Last year Glasgow held 118 free events in 5 days featuring internationally renowned speakers like Don Tapscott, and global brands like Nokia and Google.The novel crowdsourced format means the majority of the free events are created by its participants, ensuring diversity, inclusion and creativity.

To announce SMW 2012 a global photography competition using Instagram has been launched to find the best pictures from the participating cities. You can keep up to date with the latest entries for Glasgow and the other cities here.
The winner of the competition will have the opportunity to travel to one of the participating cities of their choice during Social Media Week which takes place 24-28th September.

Tim Wright, co-founder of twintangibles, the social media advisory firm and curators for Glasgow said “Social media are transforming so many aspects of our lives, culturally, economically and socially. This event gives delegates the opportunity to access the very best and leading edge thinking on the topic.”

John McLeish (Managing Director) of City Sponsor the digital agency Equator said “Being at the heart of Glasgow’s thriving digital community, Equator are delighted to be the city sponsor of Social Media Week Glasgow for the second year running. We’re proud to support the city in delivering another world-class event and help grow Social Media Week Glasgow’s global reach just as we are growing ours.”

Angela Higgins, asset manager of Skypark, the hub venue for the Glasgow event and a member of the Social Media Week Advisory Board said: “This is the second year that Glasgow has hosted Social Media Week and at Skypark we’re really excited to be hosting not only the SMW team, but a series of groundbreaking events.”

Stuart Patrick CEO of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce commented: “At Glasgow Chamber of Commerce we are firm supporters of the work done through Social Media Week. We couldn’t do our work effectively without a strong strategy for exploiting social media and Social Media Week is an excellent opportunity to share experiences right across the world from Ruchill to Rio de Janeiro. We wish Social Media Week yet another successful year.”

Don’t forget, its your week! Its your chance to speak to a global audience or hear from global participant. Get involved and, like last year, lets make the world sit up and take notice of  Glasgow again.

After last year’s success and enthusiasm, we are excited to announce that we’re back in the game and we’re bringing Social Media Week to Glasgow again.

Block your agenda for the week between the 24th and the 28th of September and make sure you’ll be here to make the most of the events and initiatives that we will all put up together.

This September, some of our 2011 partners will be there, including Vancouver, Beirut, Chicago, LA, Bogota and Sao Paulo. New entry for September, London will join us too, and together we will showcase one of the most digitally active economies in the world. We’re looking forward to collaborating with all of them, as well as with more cities that will be announced in the next few weeks to complete a great line-up for September.

In the Year of Creative Scotland, it’s wonderful to have Glasgow being part of this worldwide event, contributing again to the mission of exploring the social, cultural and economic impact of social media, and of empowering change through collaboration. Lots of news, lots of changes, lots of new initiatives and partnerships and we can’t wait to reveal all this to you in the coming months. One thing has not changed though, our hashtag Please keep on using #SMWGla and re-join the conversation, we want to get to the 24th of September well connected and ready for the big party!

Most importantly, it’s now time to put your creative-thinking caps back on. We are at the very early stages of planning another great week, so please get in touch with us at any time on FB, on twitter, via e-mail..and with any ideas and suggestions, anything you’d like to see happening next September, anything you wish to make happen, anything you want to help us with, any innovative ways you want to be part of it. We can never emphasise enough that SMW is a collaborative event, you are contributing to it like we are. And also please remember nothing is impossible.

We are already looking forward to hearing from you, don’t be shy, get in touch, let’s make of SMWGla another big success all together!

twintangibles, curators of SMWGlasgow, are a research-based consulting firm assisting organisations to understand, identify and create value from the opportunities presented by Social Media and the mindset that underpins it. They will share some of the highlights of the week and present the projects and initiatives born as spinoffs from SMWGla. They will also unveil some interesting figures and stats regarding Social Media Week Glasgow: who attended, what sectors were most represented, what the hot topics were, and so on. Here’s a taste of it, some voxpops from the SMWGla review night we organised last November (thanks to the great Inner Ear team).

Creative content communications company Inner Ear uses a combination of social media services in everything it does, from research and productivity to audience engagement and development to sales and marketing. Inner Ear provided live streaming services for Social Media Week Glasgow, advised on the use of digital media before, during and after the convention and ran a series of interactive events. At Socially Scotland Dougal and Anny from Inner Ear will talk about some of the projects they showcased during Social Media Week, including the company’s long running alternative, underground music internet radio station, Radio Magnetic and new streetwise audio walking tours producers Walking Heads. They’ll also present the results of a collaborative spinoff from SMW Glasgow: Spokenherd, a crowdsourced audiobook.

Kiltr, the rising niche network for anyone with an interest in Scotland, will take the opportunity to meet its members and discuss the latest developments of the network including the forthcoming launch of version one.

