Socializing Your Schedule With SCHED*

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Amazing Brand Partner Opportunities with Social Media Week

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

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!

Tags: "buenos aires", "Los Angeles", "mexico city", "US State Department", bogota, milan, sched
Posted in Getting Involved, global

Trouble planning your schedule during Social Media Week? Well, there’s an app for that!

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Over 170 events will take place over the course of Social Media Week, but how will participants and attendees stay on top of their schedules, especially given that events are distributed all over each city?

Fortunately, one of Social Media Week’s app partners, the lovely folks at Sched have “an app for that”!

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have already noticed the website schedule is also powered by Sched. The iPhone version provides a palm-sized version which will help you build your own schedule, find venues and get live updates as the schedule gets updated.

Did we mention it’s free? And available from iTunes.

Tags: iphone, mobile, sched
Posted in global, News

Location, Location, Location: Your Geo-Social Guide to #SMW

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

About this Guest Blogger: Johnny Makkar is a digital marketer who blogs at Attention Digital. You can follow Johnny on Twitter @jsmakr.

No matter which location-based social app you prefer, they can all be useful during Social Media Week to network with other attendees, find nearby food venues, and discover other activities to compliment our events. I’m a Foursquare user myself (which seems to be the most popular choice among this crowded space), but see value in some of the competing apps and new social event apps like Hot Potato.

Here’s are a few tips for those who will be attending Social Media Week equipped with a mobile device:

Foursquare

CHECK-INS: If you are a regular Foursquare user, you’ll probably be anxious to check-in when you arrive at an event. You should find that most venue locations have already been added to Foursquare like the Condé Nast Building (where The Future of Space and Time, hosted by Wired.com, will be held) or 92YTribeca (the site of Mashable’s Future Journalist event). In case the venue name does not come up automatically, be sure to search first before adding it to Foursquare. If you still find nothing, help everyone else out and enjoy some extra points by adding the venue.

NETWORKING: Broadcasting your check-ins to Twitter and Facebook will obviously help you discover other people in your network that are nearby. Within Foursquare, you can also take a look at everyone else who is checking in at each event (complete strangers who have common interests). Browse through their Twitter bio/feed quickly and if you’re up for it, reach out during or after the event to start a conversation and continue the discussion.

TIPS: Make sure to look out for useful tips for that specific venue. For example, visitors of the The Roger Smith Hotel (where Social Media Club’s Speed Dating event will be held) have mentioned they like having a “fabulous cocktail” from Paul the bartender or trying the mussel’s at Lily’s bar which are “edging delicious.”

TWITTER SEARCH: Another great way to find out which events are popular throughout the week is by monitoring Foursquare and Twitter to see what’s trending. Foursquare does a fairly good job at highlighting trending locations near you (just launch the app and those will be highlighted at the top of Places tab).

However, since all SMW events require pre-registration, this feature won’t necessarily allow you to spontaneously attend an event (unless that usually doesn’t stop you). Some events might have their own unique hashtag but to get an idea of where the most people are congregating once things are underway, try searching for #SMW + 4sq.

Yelp

Yelp is worth noting especially since they recently upgraded the app to include venue check-ins. Yelp’s extensive database can be a great for attendees looking to find nearby restaurants and bars to migrate to after a SMW event is over.

Simply launch the app, make sure you’re on the Nearby screen and the first three options will be Restaurants, Bars, and Coffee & Tea. Depending on the size of your group, make sure to browse the reviews to see if the place is accommodating then easily make a quick call to let them know your coming or make reservations.

Hot Potato & PegShot

These are two more relatively new iPhone apps that aim to make live events more engaging through further discussion and media sharing. We have partnered with both of these companies for SMW so keep an eye out for more in-depth instructions on using them during the conference.

Hot Potato has a great Web and iPhone interface that organizes a real-time stream around a specific live event. Once you have the app installed and are logged in using Facebook Connect, look for the Social Media Week page. Once you have it open, Check In to follow along and post your own comments/photos.

PegShot is also great for sharing geo-coded images and videos during any event. Take a few minutes and check out the video tour on the homepage to see how it all works and give it try during SMW.

The biggest advantage to using these apps is creating a micro-community in one location away from all the Twitter and Facebook noise (but both still easily give you the option to share your activity).

More Tips

Many of the same tips given for Foursquare can also apply for Gowalla users. Deciding how you use any of these apps really comes down to preference. Let us know which app(s) you’ll be using and if you’ve found any of these useful in other interesting ways during live events not mentioned above.

Finally, to access the complete schedule on-the-go, don’t forget to download the official SCHED* Social Media Week New York (iTunes) iPhone app.

Tags: foursquare, gowalla, hot potato, pegshot, sched, twitter, yelp
Posted in News