Archive for “February, 2012”

PodCamp Reminds Us of Our Roots

This past weekend was PodCamp Toronto. PodCamp, for the uninitiated, is a user-generated conference (or unconference). It is open, and features sessions and content provided by participants. It is by the community and for the community.

I’m a member of the organizing team for PodCamp Toronto and have for the past four years. I work with a team of passionate and dedicated volunteers who keep true to the PodCamp spirit. The Toronto event is open to anyone, free to attend (sponsor-supported), and participants suggest and provide all the programming. In the same spirit, the Law of Two Feet applies.

If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing: Give greetings, use your two feet, and go do something useful. Responsibility resides with you.

Just imagine if the Law of Two Feet applied to all conferences (or business meetings, for that matter).

Overtime, as social media and digital has evolved, so, too, has PodCamp Toronto. Initially for a core group of early adopters, it has expanded over time to reach literally hundreds of participants and become Canada’s largest new media event.

What I find truly remarkable is to watch this community expand and morph over time while remaining committed to the core values of the unconference movement, which are pretty closely aligned to the old school social media values: add value, be respectful, take ownership and be your authentic self.

To give you a feel for how it all goes down, here’s a small sample of the hundreds of Tweets generated (and still being generated) by the participants at PodCamp Toronto 2012:

 

 

As social media has been adopted by big business, words like “authenticity” have taken on buzzword status and have been somewhat watered down. With that context, it is genuinely remarkable to take a step back at PodCamp and reconnect with a true-blue community of people who are create and share content about their passions and are not necessarily motivated by conversions, ROI and the bottom line.

If PodCamp or an unconference comes to your town I encourage you to check it out—leave your big business baggage at the door, come as a human being and make true meaningful connections with real people.

If you were at PodCamp Toronto over the weekend, or have attended unconferences in the past, what do you think business can learn from the unconference movement?

 

 

Social Media Group Spark! for Social Media Week: Videos

The SMG team had a great time at our Friday Feb 15th Spark event. We shared our thoughts on content, data, and the digital and social world—now it’s time to hear from you!

Check out these videos of each of our speakers, feel free to share them with your networks, and let us know what you think. Each speaker will be blogging on their topics over the next couple weeks, so post your comments and questions here and we’ll address them on the blog!

If you’d like to find out more about SMG and what we do, please fill out our contact form and we’ll get in touch to set up a time to chat!

About the Speakers

 

James Cooper @jamescooper
Strategist, Content and Community

James explores the emerging trend of transmedia storytelling, which is storytelling across multiple platforms and formats using digital technologies. This talk will illustrate how, more than ever, brands have an opportunity to create a continuous content narrative that engages an audience through multiple media formats.

 

Patrick Gladney @pgladney
Group Head, Research and Insights

Patrick discusses the democratization of data. The new online world and communication landscape has made consumer and market data ubiquitous. Marketers of all stripes have unprecedented access to consumer information and are looking to action that data in almost real time. The reality is that clients and agencies have always had access to data, but the real target is insights, not anecdotes.

 

Cam Finlayson @camfinlayson
Client Engagement Director, Client Strategy and Innovation

Cam discusses data mining and social good. Big Data has quickly become an industry buzz term and with it comes promises of exciting opportunities for consumer intelligence. However, increasing privacy concerns and the logistics associated with data refinement bring their own unique set of challenges for marketers. In his session, Cam outlines some emerging solutions to address these concerns as well as innovative opportunities for social good through real-time data analysis.

 

Lindsay Stanford @lindsaystanford
Client Engagement Director, Content and Community

Lindsay’s talk is called “Inspire and Ignite: The New Wave of Visual Content Curation”. With less time and more content to sift through, new emerging visual curation platforms have taken off in a big way. Tapping into our desire for authentic and personal inspiration, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest have changed the way we explore and share content. Find out how brands get on board and ride the wave.

 

Michelle McCudden @mmccudden1
Manager, Client Strategy and Innovation

Michelle addresses a popular, but misguided request in social media marketing: making a piece of content “go viral.” This session covers why “viral” isn’t a useful term, what executives really mean when they ask for content to go viral, and how we can design content so that users are likely to spread it throughout their networks.

