Tag: crowdfunding

Attendee Spotlight: Clay Hebert, Founder of Crowdfunding Hacks, Shares His Top Picks For #SMWNYC

Posted on by Tyler Becker

With a passion for emerging technology, mobile and social media, Social Media Week attendees always strive to understand and share what’s next. This February, we’re excited to explore “Upwardly Mobile: The Rise of The Connected Class” throughout the conference, and what this theme represents from today until 2022, when six billion individuals will be connected to each other online. The sessions you won’t want to miss feature leading companies sharing their top strategies and predictions of what’s happening, and what’s to come.

To help you discover the best of Social Media Week New York, we asked a few of our attendees to share their top picks for events, talks and masterclasses taking place throughout the week. Below, Clay Hebert, Founder of Crowdfunding Hacks, gives us a look at the events he’s most excited for:

  1. Vimeo Video School Live: Creative Toolsets to Engage a Global Audience
    “If ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, then well-executed video is worth even more. Video is everywhere and many consumers would rather click play and watch for 2 minutes instead of reading copy for even 30 seconds. But quality matters. If the video is terrible, the viewer is gone.”
  2. The New DIY – Drones, Makers, and Bots: A Fireside Chat with Martha Stewart and CEO of The Barbarian Group, Sophie Kelly
    “Drones are already delivering pharmaceutical deliveries, being used in performance art and even being used in vineyards to make better wine. The combination of the maker movement and drones is very exciting. Plus…drone joust with Martha Stewart!”
  3. Beyond the Moonwalking Bear: New Ideas in Understanding Human Attention
    “In our busy, distracted world, time is our most valuable resource and attention is our most valuable currency. Faris Yakob recently wrote a book on this exact topic, Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World and I’m excited to listen to Faris, Sarah and Joe how brands and advertisers can attract consumers’ attention and translate it into not just dollars but permission.”
  4. The 10 Rules of an Open Brand: Evolving With Your Customers and the Industry
    “Companies that ignore their customers and the collective intelligence of the crowd will die more quickly than they realize. John has built Victors and Spoils on an ethos that all of us are smarter than any of us. It’s true. And it’s working.”
  5. Cult Brands 2.0: How Today’s Top Brands Breed Loyalty and Fanaticism
    “Ries and Trout wrote about it in Positioning. Seth Godin described it in Purple Cow. In a noisy, cluttered world, you can’t just be ‘a’ choice, you have to be ‘the’ choice. Turning your raving fans into your 24-7 marketing team is an investment worth making for any brand.”

You can catch Clay’s own session, “Marketing Lessons from Crowdfunding: The Psychology of Success” on Thursday, Feb. 26 at 12:00 noon. If you haven’t already, be sure to pick up your pass to #SMWNYC, and join us for what will be an extraordinary week.

About Clay Hebert

Clay Hebert is an internationally acclaimed marketing strategist and the founder of Crowdfunding Hacks, where he helps entrepreneurs and creatives fund their dreams. As one of the world’s leading crowdfunding experts, Clay has helped over 100 entrepreneurs raise over $25M on popular crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

A popular keynote speaker, Clay engages audiences around the globe on innovation, creativity, crowdfunding, marketing, entrepreneurship and the future of work.

Clay has trained senior leaders at Fortune 500 organizations and his speaking clients have included Accenture, Pfizer, Zappos and some of the top universities and nonprofits in the world. He advises corporations and startups on strategy, marketing, innovation and culture independently and through Clarity.fm, Exobase and the First Growth Venture Network. Clay currently sits on the board of Social Media Week New York and several technology and marketing startups.

Clay has written for The Washington Post, Forbes and The Next Web and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Lifehacker and The Financial Post. He is a regular guest on FOX Business.

After a decade solving complex problems for global clients at Accenture, the world’s largest consulting firm, Clay left corporate America and attended the most selective and unique MBA program in the United States, a six month journey working with Seth Godin and eight other amazing people.

Clay teaches crowdfunding at CrowdfundingHacks.com and writes about marketing, innovation and the future of work on his own blog at ClayHebert.com. Clay is active on Twitter. Say hi @clayhebert.

Marketing Lessons From Crowdfunding: The Psychology Of Success

Posted on by Nicole Brown

Storytelling. Platform. Pricing. Scarcity. Urgency.

Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have completely changed how entrepreneurial and creative projects get funded and launched. But crowdfunding, like any business venture, requires more than just a dream. It takes planning, research, great marketing, and a true understanding of human psychology to know what will be successful.

On Thursday February 26, Clay Hebert, who has helped over 100 entrepreneurs raise over $25 million on these platforms, will lead an interactive tour through a series of interesting projects, Clay will explain what’s working today (and what marketers can steal) but also why the future of marketing will be very different.

 

Find out about all the great talks, events and speakers at this year’s Social Media Week New York event here.

