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

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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 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

Localizing Social Experiences

Friday, November 18th, 2011

When it comes to designing social experiences, one must take into account many factors – most importantly your consumer. Who are they? What are they doing? And, critical to this post, where are they? We have the opportunity to work with some of the largest brands in the world, and, as Uncle Ben almost said, with great size comes great scale. Designers of these social experiences need to build programs that exist on multiple platforms and devices, based on location and demographic, and a deep analysis of the consumer and their digital habits is required for the program itself to be a success.

When it comes to these local experiences, building and deploying an application or social microsite should be focused on the platforms that are most effective. For example:

When working with clients with a strong presence in Japan or China, Mixi and Ren Ren, respectively, need to be involved in the program build from the very beginning, as the functionality and mechanics of each platform vary and must be accounted for.
If the brand is popular in Brazil, then Orkut (60% Brazilian) and the brand’s .br site should be involved in the build.
When working in Canada, should the program be localized for Quebec and have a French language option (the Régie requires this if the program is a promotion)? Or do you build out a completely separate experience because the quebecoise don’t really like the whole “translation” thing; they’re a distinct people with their own culture and deserve their own separate experience, which must be accounted for.

However, when a campaign is global, and encompasses many nations and cultures, then how do we localize that experience so that it feels natural across each instance? Now we must understand business capabilities and restrictions.

For some clients, localizing an experience simply means translation of copy and creative within an experience and displaying the appropriate version to the appropriate user based on that user’s Facebook language settings. For others, we include language toggle options for the user, who may have a preference different than their default Facebook language settings, or we’ll verify via IP (which is less reliable).

Some clients have localized social content teams, whom we leverage when building out experiences that must be custom localized on a market-to-market basis. This creates added flexibility and requires a much more dynamic build to accommodate for multiple CMS back-end administration permissions and functionality. For retailers and service providers, for example, messaging and functionality may have to change based on region because shipping or service may not be available in all areas, but the brand will still want to message those folks for added awareness and viral spread through the Graph.

There are many ways to handle localization, but the good news is that we don’t have to guess at our solutions. In every case, the answer becomes apparent after we do a deep analysis of our client’s business requirements, business objectives, operational capabilities, and their consumer preferences.

Jed Singer is a contributor for the Social Media Week Global Editorial Team based in New York City, and is an Engagement Associate at Stuzo | Dachis Group.

Tags: facebook, global, localization, mixi, Orkut, ren ren, social experiences
Posted in Business, Media & Communications

Nokia: Creating Goodwill, Connecting People Globally & Having Fun

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Leading off today is the first of a few posts that recap some of the contributions of the major partners of Social Media Week September 2011. Today’s focus is on Social Media Week Global Headline Sponsor Nokia, who helped power the conference globally and across many of our markets.

Working with Nokia we collectively agreed that their participation in Social Media Week needed to focus on creating goodwill, providing value for our attendees and on making the experience better, richer and more fun. This video is a really tremendous example of how this was achieved:

#NOKIACONNECTS RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

Through its “Random Acts of Kindness” efforts, Nokia was able to provide some very cool incentives for attendees across six of the SMW cities, from phones to get-well kits to customized drawings of user tweets.

Possibly most cool of these all was the Nokia Gift Machine in Glasgow–featured here on Engadget–that dispensed all kinds of goodies (including N8 phones!) to people who checked-in to the machine via Foursquare.

Awesome as the Random Acts of Kindness were, Nokia also contributed to the conference in three additionally significant ways:

SMW RealTime: Powered by#NokiaConnects and focused on bringing people together around the world
Social Media Week Live: Making SMW content available globally for as many people as possible
SMW Local: Participation in the content and conversation in multiple cities throughout the week

SMW REALTIME APP

Perhaps the most significant of these efforts was Nokia’s collaboration with Social Media Week on the development of the SMW RealTime app (at socialmediaweek.org/realtime) that powered the conference, providing attendees with a way to track their schedule, follow specific sessions, discover new events and follow the real-time conversation of other participants in all 12 cities and around the globe–72,000 tweets and 6,000 Foursquare check-ins worldwide. The app also provided a great way for event organizers in all 12 cities to project real-time data about their event on large screens in both a global and local view.

SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK LIVE

Additionally, Nokia made it possible for people around the world to catch SMW events that they weren’t able to attend in person by powering Social Media Week Live, the streaming platform through SMW partner Livestream.com. With over 180 SMW events streamed live and 65,000 unique streams totally 2.2 million viewer minutes, this was a significant contribution to the SMW experience this September.

SMW LOCAL

Lastly, as a truly global organization Nokia was able to contribute to content and conversation on a significant level, with involvement in nearly 20 events across six cities, including local sponsorship of the conferences in Berlin, Beirut and Milan. A sampling of some the highlights are included below–click on the event titles to watch archived videos of the sessions:

GLASGOW:
“Nokia & CNN at SMW Glasgow: Social Media and The Evolution of Breaking News”
Nokia Global Director of Digital and Social Media Craig Hepburn (@CraigHepburn) joined this discussion with Peter Bale of CNN to discuss how social media has impacted Nokia and how global brands are responding to digital trends.

CHICAGO:
“Always On, Always Connected, Always Local”
Adam Mirabella (@AdamMirabella), Global Director of Digital Marketing at Nokia, joined this panel to highlight the social conversations taking place on digital and mobile tech- and its impact on consumers and their purchases.

BERLIN:
“Keynote: Gabe Zichermann on Gamification, hosted by Nokia”
Looking at the new arena of gamification and its purpose in fund-raising, enjoyment enhancement and location-based services. Hosted by Nokia, this session brought in Gabe Zichermann of the Gamification Summit and Workshops with Wooga’s Sina Kamala Kaufmann and Willempje Vrins.

“Location and Social Space, hosted by Nokia”
Sylvain Grande of Nokia Maps and Digital Marketing Manager Alex Oberberg (@AlexOberberg) reviewed location-based services, using Nokia’s Checkin Reward Campaign as a case study.

LOS ANGELES:
“The Mobile Marketing Revolution- Gimmick or Here to Stay?”
Global Director of Digital Marketing of Nokia, Adam Mirabella participated in this panel covering mobile marketing. From QR codes to ROI, this session presented examples that have worked and lessons that the community can learn from. You can follow Adam on Twitter at @AdamMirabella.

MILAN
“Hunt the Icons”, a scavenger hunt sponsored by Nokia
A treasure hunt in the center of Milan during the final day of the festival, where teams were given a Nokia N8 and had to interpret the clues scattered throughout Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, reach different goals and to check in before the others to win a Nokia 500 phone.

BEIRUT
“When Nokia Engages with the Audience: Success Stories”
Creative firm 1000Heads joined Tania Retief, Social Media Communications Manager at Nokia, and Nokia’s Digital Marketing Manager, Antoine Naaman (@_Ant1_), to highlight some of their favorite consumer collaboration stories and how they involve you, the customer, in the process.

I am really happy to make this happen in Berlin: so far, one of my best professional experiences at Nokia. Pino Bonetti, Ovi by Nokia Blog Editor in Chief

—-

As you can see, Nokia’s contributions to the week–from apps, to ideas, to just helping people–were huge and went a long way toward making the week the success that it was. We leave you with this video from Irkafirka, who worked with Nokia to contribute random acts of kindness by illustrating user tweets for them.

Tags: "random acts of kindness", global, nokia, RealTime, smw11, social media, social media week, Social Media Week Live
Posted in Featured, global, Partner Profiles

Social Media Analysis From Day 5 of SMW

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Hello for what is one of the last times you will hear from me this year. Sheldon from Sysomos here with a look back the final day of Social Media Week September. Apologies for not having this up yesterday, but something came up that prevented me from posting this. That said, I have some analysis and a look at few conversations that took place on day five of Social Media Week.

