit us at socialmediaweek.org/gettinginvolved.
If you are a brand looking to reach a global audience of hypersocial influencers, please contact Ben Scheim at +1-347-224-3996 or by email at ben@crowdcentric.net for a copy of the sponsorship prospectus and to learn more.
During the second week of July, Bogota became a trending topic in social media in Colombia; and it was not something that happened by chance. A whole movement was set in order to create a different view of the city.
