At #SMWNYC, Mashable Will Outline The Future of Publishers Using Messaging Platforms

Across the globe, messaging apps are amassing huge audiences. Though initially made popular as an alternative to SMS, chat apps such as Snapchat, WhatsApp, Viber and LINE are increasingly gaining traction as hubs for multimedia content.

As organizations start to catch on, several publishers have already begun to pave the way for how to best deliver news and content, and engage with the growing user bases on these apps.

In this session, “The New World of Social: How Publishers Are Using Messaging Platforms to Engage with Audiences“, we’ll hear directly from the strategists influencing the way these publishers approach emerging digital platforms – from the opportunities they see in messaging apps to the challenges they’ve encountered in developing strategies.

Register your pass to attend SMW New York, and join us on Tuesday, February 23rd at 5:30pm at The TimesCenter to hear from Ryan Lytle (Director, Social Media and Platform Partnerships, Mashable), Samantha Barry (Sr. Director of Social News, CNN Worldwide), and Eytan Oren (CEO of messaging app agency, Block Party).

10 Years Of Digital: A Fireside Chat With Pete Cashmore, Founder And CEO Of Mashable

Since Pete Cashmore created Mashable in Scotland a decade ago, its goal has been to document the digital revolution and how it empowers and inspires people around the globe.

Pete Cashmore-10In their 10 years of existence, Mashable has been witness to a lot, from the the rise of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, to the fall of world leaders. They’ve seen the spread of social media to all corners of the globe and reported on its profound impact and influence on nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Mashable has grown up from a small, one-author blog about web tools and emerging social networks to the web’s largest independent news website dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology.

From the start, Mashable followed the rise of Web 2.0 and the way it reimagined the way people communicated, collaborated and shared ideas and information. Fast-forward to today, and technology has impacted nearly every facet of our daily lives, from the way we do business to the way we interact with media and entertainment.

On Thursday February 26, join Pete Cashmore, Founder and CEO of Mashable, in conversation with Toby Daniels, Founder of Social Media Week and CEO of Crowdcentric, as they take a look at how digital media has evolved and where it’s heading.

 

For more information on Pete Cashmore‘s talk and to secure your pass for the week, visit Social Media Week.

 

Make Videos That Matter With These Tips From BuzzFeed, Mashable And Vimeo

Video is the future of content marketing. That is, if it’s not the here and now. But celebs, cute cats and babies don’t guarantee viral success.

To learn the secrets for making killer videos, we’ve highlighted the best events taking place at Social Media Week NYC:

Creating Video Content For How It’s Consumed

Join us as Jonathan Perelman, BuzzFeed Motion Picture’s Vice President examines the evolution of media and how new innovations in distribution technologies have changed how it’s consumed. From LOLS to CUTE cat videos that pull at your heartstrings, Jonathan will dive into the science behind creating shareable content for the social web.

Storytelling with Vine: How to Create Short Form Videos That People Remember 

Today, storytellers are finding increasingly imaginative ways to share their ideas with interactive and visual elements, bringing their messages to life.

As the head of the visual storytelling team at Mashable, Jeff Petriello is responsible for the creative behind many branded social advertising campaigns, having worked with Olympus, Hewlett-Packard, Hot Wheels, MasterCard and more just in the past few months. This masterclass will explore Jeff’s storytelling techniques using Vine, specifically how to create short form videos that people remember.

Vimeo Video School Live: Creative Toolsets To Engage A Global Audience

Video is exploding online for many reason and the experts at Vimeo are here to teach you how to make your videos better and reach global audiences using their creator toolsets.

Vimeo will give a hands on tutorial on their industry leading creator toolsets with examples showcasing how to use video to engage your audiences more deeply and for those professional creators, best practices to market and even sell their work to viewers worldwide.

 

See the full preview of Campus at Highline Stages here, then get excited to join us for a week you won’t forget. Grab your pass to get full access to SMW14!