Using Sysomos Heartbeat I was bale to plunge into all the social media activity happening throughout the globe in relation to Social Media Week. I started the final day as I have every other day this week, by looking at mentions for “Social Media Week” and the hashtag “SMW” for a general overview on Friday’s activity. On the final day of Social Media Week I was able to find 55 YouTube videos, 129 forum postings, 41 online news articles, 139 blog posts and 3,607 tweets.

I then decided to see where most of the talk I was seeing about Social Media Week was coming from. This lead me to discover something interesting. In the chart of the top four countries mentioning Social Media Week, the country with the most amount of mentions was one that wasn’t even home to one of our host cities. It turns out that people in Indonesia were tuned in through social media to what was going on around the world and accounted for 38% of all Social Media Week talk on Friday. The other three top countries was the USA (16%), the UK (11%) and Canada (7%).

I then started to dig into the conversations happening in our host cities. I started my exploration of the final day in Chicago. As we’ve seen in most of host cities throughout the week, there has been one big day where the talk of social media and it’s use for business seems to take president. That day seems to be Friday in Chicago. A look at the buzzgraph for talk coming from Chicago revealed that business “advice” for “brands” seemed to be a big topic. I can also see that there were talks being given by some great leaders in business, including “WOMMA” (Word Of Mouth Marketing Association) and “Christine” “Cea” of “Unilever.”

I then jetted down to Columbia and checked in on what people were talking about in Bogota. It seems down here there was business advice being shared, but of a somewhat different nature. While the talk in Chicago seemed to point towards big businesses, down in Bogota there was a lot of talk about entrepreneurship. Judging just by the key conversations I was bale to pull up, there was a well received talk on tips for entrepreneurs given by @brian_wong.

Meanwhile, in Moscow there seemed to be an interesting session talking about social media and art. The event featured two speakers who represented art galleries, such as The Tate, and a representative from the Google Art Project. It seems that the talk focused around how social media has given art lovers a chance to connect and support the community. In one of the quotes from the key conversations I found, we can see that The Tate highly relies on social media to help them with donations to continue to run.

Over in Rio Dr Janeiro i pulled up a buzzgraph that shows most of the conversation taking place there on Friday seemed to be about all teh events that were going on. We can see that right in the center of the buzzgraph we can see the word “evento” which means event in Portuguese. From there, I’m not 100% sure what all the events were actually about, but there some interesting words that are stemming from our center word. Words such as “brinca” (jokes), “torce” (twists), “amadureceu” (matured), “mediadora” (mediator) and possibly the strangest of all “mobster.” I’d be most interested to know what the talk about mobsters was about.

My final stop for the day was in Los Angeles. A lot of the talk in LA was focused around one delicious sounding event. There seemed to be a lot of talk around an event known as #techmunch. From what I can gather, the event seemed to focus on tech people and food. It sounds like an event I would have been most interested in.

That’s most of the interesting action that I was able to find about our final day of Social Media Week. The following is the activity levels that I found about each of 12 host cities around the world on Friday:

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

That’s it for my quick look back at the final day of Social Media Week. I hope you all enjoyed these little reports through out the week. This isn’t the last you’ll hear from me though. I’ll be back at this one more time next week with a big overall wrap-up of the entire week, including stats and some interesting facts and conversations. Keep you eye out for that early in the week.

I hope everyone had a enjoyable Social Media Week, because I had fun watching it all happen through Sysomos.

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

Social Media Analysis From Day 4 of SMW

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Hello again social media aficionados. This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again with a snap shot of what’s been happening around the globe for Social Media Week. Today is technically the actual last day of Social Media Week, but today I’m going to be looking at yesterday, the fourth day. Using Sysomos Heartbeat I kept an eye on what was being said through social media in our 12 host cities around the world.

I’ll start this post as I’ve started all the previous ones, with a look at Social Media Week in general. Yesterday I captured 52 YouTube videos, 48 forum postings, 53 online news articles, 262 blog posts and 4,012 tweets mentioning “Social Media Week” or the hashtag “SMW.”

