Everyone knows the stars of YouTube, Vine, Instagram and Snapchat. They have big audiences and big price tags, and working with them isn’t always a possibility.
To better understand this complex yet increasingly crucial video ecosystem, we’re thrilled to have Storyful join SMW New York as an Official Event Partner. They’ll break down these video platforms, and share how they’ve has established itself as the leader in verifying viral videos, trending news, ad user-generated content (UGC) online.
Their session, “The New Generation of Social Influencers” on Wednesday the 24th at 12:30pm at The TimesCenter will explore how you create a strategy for identifying and engaging with social influencers to help you achieve you tell you story and reach the right audience.
Storyful’s CEO, Rahul Chopra will dive into what makes a social influencer today, how they reach and engage audiences, and what marketers and advertisers need to do to be effective in 2016.
In a day and age where 75% of Americans don’t even go to the bathroom without their phones, it is clear that brands and marketers need a mobile strategy. Customer engagement is critical to success to a brand’s long-term success, so here our top three tips to keep up with your community, wherever they may be:
Use Video
Platforms like Vine and Instagram make it easier than ever for marketers to connect with their customers on the go. More than 40% of YouTube’s traffic comes from mobile devices. And that’s just one platform. That means it’s the most effective way to get your audience. Unruly seems to have helped master it, having delivered, tracked and audited 3.5 billion video views- they have “viral” down to science. So, if you’re going to use video on mobile, you should join Unruly for this seminar as they share their expertise and how to stay ahead of the competition.
Use a Multi-Cultural Strategy
If experts from Facebook, Twitter and Verizon care about multi-cultural marketing, you probably should, too. With our increasingly connected and diverse society, it is important to understand who your customers are and how to reach them. And marketing executives agree. African Americans and Hispanics lead the way in terms of adopting technology and represent a large portion of U.S. spending, creating vast opportunity for mobile marketers. Few get multicultural like IAB. So, don’t miss IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence panel on how you can grow the multi-cultural marketing strategy for your business.
Go Local
Reach customers right where they are and when they are nearby. It’s the easiest way to get them in your door. Advances in technology allow marketers to target consumers more precisely than ever, factoring in location and customer profile. So, it’s time to learn these tools. Learn how to increase engagement and sales conversions with a smarter mobile strategy at this session with experts from Qualcomm, Control Group, and Ogilvy.
To dive deeper into these topics, register for Social Media Week here. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and events on topics from entrepreneurship, technology and publishing. And even if you can’t make it, thanks to our partner Nokia, catch these events on Livestream by creating an account.
For those who crave a way to share their passion for social change, Eli Pariser and Upworthy are common names. Eli established Upworthy with Chris Hughes of Facebook and Peter Koechly of The Onion with the goal to make important content as viral as Charlie biting your finger.
And it’s worked. Upworthy is the fastest growing media site of all time, bringing the “awesome”, the “meaningful” and the “visual” all together.
Upworthy isn’t Eli’s first venture though. Eli is a true veteran of the Web. He formerly directed the liberal grassroots organization, MoveOn, working as a catalyst for citizen-driven change. Under his stewardship, MoveOn grew 10 times larger and collected more then $120 million in small donations. Eli realized the power of organizing individuals to take small actions for change, tripling the organization’s member base and creating a political shift in the 2006 elections.
“We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.”
In 2011, after noticing that social media and search engines were eliminating some friends’ posts from his feed and only showing him search results tailored to his tastes, he sounded the alarm on the increasingly narrow lens that social media algorithms and search networks are creating in the name of ‘personalization’ in The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. His TED talk on the topic has been seen more than 2.5 million times.
Shortly thereafter, he co-founded the company that encompasses both – using his community–organizing expertise to help combat the narrow lens of social media and search algorithms. Upworthy curates meaningful content on social, economic and societal issues that is then massively shared by the site’s community. Upworthy.com routinely breaks its own traffic records, seeing more than 46 million page views in October 2013, and garnering more views than the New York Times, FOX News or BleacherReport.
Join us to hear what he has to say grassroots organization, his experience growing organizations, and the future of Upworthy. Grab your pass now here.
We sat down with SMWNYC Supporting Sponsor Buzzfeed’s Jon Steinberg to talk journalism, branding and more. BuzzFeed is the leading social news organization, intensely focused on delivering high-quality original reporting, insight, and social content across a rapidly expanding array of subject areas. Here’s what he had to say:
What is BuzzFeed’s greatest success with social media to date?
I’d largely attribute it to our singular focus on social, which really comes from Jonah’s vision and focus for the company from day one. Our technology, editorial, and ad products all focus on creating and optimizing things that excite and inspire people to share. This has allowed us to grow the site rapidly and do only truly social advertising in lieu of banners.
What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in the emerging technology and/or new media space right now?
Well, it’s certainly the big move to social and mobile. And I think that’s one trend. This summer, the BuzzFeed Partner, which includes 300 million unique visitors from sites like Time, Daily Mail, and Huff Post got more traffic in aggregate from Facebook than from Google. And at BuzzFeed we now get about 30% to 40% of traffic from mobile. People are literally discovering and consuming media in a completely different channel then even a few years ago.
What are you looking forward to most at SMWNYC 2013?
I always like to hear about what brands that I’m unfamiliar with are doing. It’s always a great place to get ideas, and the sessions tend to always have people who are eager to chat after their panels. I love catching a few sessions each day.
Tell us about your goals for SMW. As the 2013 Official Supporting Sponsor and a host of several events, what do you hope attendees will take away from the experience?
I hope that people who have never heard of us will get to understand what BuzzFeed does in Social Advertising and that those who are curious already will attend events and panels where we can answer their questions.
What is the most creative way you’ve seen social media used?
I love these new social illustrations and infographics we’re doing for brands like AT&T and AMC’s Walking Dead.
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It’s a new genre for our social ad products that our new Chief Creative Officer Jeff Greenspan has rolled out. They are very native to the web are a designed to be shareable and relatable to fans (of say Zombies) or people interested in a given area (Classic Literature).
This year, our global theme is “Open & Connected: Principles for a Collaborative World.” How does BuzzFeed embody or support this idea?
In many ways BuzzFeed is a site that couldn’t exist without a connected world where people collaborated to share and and inform each other with all varieties of content. BuzzFeed is the oposite of an isolated, individual in front-of-a-disconnected-terminal scenario.
What brands do you think are leading the way in innovation with social and digital?
I look every week at the campaigns we’re running and think about which one interests me the most and why. I’d honestly say the answer is different every week. This week I’m loving the AT&T and AMC campaigns. From a longer term perspective, GE and Virgin Mobile have been working with us in a deep and long term fashion and are consistently pushing and innovating in what it means to be a social, always-on publisher.
