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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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:

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!

Social Media Week has reached an important milestone today for the September 19-23 conference, as we are proud now to reveal the first wave of confirmed events taking part in this simultaneous worldwide event.

This September’s event–powered by global headline sponsor Nokia–is the largest yet, taking place in twelve cities on four continents.

“Social Media Week is more than an event, it’s 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” says Craig Hepburn, Global Director, Social Media, Nokia

Learn how to get involved and take part in the global dialogue this September:

• Join The Community
• See What’s Happening
• Submit An Event
• Spark the Conversation
• Share Share Share!

Join The Community

Become a part of community by joining the Social Media Week network–go to socialmediaweek.org and sign up for a Social Media Week account. Signing up is an important step because it will allow you to:

a) Submit an SMW event
b) Save interesting events on the schedule to your personal “Favorites” list
c) Register to attend events when registration opens worldwide September 6 (it’s not open yet, sorry!)
d) Receive weekly updates from us on progress worldwide to make sure you know what’s going on and don’t miss any key updates

Signing up for an account is easy–just visit socialmediaweek.org and click “Login/Register” in the upper right hand corner. And if your name is already in the upper right hand corner, it means you’ve already signed up!

See What’s Happening

It’s still early and only the first wave of events have been made public today, but already there are a lot of great ideas confirmed for September and we’re excited to share them with you.

To see the entire global schedule for Social Media Week this September, go to socialmediaweek.org and click the “Schedule” button to see what’s confirmed so far, or else go to http://socialmediaweek.org/schedule/. To see city-specific lists, choose your preferred location from the drop down menu.

Registration to attend events begins on September 6, but as stated above, for now you can choose events you are interested in and “Save to Favorites”

Here’s a handful of our favorites so far from the early confirmations:

Social Buzz Awards (SMW Glasgow)

Social Buzz Awards are launching to celebrate and reward the best in social media communications in the UK and will recognise the individuals, companies and organisations who are transforming the use of online to communicate with people in new and innovative ways. The judging is set to take place in Glasgow as part of Social Media Week Glasgow. The list of judges includes well known names from Google, Tesco, and BBC.

Improvised Innovation: The Second City and The Chicago Tribune (SMW Chicago)

A 150 plus year old powerhouse newspaper and a 50 plus year old legendary comedy institution wouldn’t seem to have much in common, but a closer look at the two companies and their unique partnership provide a fascinating look at how the landscape of new media has fostered unprecedented collaborations and innovation.

Berlin Election: Who won the social media election? (SMW Berlin)

The Berlin city-state elections will be held on September 18. On September 19 Social Media Week will assemble a panel of experts to analyze the impact of social media on the vote. Did any issues arise via social media? Did any candidate use it well, or badly? Was it an influence at all, and if not, why not? What does the pattern of social media use in the Berlin election tell us about the forthcoming federal election in 2012? Supported by Projekt Zukunft.

Travelling Inside of Innovation (SMW Milan)

A whole train (11 couches, 600 people) will go from Rome to Milan as a traveling “innovation lab”, a unique experience at 300 km per hour. Attendees will have a chance to meet experts, investors and digital media with the Speed Business formula (15  min turnover). Upon arriving at the Press Conference in the Royal Room at the Central Station in Milan and the first Italian Digital Mission. Sponsored by Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane (national railway company). See the Milan team’s last SMW train voyage here.

Tim Wright of Twintangibles and city partner lead for Glasgow said, “We are getting really excited about what is happening for Social Media Week in Glasgow because already we seem to be well on course to hit one of our key targets – diversity. We want Glasgow to demonstrate the breadth of impact social media and mobile communications is having through diversity of topic, venue, participants, hosts and event types and we are getting bowled over on every one of those fronts. We will have tweetups, flashmobs, workshops, seminars and speaker-led events to really cover the map.”

Submit An Event

Join Google, Ford, BBC, Financial Times, and more to get involved and position your organization at the center of the conversations impacting your industry. Give your organization the opportunity to facilitate dialogue around a pressing theme or topic by hosting an event in your city.

If you’re looking for inspiration on planning your event, go here and here to get some ideas from us on how to put together something new and fresh and outside of the traditional event framework.

Spark The Conversation

The power of Social Media Week is driven by the way you (the SMW community) participates with your ideas, knowledge and creativity. Help to shape the conversation and define the experience in your city by nominating yourself or someone else as a speaker.

How else can you get involved? As an open and collaborative platform, Social Media Week provides many other ways to join the dialogue by providing in-kind service, sponsoring events, joining the editorial team, or volunteering to help out local city organizers.

Visit the global Get Involved to learn more.

Share Share Share!

We would love it if you can continue spreading the word to help galvanize your local Social Media Week community to take part and get involved today. Use the links at the top of this post to share with your communities on Facebook and Twitter!

——

Thanks for again for your interest and support. The next major milestone takes place September 6, when people around the world will be able to start registering for events. Look for more updates on this milestone in the weeks to come.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook for real-time updates.