I then started to look into the conversations that were happening in each of our host cities. Today I started São Paulo, Brazil. I looked at a buzzgraph of the conversation and found that there seemed to be some talk of using social media for business purposes in São Paulo yesterday. We can see this from the connection of the words “empresa” (business), “promoção” (promotion) and “consumidores” (consumers). Some of the words that we see connected talk about how businesses can or should be using social media. These are words like “engajamento” (engagement), “pessoal” (personal) and “iPhone.”

Next, I went over to Glasgow in Scotland. They too seemed to have a big conversation going on about social media and business. In Glasgow there appears to be a lot of talk about the ROI that one can derive from social media. There seems to be the take that ROI comes from the relationships comanies can have with consumers. The model that seems to have come from the talk says that a good social connection will lead to financial ROI.

Over in Milan, the social media for business talk continued. However, in Milan the conversation seemed to be a bit different. It looks like in Italy yesterday they were talking about starting up new businesses using social media. We can see there was talk about “collaborative” “production” and “creation” as well as the uses of “crowdsourcing” and “crowdfunding.”

I then went over to Beirut in Lebanon and found something very interesting. The buzzgraph shows us the connection between words and in the buzzgraph below we can see a strong connection from two main sources. The first one is from links being shared through Twitter as we can see their URL shortner “t.co” in the middle and the second one is the word “mony.” When I first looked at this, I thought that “mony” might have been a word in another language that I would need to translate, but then I dug a bit deeper to see where the word was coming from. It turns out that “mony” is actually Twitter user @mony_. That means that yesterday she tweeted enough to be a main connection for the Social Media Week talk in Beirut.

Lastly, I took a look what was going on in my home country of Canada and the Social Media Week talk coming from Vancounver. I’m not 100% on what all the sessions happening in Vancouver yesterday were, but there seemed to be a good amount of discusion around drinking and social media as you can see from the key conversations just below:

To end off my look at yesterday, the following is the activity levels in social media about and from each of our 12 Social Media Week cities.

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

That’s all from me for today. I’ll be back again tomorrow with a look at how the last day of Social Media Week played out.

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

Social Media Analysis From Day 3 of SMW

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Hello again social media enthusiasts! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back once again to give you a quick sneak peak at some Social Media Week happenings from around the globe. We’re now over half way through the week, but this post will be looking back at yesterday, day three of Social Media Week. Using Sysomos Heartbeat I’m going to take a quick look at some of the conversations happening in our host cities yesterday.

Again, I’m going to start with a quick look at what general Social Media Week activity looked like yesterday. Searching for the term “Social Media Week” and the hashtag “SMW” I was able to find 65 YouTube videos, 47 forum postings, 64 online news articles, 162 blog posts and 4,173 tweets yesterday.

Today I thought I’d take a look at something interesting and different around the general Social Media Week talk. Using our entities tool, I was able to pull out entities (meaning nouns, proper names, places, etc) from all the combined Social Media Week talk. In here, we can see a bunch of the most talked about entities. These include most of our host cities, some event speakers from around the globe, some of the Social Media Week sponsors and some of the networks being focused on like Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

I then took a look into some of the conversations happening in individual cities. I started in Berlin today. The talk here seems most interesting. While I’m not going to write out a full translation from German to English, it seems like there was a lot of talk about how social media and the general public can form together and where talk using social media goes public unlike in past forms of communication.

Next, I jumped over to Los Angeles. Again I found some interesting conversations happening here. In Los Angeles there seemed to be some prevalent conversation happening about how to differentiate effective use of social media from just creating a bunch of noise. Some of the conversation touched on the art of telling stories to the public via social media because it’s easier for the public to connect to stories than just messaging. The second quote here touches on the ideas of good content through social media being used as a marketing tool.