5 Minutes with Susan McPherson

(Photo: Susan McPherson, third from the left, at SMW NYC 2012)

Next up in our Advisory Board interview series is Susan McPherson, Senior Vice President and Director of Global Marketing at Fenton Communications:

1. What is you or your organization’s greatest success with social media to date?

With Fenton’s support, I’ve had the opportunity to launch and grow #CSRchat, a biweekly Twitter chat that focuses on a range of corporate social responsibility issues. Over the last two years, I’ve facilitated conversations with a growing group of extremely intelligent and engaged people who come to the CSR field from a variety of perspectives. Special guests have ranged from Microsoft’s Citizenship Team to reporting guru Elaine Cohen to the Inteland Cisco CSR teams to the Director of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. It’s amazing to see this community come together twice a month and take a deep dive into important questions, issues, and solutions that drive the CSR field forward. The more rewarding part is when I’m at conferences and events, I get the chance to meet #CSRchat participants in person—and they already feel like old friends.

2. What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in the emerging technology and/or new media space right now?

There are so many exciting things happening in the technology space, but I’m partial to innovations that use new media to create social change. Social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and corporations are doing amazing things to improve the lives of communities across the globe. For an example, check out 10×10, a groundbreaking global campaign that uses documentary film, photos, blogs, videos, books, social media, and strategic partnerships to deliver a single message: educating girls in developing nations will change the world. With Intel as a founding partner, 10×10 really exemplifies a storytelling-driven campaign that strategically integrates relevant media channels, relationships, and events—all with the purpose of changing the world.

3. What speaker or event are you most looking forward to at SMW NYC?

Fenton is co-hosting “Giving Gangnam Style,” an interactive ideathon with 92Y, Mashable, and the UN Foundation centered around #GivingTuesday, the new national day of giving that launched last fall. The success of the inaugural Giving Tuesday proved that social is transforming how people give and that it’s turning everyday citizens into philanthropists. At this event, we’ll invite participants to share ideas and announce plans for how to participate in Giving Tuesday 2013. Based on the current attendee list, I truly cannot wait to see what the audience comes up with. It promises to be an inspiring and unique event. Another event I’m particularly excited about is “Money, News & Sex: Stories of Challenging Three Industries from Cindy Gallop, Jessica Jackley and Katie Orenstein.” I count all three as amazing friends who have paved tremendous paths for women everywhere.

4. What prompted you to join Social Media Week’s Advisory Board? What do you think is SMW’s greatest value add to the tech/media space?

I believe social media is a wonderful tool for facilitating connections, generating engagement, building communities, and inspiring change. But we all have to remember that it’s just a tool. Without offline engagement and relationships, social media loses a lot of its value. That’s what I think is so great about Social Media Week. It celebrates what’s so great about social media, but brings us all physically together to do so, creating a unique space where offline and online engagement fuse together, and paving the way for true innovation.

5. What is the most creative way you’ve seen social media used?

It’s not the most recent, but I LOVE Tipp-Ex’s YouTube Tippexperience. Essentially, you watch a YouTube video titled “A Hunter Shoots a Bear.” The hunter in the video then reaches for the Tipp-Ex white-out tape (sitting in an ad to the right of the frame), crosses out “shoots,” and invites you to choose your own verb. Depending on what you choose (from “kisses” to “punches” to “eats”), the video will change accordingly. So cool and shareable. Check it out and try it for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/user/tippexperience

Susan McPherson is a serial connector, passionate cause marketer, writer and corporate responsibility expert. As SVP/Director of Global Marketing at Fenton Communications, she focuses on creating visibility for the firm running its CSR practice. She’s a regular writer and contributor for the Harvard Business Review, Triple Pundit and Forbes and has 20+ years experience in marketing, public relations, sustainability communications. Prior to joining Fenton, McPherson was vice president, CSR services at PR Newswire. McPherson serves on the board of Bpeace, an organization dedicated to assisting women in regions of conflict and post-conflict start businesses and Earth 2 Hub, a London-based innovative media platform for science and technology. She also is a member of Echoing Green’s Social Investment Council and Social Media Week’s New York Advisory Council. Additionally, she serves as an adviser to the non-profits: Girls Who Code, Plant A Fish, She’s The First, The Adventure Project and The OpEd Project. Recently, McPherson was selected as a Vital Voices global corporate ambassador.