A good example of a brand that has used the Social Media Week platform in a variety of ways is global advertising giant JWT. When we began conversations with them prior to the February 2010 conference in New York, they knew that they wanted to take part and that they had a) interesting product, b) talented staff and c) a great space to hold events. After a consultation with us, they decided to organize an event at their offices in New York on crowdsourcing and make their space available to host another event that needed a home.

Both events were tremendously successful, drawing sellout crowds and putting spotlight on JWT in New York as a leader in its industry. In 2011, they decided that they wanted all the good from 2010 and more, and visibility not just for New York but for their teams around the globe. We were able to offer them the opportunity to serve as a global sponsor [link], including hosting the Business, Media & Communications Content Hub of SMW New York and participation by JWT teams in Toronto, London and Sao Paulo with hosted events at their spaces and thought leaders on panels. What will they do in 2012? Can’t wait to find out.

What can Social Media Week do for YOUR brand? Contact one of the Social Media Week teams to learn how you can use the SMW platform to drive exposure for you and your organization globally or locally around the world. Go here to learn more and Get Involved in Social Media Week in your city, or contact Ben Scheim by email at ben@crowdcentric.net for more information.

Videos from the Business, Media & Communications Content Hub of SMW New York:

We are pleased to announce that MWW Group is joining The Social Media Week Global Editorial Team as a company contributor.  Company contributors will contribute content from various individuals within a company and serve as an opportunity to hear from a diverse range of views from a given space.  MWW Group posts will be posted once every Wednesday so be sure to look out for their content!

About MWW Group

MWW Group is a top ten, global, independent public relations firm known for its results-driven approach to public relations. Passionate, driven, strategic, highly experienced professionals with an entrepreneurial attitude, flawless execution and unparalleled commitment to client service.

Dialogue Digital is MWW Group’s award-winning digital media practice that is recognized for its industry leading campaigns and strategic expertise in digital, social and emerging media. In our current age of real-time, direct communication, in which brands are defined by communities of enthusiasts, voices of detractors, and influential voices both on and offline, Dialogue Digital believes in the power of compelling content, flexibility, great design and the art of continuous measurement.

In the past year, MWW Group was named both “Midsize Agency of the Year” and “Strategic PR Agency of the Year” by The Holmes Report and “Digital Firm of the Year” and “Digital Team of the Year” by PR News.  For more information visit www.mww.com and follow MWW Group on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

1. Attend a World Refugee Day event. This week, Local, national, and international groups are coordinating events all around the world to connect communities with their new refugee members. By using MeetUp Everywhere, all the local chapters can add their events to the site, and the global movement is represented in the map visual. Attend an event or add one of your own.

2. Take Action Locally and Get Points. Welcoming America is a grassroots movement of individuals who help refugees adjust to their new life in the U.S. They just launched a new tool called “Friends of Welcoming,” By taking the actions they list and helping refugees and organizing in your own community, you can get points, badges and prize money.

3. Compete Online. The Enough Project’s Darfur Dream Team launched their Summer Challenge today. They will be providing actions – from watching videos to volunteering – all summer long and rewarding those who participate with prizes, like Don Cheadle and John Prendergast’s book Enough Moment.

4. Look at Infographics. I love when causes can get creative with data visualization. Check out what UNHCR did with their most recent refugee report and Google Fusion Tables, another free tool from Google.

5. Text to Donate: There are three great ways you can help three great causes, and they are all doing it differently. Mapendo International goes into conflict areas and refugee camps to help those that have fallen through the cracks. They collect $5 donations by text messages of RESCUE to 90999, and 100 text messages can rescue a person.

6. Give Time. Refugees International has a similar mission to Mapendo’s, but they are asking you to donate your time instead. Visit their page on Causes and each advertisement you look at will generate 10 cents for their efforts.

7.  Watch a Film. Snagfilms offers documentaries for free online. Check out the award winner film The Last Survivor, which follows refugees from Darfur, Congo, Rwanda, and the Holocaust as they rebuild their lives.

8. Remember the Past. Many times since the Holocaust we have heard the word “Never Again,” and yet we see have seen genocides multiple times since. Triangles of Truth sells paper triangles for $1, and with each triangle you honor a Holocaust victim by giving charity in his or her name to end genocide today and to help survivors of current genocides. The triangles raise awareness and also encourage us to act in memory of Holocaust victims to give meaning to the ideal of “Never Again.”

9. Become a Volunteer. For those of you looking to commit more time to this cause, check out the International Rescue Committee’s volunteer program. I participated in it for two years and it is one of the best things I’ve ever done.

10. Tweet. At the very bare minimum, the least you can do is tweet this post with the hashtag #WorldRefugeeDay to help keep this day in today’s trending topics.

Christie Marchese runs marketing and social action strategy for Righteous Pictures, a film and new media production company that uses storytelling to foster social change. Connect with her on Twitter @ChristieM

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