My next stop was in South America to see what was happening in Buenos Aries. While it didn’t seem that one conversation or event seemed to be dominating the conversation down there, there did appear to be a number of really interesting topics being discussed. In Buenos Aries it seems that there were discussions happening about virtual worlds, the use of social media in the medical field, how students use social media and a topic near and dear to me; social media monitoring.

Next, I decided that because yesterday marked the half way mark of Social Media Week I would do something a little fun. Because in all of our cities Twitter always seems to be the previlant form of Social Media Week communication, I thought it would be interesting to see who tweeted the most about the event in their city. The following is a list of the top tweeters from each of our 12 host cities over the first three days (not including the official Social Media Week Twitter accounts):

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

Finally, to end off today’s post here’s some stats of the activity that was happening in each of our host cities yesterday:

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

That’s all for my half way through Social Media Week post. I’ll be back again tomorrow to look at how day four of Social Media Week played out.

I hope you’re all enjoying reading these posts as much as I’m enjoying putting them together. Leave me a comment with any thoughts on what you saw here today or what you’d like to see in the next couple of days.

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

In London tonight, all the police cells are full

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

“In London tonight, all the police cells are full”

BBC TV News

It’s the fourth consecutive night of rioting and there are an unprecedented 16,000 officers on the capital’s streets.

Last night and today law abiding Londoners reacted in the way they know best – with humour.

…and here’s the picture:

The hashtag #LondonRiots starts reporting the ‘news’ that London Zoo had been looted and there’s a tiger loose on genteel North London’s Primrose Hill.

Soon, there’s another rumour of another animal on the loose:

Dalston, east London, comes under attack and police can’t respond. Local shop owners defend themselves:

Groups set cars on fire in Camden Town on the first night of breakthrough comedian James Mullinger’s new show, leaving Mullinger to react by stretching irony to its limits:

Those watching from home start to realize that what they’re seeing is brought to them by incredibly brave reporters:

And this viewer thinks it’s time that their names are adjusted to recognize their bravery:

The night wears on and the rioters’ endurance exceeds that of the concerned citizens, who are now thinking about work tomorrow:

The sun rises. A new day. But with the police overwhelmed yesterday, people’s attention naturally turns to what will happen tonight. Can nothing be done?

Rumors spread about riots being planned in other areas of the country.

Shopkeepers have to take a difficult decision. In Manchester, a Subway store owner faces up to reality:

(photo (c): @xsophmayx)

Some stay open, stay defiant.

Blogs are quickly set up to identify – and shame – the looters.

And as law abiding citizens (and BBC reporters) get ready for another night, anxious parents from all over the world are calling to check everyone’s okay:

There have been terrible scenes and feeble justifications for criminal behavior. One man was shot dead. Families have been made homeless. Small and large business have been burnt to the ground.

But all today, ordinary people rallied round the hashtag #riotcleanup with brooms, plastic bags and smiles. There are Twitpics circulating off tables laid neatly with tea and home-baked cakes as refreshments for police officers with some using their riot shields to carry tea out to their colleagues.

Sometimes there seems little to reason to laugh at any of this. But somehow, we’ll find a way to clean house.

(photo: @chris_stark)

If you’ve seen something that made you laugh, please send it to me and I’ll repost: @verbid or yowesty@verbalidentity.co.uk

But wherever you are, be safe out there.

Chris West is on Twitter @verbID. He is a contributor to the Social Media Week Global Editorial Team, based in London, and he is the Main Voice at www.verbalidentity.co.uk He worked for 20 years as an award-winning copywriter in the world’s best ad agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi, BBH, RKCR, Leags Delaney and a little start up called Mother. For the last ten years he ran a project-based ad agency with clients including Sky, Selfridges, Unilever, Ocado, Christie’s, EMAP, Harry Winston and Tourneau. He also writes for the Sunday Times and is a Contributing Editor at the UK’s leading luxury magazine, Lusso.

Interested in joining the Social Media Week Global Editorial Team? Apply here!

Tags: cleanup, global, humor, london, looters, News, police, riots, technology, twitter
Posted in Art & Culture, Business, Media & Communications, Coverage