Social Media Week

Drop.io

Five Questions for Soraya Darabi of drop.io’s PressLift

Soraya Darabi claims she’s a would-be harmonica player on Twitter, and it’s easy to see why she doesn’t have time to take that show on the road. She’s busy preparing PressLift for its Social Media Week debut, while also contributing to Social Media Week’s board, to name a couple of her latest commitments. Fortunately for all of us, she took the time to serve as the guinea pig in the SMW blog’s interview series; we’ll have features with more social media movers coming up.

sraya darabi

Social Media Week: What are you most looking forward to during Social Media Week?

Soraya Darabi: Apart from the panel drop.io is hosting, the PressLift event, and an event I’m hosting with Caroline McCarthy, Alli Mooney and Emily Gannett called “Digital Divas,” to honor women in technology, I’m looking forward to the New York Times panels, the Charitini /Think Social non-for-profit panel and the special New York Tech Meetup hosted by Scott Heiferman of Meetup.

How is PressLift going to contribute to SMW?

PressLift is in open-beta now, but we will officially launch during Social Media Week.  Both Steve Greenwood and I are on the Social Media Week advisory board and PressLift is an official communications partner of SMW.  Plus, drop.io is a partnered organization.  Clearly, we’re involved and looking forward to the events and festivities, and spreading the word about them as best possible.

You recently moved from one of the most established brands in traditional media to a relatively new startup where you’re launching a new product. How does the experience compare?

SD: Comparing The New York Times to drop.io is not easy.  I loved my job at The Times and the thrill of working for a celebrated, around-the-clock news and information organization was unparalleled.

What’s great about drop.io is that even though it’s a Time magazine “Top 50″ Web site with millions of users, the company truly has that fun and energetic start up vibe.  I work directly with a team of 14 brilliant technology enthusiasts.

If you’re on a desert island and your phone can only tap into enough bandwidth to download a single mobile application, what would you choose?

Am I alone on this island? If not, and there are a few tiki hot spots, then I’d say foursquare.  But if alone, my answer is the Classics app.   I hope my mobile device is the Apple tablet.

If you could pick any person living or dead to be the patron saint of social media, who would you choose and why?

This question is making me laugh.  I don’t know… Tom from MySpace? With over 270 million friends he most definitely deserves the honor.

-Interview by David Berkowitz, Sr. Director of Emerging Media & Innovation at 360i

Greetings from Social Media Week Global HQ and Happy New Year!

We wanted to take this opportunity to provide an overview as to what’s happening in the build up to Social Media Week 2010.

By now, you probably know that on Feb 1st, Social Media Week will launch simultaneously in six cities, across five countries and three continents, hosting the first cross-collaboration conference of its kind (at least that we’ve heard of).  If you didn’t know about it, or if you knew but it still doesn’t make sense, you can learn more here.

Helping us to produce the conference are literally hundreds of people, who are heavily involved in the design, planning and execution of over one hundred events in six cities, including London, Berlin, New York, Toronto, San Franciso and São Paulo.

The roles these individuals perform vary and include our global advisors, lead city organizers, city advisors and planning committee members.  Without their passion, energy and enthusiasm, this initiative would be simply be impossible to pull off.

We are also privileged to be working with some of the world’s most innovative and exciting brands who have come on board as sponsors, event partners and collaborators. Included in this list is our Headline Sponsor Meebo Inc, and our Global Gold Sponsor Pepsico.

In addition to their support, we are also incredibly fortunate to have Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and The New York Times supporting us as media partners and in New York we have also secured MOMA, Time Inc, Razorfish, Deep Focus, Wired, IDEO, Drop.io, PressLift, SoundCtrl, Colaboratie Mutopo, and 360i as event and communication partners.

Thanks to these partners and sponsors, we are able to host many of the events for free, allowing us to fulfill our goal of keeping Social Media Week open, inclusive and accessible for as many people as possible.

Now, you may be asking “where’s the schedule of events?”, or “when can we actually register or RSVP for these amazing events you keep talking about?”.  Both valid questions of course and fear not schedules and RSVP opportunities are forthcoming!

As is the nature of Social Media Week, the program comes together organically and the schedule events builds over time as each city and each organizer within each city adds their events to the overall program.  Also, unlike traditional conferences where you pay for a single conference pass, attendees of Social Media Week are able to pick and choose events in a more à la carte fashion, selecting opportunities that are more specific and relevant to them.

We promise as events are added to the program, we will let you know and if you keep an eye on @socialmediaweek (Global), or @smwldn (London), @smwbln (Berlin), @smwsp (Sao Paulo), @smwnyc (New York) and @smwto (Toronto) you will receive updates in a more timely fashion.

That’s it for now.  More, big juicy announcements to follow.  Thanks for your interest, particiaption and support.

Social Media Week 2010 is going to be huge!

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