 

The Conscientious Teen’s Guide to Using the Internet for Good

This post is a series of blogs contributed by SMW NYC media partner Differences Magazine. To learn more about Differences Magazine and to see the original post by Jessica Bender, please click here

There’s no doubt about it; the typical American teenager is obsessed with the Internet. According to a 2011 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, the vast majority of teenagers ages 12 to 17 (a whopping 95 percent) are now online. Most teens are addicted to watching epic feats of kitten talents on YouTube or reading up on old-school Nickelodeon cartoons on Wikipedia, but a lot don’t know that they can use their Internet skills to do good.

With the exponential growth of teenage social responsibility and activism over the past few years, the apathetic teen is slowly becoming extinct. Heck, you even have a better shot of getting into the college of your dreams if you even volunteer (according to a survey conducted by teen-centric non-profit DoSomething.org)! Want to get in on the do-gooder action? We know the best places for you to get inspired and get started on your quest to become a young social activist.

If you’re attached to your cell phone…you can get inspiration on ways to volunteer to your mobile! DoSomething.org sends out weekly volunteering ideas once a week to over 35,000 teens, so you have the power to make a difference right in your text inbox! Sign up by texting “DoSomething” to 30644 or registering your cell number here.

For the YouTube addicts…make your voice heard with your webcam. When it comes to important social issues, an audience will always exist. While you’re recording, make sure to keep it short, simple, and fun! Check out crowd-source initiatives like the It Gets Better Project and We Stop Hate to get you started on your quest to become a socially responsibly YouTube sensation.

It’s okay if you overshare on your social networks…if you’re sharing the right content. Instead of updating your statuses with tales of unrequited love, try to share stories and content on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn about issues you truly care about. Your followers will thank you for the breath of fresh air on their feeds.

Glued to your Tumblr dashboard? There’s tons of non-profits and charities that post and reblog mega-cool content revolving around social good and making a difference. Their inspiration and feel-good posts will also probably make your heart grow a few sizes bigger, so it’s probably a good idea to follow what they’re doing. Some of my fave non-profits that are invading Tumblr include The Trevor Project, To Write Love on Her Arms, She’s the First, and UNICEF.

Can’t stop Tweeting? Use your Twitter account as a platform to promote issues and causes you’re passionate about in 140 characters or less. Three things to keep in mind while being a thoughtful Tweetheart:

1. Hashtag keywords when Tweeting so your Tweets show up easier in searches.

2. When Tweeting an article you want to share, make sure to refer back to the source’s Twitter handle. They’ll appreciate you taking notice of their content and might follow you back as a result.

3. Don’t Tweet or retweet too much – that’ll drive your followers absolutely crazy.

That being said, there’s a plethora of organizations and social good sites just aching for more followers. Mashable and GOOD have lists of organizations for you to follow and worship.

Reporting on Reporting: The Evolution of Journalism at Mashable’s NextUp NYC

Matt Wurst is Manager of Digital Communities at 360i. You can follow him on Twitter @mwurst.

If video killed the radio star, is Internet killing the print and video stars? And if so, how should current journalists adapt and current journalism students prepare?

These are questions that newspapers and television networks are grappling with on a daily basis. They were also among the many topics discussed at Mashable’s “NextUp NYC – The Future Journalist” event last night at the 92YTribeca as part of Social Media Week here in New York.

A year ago, TIME magazine predicted that a journalism crisis was approaching “meltdown proportions” and that “some major cities will no longer have a newspaper.” The alarm bells rang even louder when The Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down for good and The Philadelphia Daily News and Minneapolis Star-Tribune filed for bankruptcy soon thereafter.