Socially Scotland is a networking opportunity for all Scots in London and for anyone interested in Scotland to get a flavour of what is happening North of the border.

Scottish craft beer, generously offered by WEST brewery and Ayr Brewing Company, and ‘Scotland’s flavourite’ tea cakes and biscuits offered by Tunnock’s, will be available throughout the event. Don’t miss out!

*** The official hashtag for the event is #smwldngla – Please use it to connect and network! ***

Register here!

This event is made possible by:

Drink Sponsors:

Snack sponsors:

Spoken Herd, a free downloadable audio book created by members of the public, has been launched online. The audiobook, funded by Creative Scotland and part of the legacy from Glasgow’s Social Media Week, celebrates the best of Scottish poetry with some new and old classics.

The project began as a collaboration between InnerEar, famed for their Radio Magnetic internet radio station, twintangibles, one of Scotland’s top social media consultancies, and Cargo Publishing, a Glasgow publishing company and recent recipient of The List Magazine’s Best Newcomer Award 2011. Members of the public auditioned for the chance to read the poems on the audiobook.

The organisers were impressed by the quality and quantity of entries. “Crowdsourcing is founded in the idea that there is a wealth of untapped talent available and this project demonstrated that. Some really talented narrators came forward” said Tim Wright of twintangibles. Dougal Perman, director of Inner Ear, agreed: “our approach to making audio and video programmes is all about portraying real people’s stories in their own words. The variety of accents and styles we’ve discovered through Spoken Herd is inspiring.”

The creators are now planning a follow up audiobook and hope that the current release stimulates interest in Scottish poetry. “I think Scottish poetry gets overlooked and we have so many talented poets like Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard” said Cargo MD Mark Buckland. “This audiobook has got a lot of people excited and we’re really pleased there’s a renewed interest in poetry.”

LISTEN HERE: http://soundcloud.com/spokenherd/sets/social-media-week-crowdsourced

www.spokenherd.co.uk

Social Media Week Glasgow teamed up with Cargo Publishing, twintangibles, and Inner Ear to produce a crowdsourced audiobook, thanks to the support of Creative Scotland.

To be part of this project, you should audition to be a narrator to record some of the best poems and essays from Scottish literature, thus contributing to one of the most unique audiobooks available. You can create an example of your talent as a narrator by reading A Red, Red Rose by Scotland’s bard Robert Burns. You can either upload it to YouTube, or use Audioboo, or hipcast, or simply send us an mp3 of you reading.  A copy of the poem is available on Spoken Herd website.

Collaboration has been a common theme this past week. Last Friday I attended the launch of Entrepreneurial Spark, a fascinating social enterprise that is designed to offer free office space and facilities to embryonic businesses in a collaborative space where the participants have maximum opportunity to work with, and learn from, each other. It’s an incubator in the best sense of the word and made possible through the generosity of people like Willie Haughey, returning opportunity and purpose to his local community, and the vision and drive of Saltire Fellow Jim Duffy to make it happen. Well done and good luck to them

On Monday I was at Govcamp Scotland where Zachary Tumin talked about the book he has written with William Bratton called Collaborate or Perish! Its message is that collaboration is, and will continue to be, the key to success and sustainability. I agree and find that the mindset and ethic that is fuelling the widespread adoption of social media means that this approach will progressively embed itself as both possible and desirable.

Increasingly we will see agile groups and individuals coming together to deliver projects and remaining in a grouping for long enough to get things done then dispersing and reforming into new collaborations. It is agile, robust, innovative and efficient, and has a Schumpterian touch to it that would have us believe it also is highly creative. Don Tapscott, curator of the forthcoming Social Media Week and keynote speaker at Social Media Week Glasgow 2011,  is of course the prophet of collaboration at all levels and has understood that its time has come. We have both the ethic and the technical ability to do it, we simply need to apply it to resolve the problems and challenges we face.

It was particularly interesting then to attend an event that was part of Glasgow for Business Week hosted by an organisation called Cooperative Development Scotland (CDS). CDS is a body that offers advice to those that want to build a co-operative business model for an organisation. They will guide you through the process, including access to funding and legal models.

Now cooperatives are not new, but interestingly perhaps their time has come because when allied to the appetite for collaboration and the appetite for a more democratic and more equitable distribution of the fruits of our work, as demonstrated through the occupy and 99% movements, it becomes a compelling model. I know of several individual companies and organisations that have formed a cooperative vehicle in order to pitch for work, deliver complex projects, to purchase more effectively and just love the idea of remaining an independent organisation but part of a larger group that is both democratic, equitable and risk dampening. Interestingly the UN has declared 2012  The International Year of Coops.