Social Media Week Un(filtered): Steven Rosenbaum’s Guide

Posted on by Sara Adam

Another Social Media Week rockstar who will be joining us this year is Steven Rosenbaum. Steven is best known as the producer behind the creation of MTV News UNfiltered. Then, in 2011, he published Curation Nation, a book that explores the need for brands to curate content that engages their customers. Currently, he is the CEO of Magnify, a video curation platform that enables companies to create a uniquely engaging experience for their customers. Needless to say, he is an expert on all things storytelling and all things millennial. You will not want to miss these events, so  register for SMW before it’s too late!

In Stevens’ own words, here are 5 reasons he is pumped about Social Media Week: 

The thing is, I’m a long-form storyteller that’s increasingly in love with the democratization of new platforms that are connecting audiences with new voices. Ah, therein lies the conundrum. Are we unleashing a new force for social and editorial good, or are we hooked on a new drug that ties speed, viral headlines, and funny cat videos to an audience that scans rather than reads?

With those big questions in mind, I’m counting on SMW to provide the answers (or at least engage in a smart conversation about the trends facing storytelling). So, my Curator cape is on, and I’m ready to nail the five most awesome presentations and panels in this week, chock full of content.

Here’s my Curator’s top 5.

  1. Is Social Killing Storytelling?
    This panel is going to be a minefield of twists and turns. The panelists are from ‘big media’s Bravo TV, The guardian, The Atlantic, and ‘big web’  Huffpo and Mashable. So they are going to say that social is awesome! But at the same time, what happens when social “Is Storytelling” and Twitter replaces The Guardian. Yikes.
  2. Keynote interview: Jonah Peretti, Founder and CEO of BuzzFeed
    So, first off — Toby isn’t going to let Jonah just have a BuzzFeed commercial. The fact is, BuzzFeed is a traffic machine. Massive and growing. But is it a trick, or is it really the future of editorial? Toby will find out – and the whole world will finally know 🙂
  3. Upworthy’s Real Mission: A Keynote Announcement from Eli Pariser, Founder
    Since I can’t see Eli and Jonah in a cage match, this is the next best thing. Eli has a mission, and I think we know what it is (see: moveOn.org) but there may be more. And in a world of Filter Bubbles, Upworthy needs to continue to grow while not creating a bubble of it’s own. Can’t wait to hear what he’s got to say.
  4. Five Ways Millennials’ Habits Are Changing How Content is Made and Shared
    Even as BuzzFeed and Upworthy sort out the new traffic world, millennials are morphing yet again. From computer screens to mobile devices, from SMS to vanishing text, Vine, Listicles – the kids today are turning content upside down. And they’re just getting started.
  5. The Future of Giving: Storytelling, Big Data, Crowdfunding, and Finding New Donors
    Storytelling at its core is about having an impact. And this panel connects the story of change with the dollars that drive change. It’s a unique conversation -and the kind of panel that makes me love SMW all the more. Stories connect and change the world. I’m in.

We only let Steven choose 5 events, so make sure to check out our schedule for a wealth of events on topics like journalism, marketing and technology.

Technology & Collective Intelligence: A Recipe For Impact And Success

Posted on by Lindsey Taylor Wood

(Part 3 of 3 in the Architects, Inventors and Collaborators Blog series.)

It’s no secret that our world has become increasingly social. I wonder, however, if those outside the technology industry have paid mind to the way in which technology has become intrinsically linked with collaboration.

Whether crowdstorming, crowdsourcing or crowdfunding, hackathons or strategic alliances, technology has become a vehicle for our world’s brain trust, and a way to tackle the most pressing issues of our time. Organizations and individuals can utilize these frameworks to problem solve, create usable software, discover new ideas and prototypes, pool money to fund initiatives, outsource tasks and even to save lives.

Technology paired with our collective intelligence is the ultimate recipe for impact and success.

Speaker Tonya Surman embodies this collaborative ethos. The founding executive director and current CEO of the Centre for Social Innovation, Tonya’s work revolves around building shared spaces and fostering cooperation among networks of social innovators. Her latest book, The Community Bond: An Innovation in Social Finance, is a testament to the efficacy of this approach, as CSI renovated its Annex location by raising $2 million dollars through community bonds.

Not just allowing, but pushing for open innovation and alliance building is critical to our future. As is incentivizing the Architects, Inventors and Collaborators that are rethinking traditional structures and developing new frameworks, manifesting their ingenuity and facilitating partnerships for impact, respectively.

One person who does this brilliantly is speaker and Quirky Founder & CEO, Ben Kaufman. To date, Quirky has developed 288 products with the help of 188 retail partners and 328,000 investors. By removing barriers for inventors, he has been able to bring two new consumer products to market each week, and share revenue with the people who helped to inform and produce them.

Essentially, Ben architected a new way of producing by connecting inventors with a larger community of collaborators: everything this year’s theme stands for.

Join Tonya, Ben and a number of other speakers at our Global HQ on Thursday, February 21st, when we continue the discussion on how to create and embody a more open, connected and collaborative world. We look forward to seeing you there.