Video coverage of Wednesday’s panel:

But according to last night’s panelists, Sree Sreenivasan (@sreenet), the Columbia Journalism School Dean of Students, and Vadim Lavrusik (@lavrusik), one of Professor Sreenivasan’s Digital Media graduate students, journalism isn’t dying. It’s simply evolving. Even as many traditionalists feared the end of beat reporters, in-depth coverage, investigative reporting and newsmaker/celebrity accountability, the sounds of their struggles are being drowned out by the sound of keyboards clicking, video streams playing, Twitter feeds refreshing and RSS feeds updating.

With upwards of three hundred journalists, PR gurus and social media aficionados filling the lofted space in lower Manhattan, the teacher and his student optimistically agreed that a new era of “tra-digital” journalism, the surface of which has barely been breached, is upon us. They astutely compared where we are now in a digital age to where radio was in 1912 and television was in 1950. (You can view their shared presentation at http://bit.ly/futurej.)

As a veteran of the news industry and well-connected social media insider, Sreenivasan navigated through the multiple uses of new and emerging platforms and how they can apply to the “old world.” (He doesn’t get GoogleWave yet, but who does?)  He emphasized the need for today’s journalists to learn multiple talents while retaining a specialty that distinguishes them from their peers. Working together, Sreenivasan and Lavrusik also explained how to become a multimedia storyteller, “learning and understanding what media is right for what story.”

Some other required qualities and skills for experienced and news journalists alike are to become reliable “pointers,” helping cut through the noisy clutter and sharing good content from across the web. They stressed the value of “community managers” that listen and interact with readers/viewers and don’t simply broadcast their messages in one direction. Additional “best practices” encourage newshounds to think about their own brand and adopt an entrepreneurial spirit.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is a top, if not THE top, journalism program in the country. Yet the curriculum taught just a decade ago is already an antiquated relic of a lost era. Faced with advances in technology and expanded use of the Internet, the next generation of journalists is training for professional opportunities in a changing media landscape that might be very different in another ten years down the road. Meanwhile, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media.

It is imperative that journalists of today and tomorrow develop a “digital media mindset”—how to think about news stories and packages from an online perspective. Look no further than our hosts for the evening.  Mashable plays an important role in the publication of digital news, trends and technologies. (In fact, Mashable has become such an institution in my own daily diet of fact-gathering that it now holds the fourth spot on my iGoogle home page, batting clean-up behind my Gmail inbox and RSS feeds from CNN and ESPN.)

Throughout the course of the discussion, a number of the journalists in the room were taking notes, some even sticking around as the crowds dispersed to learn more, dig deeper – clear indication of a reporter’s nose for information, if you will. And that, as the professor noted throughout his presentation, is just one of several skills that will never be rendered obsolete, along with the ability to observe, ask questions, process thoughts and write.

Social Media Week NYC: Initial Agenda of Events

After months of collaboration we are delighted to release the initial agenda for Social Media Week NYC. In addition to what you can see here, we also plan to add at least another fifteen events to the program over the course of the next few days.

You can view the initial agenda here: http://socialmediaweek.org/newyork/schedule/

PLEASE NOTE THAT REGISTRATION OPENS FROM JANUARY 18TH.

Attendees will be given a full two weeks to register for events. Registration will be on a per event basis, allowing you to build a personal program that is specific and relevant to you.

If you want to receive updates you can follow @smwnyc on Twitter.  If you would like to be notified when registration goes live, please email info@socialmediaweekny.com.

Thanks to Social Media Week’s Title Sponsor Meebo and Supporting Sponsor Pepsico and Pepsi Refresh, almost every event hosted during Social Media Week will be free to attend.  Thanks also to our Media & Communication partners, The New York Times, Mashable, PSFK, 360i & PressLift and of course to our fantastic Advisory Board for helping to put together Social Media Week NYC.