The link between cooperatives and social media was a connection we identified long ago and was highlighted in films like Us Now. For a more prosaic and local idea of how co-ops can be powerful collaborative tools in business you might also want the short CDS film and in the spirit of collaboration I share this with you here.

The topic of the event is very current and we thought it interesting to share some general thoughts and insights on a particular aspect of it, the exploitation of Social Media for Urban Regeneration projects, and why we think this is relevant at a global level and at a Scottish level.

Urban Regeneration is a hot topic in Scotland as it is elsewhere, and there’s some innovative thinking around that. At SMW Glasgow we indirectly touched on this particular topic during Don Tapscott’s final keynote. As you will remember, Don was skyping in from Colombia: Bogotá is indeed the first city for the groundbreaking project Open Cities, a project seeking to engage the population of a city and its key stakeholders in ‘transforming to a 21st-century, smart and connected city‘.

So, what is Urban Regeneration and how does  Social Media play a fundamental role in that? Urban Regeneration – or Urban Renewal as Americans would say – is the improvement process of the social, economic and physical conditions in deprived or abandoned urban areas. The process is becoming more and more community-led: the regeneration process is determined directly by local people and communities rather than coming from local government. It’s adopting, in other words, a bottom up approach rather than a top down one. And social media dynamics work in the same way. Whereas regeneration strategies in the past have been “imposed” from the top, now they can be fed by direct community involvement: local people are determining how things have to be regenerated, and are actively participating in the renewal process. The contribution of local communities can be  active and strong because they know their voices can be heard. It’s an important shift, brought throught the mindset that underpins Social Media. In a pre-web 2.0 world, the process of consultation was often difficult, patchy and dominated by vested interest leaving many people with a sense of powerlessness to affect any change in society. Social Media are increasingly  giving us confidence and belief  that our voice will be heard, and that together  we  can make a contribution and bring about change the world little by little, starting from our local community.

One of the most outstanding and exciting projects in Glasgow is happening at the Speirs Locks. The long-term Glasgow Canal Regeneration Project aims to transform the canal into a “fantastic waterside environment that will bring benefits to those living and working in Glasgow, whilst providing special destinations for visitors to the city” (www.glasgowcanal.co.uk/speirs-locks). The interesting thing is that the masterplan design approaches produced so far have been following an extensive and ongoing community engagement exercise which has seen local residents, businesses and school children feeding into the plans.

Some of the partners involved in Social Media Week Glasgow played a role in this project too. In particular, Dougal Perman, founder and director of InnerEar, sponsor, event and – above all – AV partner for SMW Glasgow, is one of the people who attended some of the workshops and round tables on how to share the space and place of Speirs Locks. In his words, “it’s not just about the arts, it brings together people from all different aspects…it’s got to be about people interacting, people creating things together”. Tim Wright of twintangibles, lead organising partners of SMW Glasgow, was present at one of the round tables too. As he puts it, by ‘taking the trouble of asking the community’ and taking a broad range of opinion, they increased the possibility of success. Flexibility has to be part of the process with an iterative “safe Fail” environment for incremental development. Things rarely  go entirely to plan, and you need to adjust and respond to that. And flexibility, responsiveness are other aspects of the social media mindset that is affecting us and, in turn, society”.

Finally, guess who visualised all this? Yes, it’s them again: wearesnook, who produced our fantastic intro video for Social Media Week Glasgow.

For a number of reasons. The format of SMW is a very interesting concept of how to put together a conference, it aims to change the way we run conferences in the future, it is essentially crowdsourced so the format of the event was appealing to us because it was addressing some of the changes and effects that come with the collaborative models that Social Media enables. But more important than that it was to have a platform that allowed us to broaden the debate on Social Media to touch on a variety of subjects, and take the story or take the message to a wider community that Social Media is having a very profound impact on society, economy, and culture. We felt that Glasgow – and by extension Scotland – has a strong digital community, it is very digitally engaged and it has a history of innovation in many fields which is becoming apparent in the way Social Media is being exploited in Scotland. It was time that Glasgow got recognition for that alongside these other international cities that were bidding at the same time, and it was also right and appropriate that Scotland got representation; the only other time this event has come to the UK it was in London, so we felt that it was time that North of the border got some recognition as well.

- So was Social Media Week Glasgow a success?
It’s not entirely for me to say whether it was a success, it‘s really for others to judge, because it is very much a shared event, it’s crowdsourced in the sense that the vast majority of the events that were put on through the course of the week were originated by people who came forward, wanting to put something under the umbrella of the larger event. It was a shared experience and I have my personal views on whether it was success, but fundamentally is whether the community feels that it was a success, and thus far almost exclusively all of the feedback has been very positive. We had more than 100 events taking place through the 5 days, in a lot of different locations and one of the aspects of the pitch that we made to crowdcentric in our bid to bring SMW to Glasgow was that we would offer tremendous diversity, and I think we achieved that by bringing events that were taking place addressing consumer products, fashion, media, healthcare, really really diverse range in terms of the subject matter, but also the format, the size and scale of these things, so some were quite small events, some were very large events with a significant number of people attending. So I think in all of those cases we achieved more than we actually set out to do, we were more diverse than we could have possibly wished for; we certainly delivered more events than we expected when we initially intended to put the event on and I think that the reception that we received and the amount of coverage that the events received has been almost exclusively positive. There’s always one or two but on the whole I think pretty much everybody says it has been an extremely good and useful experience. Doesn’t mean to say that we wouldn’t change it if we had the opportunity to do it again of course, we would, that’s how experience works, but on the generality I think it has been an almost exclusively positive experience. Certainly for us: on a personal level and from the twintangibles point of view I think we would view it as entirely positive, if challenging and demanding at times in actually making it happen, but it was a privilege to be involved.

- Any personal highlights for yourself?
There are a number of highlights for me. I particularly enjoyed Jeremy Gilley’s presentation to open the event. His was a very inspiring story and it’s something that it’s often forgotten about how you can use these communication platforms for really significant and world changing initiatives and he’s very much testament to that, so that was an inspiring piece to kick off the day. The Nokia vending machine was a lot of fun, I didn’t actually win anything out of it, but ten people got phones, it was a lot of fun seeing people queuing up with the expectation of getting a phone and getting a chocolate bar instead, but that was fun. I really enjoyed both the wine and the beer events for obvious reasons but also because I think they were quite innovative. The intention was to demonstrate how social media brings producers and consumers much closer together and it was quite technically challenging to make those things happen but they went very well so I enjoyed those a lot. The Government involvement and the Government endorsement of it by the attendance of ministers but also by them putting on their own event was a highlight, because it represented some recognition that what we do had attracted the attention and the endorsement of those bodies. But the undoubted highlight for me was Don Tapscott. I said when I introduced Don on the Friday as the closing keynote that when we initially thought about bidding to bring SMW to Glasgow who would we ideally have on the list of events through the week, who would be the speakers, and it was one of those brainstorming events where you can put anything you want no matter how absurd on the table; and at the top of my list was Don Tapscott and we just laughed at the idea that we could get him involved with SMW Glasgow. And by the wonders of social media and the connectivity and the willingness and collaborative spirit that goes with that we managed to get Don Tapscott to do the keynote address, and for me that was an enormous privilege to be able to introduce him but also to have the opportunity to put questions to him, it was fantastic, and couldn’t have wished for anymore so it’s certainly my highlight.

- Where is the future with SMW Glasgow?
We want to try and build on the legacy of this iteration of SMW that took place in Glasgow. The event itself as you will probably know is now taking place twice a year because the demand from cities to actually get involved with this is growing all the time, so there are no guarantees that even if we were to bid for it we would necessarily be able to bring it back to Glasgow. Therefore our immediate focus is to build on what took place through the week and I think that most of the organisations that took part in Social Media Week are also looking to do that. We know that the next iteration of SMW is taking place in February 2012 and London is one of the participating city for that. So we will probably try and run some follow-up events as part of that to highlight Glasgow participation this year. We also know that the organisation crowdcentric in NY were extremely pleased with what took place in Glasgow and the fact that outside of NY we had more events than any other cities participating in SMW ever, which is a tribute to Glasgow. I think they were very impressed by the way that developed and how the city engaged with it so I think that if we were to bid to make it happen again in Glasgow then we would have a sympathetic ear in NY. But our focus at the moment is to build on what we achieved this time round with a view to considering whether we wished to do it again in Glasgow, and if we do what format that would take.

- Would you like to round up with a closing statement?
We pulled it off. It was a pretty ambitious thing to take on. Some people thought we were a bit crazy, I think we thought we were a bit crazy when we were first going for it, but it has been a tremendous success; it has been a wonderful thing to be involved with, we met a lot of fabulous people, made friend with people that otherwise we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet. I think it has kicked off some terrific initiatives off the back of it, and I hope it’s giving a lift to the digital community in Glasgow and Scotland generally but also allow Glasgow and Scotland to get some international well deserved recognition so all in all very pleased, tick, v. good, gold star as far as I am concerned.

The interview was realised by Cameron King, @CameronKing, as part of the SMWGla podcast series available on iTunes and Podomatic. [transcript]

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Podcast: Interview with Tim Wright, twintangibles

Cheers everyone, and thanks again for a great week!