 

Brandon Oliver Smith @brandonXoliver
Analyst, Research and Insights

Brandon explores how brands and individuals cut through the noise. The barrier to entry for anyone to create content has dissolved in the age of affordable technology. How can your content make an impact when it’s competing with nearly everyone on the planet? Brandon will talk about pop culture and the importance of taking the road less traveled to make an impact in the digital age.

 

 

Maggie Fox @maggiefox
Founder and CEO

Maggie Fox is the founder, CEO and Chief Marketing Officer of Social Media Group. Maggie was the host of SMG’s Spark event.

Social Media Week San Francisco: SAP Social Media Day

Last week I had the great privilege of being asked to participate in SAP’s Social Media Day in Silicon Valley; part of global Social Media Week (see here for SMG’s own contribution to SMWTO).

Organized by Natascha Thomson of Marketing Xlerator, speakers included SAP’s CMO Jonathan Becher, who opened the day with a keynote that asked the question, “How Social Should Your Culture Be?”, followed by a panel discussion that I participated in along with Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang (video of all sessions can be viewed here). Possibly the most interesting outcome of our chat? The hashtag #deadpuppy (watch the video to see what I mean).

Subsequent discussions included:

The Social Culture
, lead by SAP Vice President of Social Media Brian Ellefritz, which included a panel that discussed the challenges of building a social brand, which featured Maria Poveromo from Adobe, Len Devanna from the most excellent Ant’s Eye View, Lisa Rosner, CMO of Netbase, and Becky Ann Brown, Director of Social Media at Intel.

The Social Audience, lead by SAP’s Mark Yolton, Senior Vice President of Communities and Social Media. The amazing Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of the Community Roundtable, delivered a presentation titled, “Why People, Relationships and Communities are Becoming Strategic”. I delivered a talk about Content Marketing and how marketers must learn how to use it to earn attention in a “billion channel universe”. We finished up with a great panel discussion that included Deidre Walsh from Jive Software, Kimarie Matthews from Wells Fargo and SAP Mentor Srini Tanikella.

Social Technology, the final session, was moderated by Timo Elliott, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing at Business Objects (who also takes the most fantastic pictures on Instagram) and explored how social techniques can be used to enhance and improve the way products are made and sold.

Overall, it was a tremendous day filled with incredibly high-quality content and speakers, and it was a pleasure to have been invited to contribute. I took away a ton of information and insight, as I’m sure the room full of attendees did as well. For those of you not able to be there, video of the entire day is available here.

[disclosure: SAP is an SMG client]

Best Thinkers Webinar Series: B2B and the Complex Sale

Join Maggie Fox next Tuesday February 28th at 12pm EST / 9am PST for an exclusive live webinar from Social Media Today on B2B and the Complex Sale.

The nature of complex sales has changed dramatically with the adoption of the Internet as a research tool. People on the sales end are much less in control of the process because customers can now find out much about the supplier without asking them directly. Now vendors are adopting some of the same capabilities provided through the Net – researching the needs of potential customers and clients, discovering what will bring value to their companies. The B2B world is becoming one where negotiation can become more well-informed before it even begins. This webinar will cover this changing landscape, addressing questions like the following:

  • How do sales people train to operating in the Enterprise 2.0 world?
  • What tools are available today to both vendors and buyers that did not exist 5 or 10 years ago?
  • How does online B2B affect the sales cycle?

Maggie and panel members, Kendra Lee, author of the award winning book Selling Against the Goal and president of KLA Group and Ron Karr, CEO of Karr Associates Inc., a firm that specializes in helping organizations build high performing sales cultures and customer loyalty and is also the author of Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way.

Register now, HERE!

Closed for Family Day

Social Media Group’s offices in Toronto are closed Monday February 20, 2012 for Family Day. We’re back in the office on Tuesday February 21, 2012.

Have a safe and happy holiday spending some quality time with your families!

Image: photon_de

SMG Roundup for Feb. 17, 2012 – Social Media Week Edition

This week’s roundup is all about Social Media Week.

Social Media Week “offers a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries. Annually, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference online and through mobile.”

With that in mind, I’m going round up some of the most buzzed about items from Social Media Week 2012.

#SMW2012 Halftime Report

On Wednesday, Synthesio published a half-time report infographic of Social Media Week awesomeness. It includes a look at top influencers, most buzzed about keynote speakers and trending topics. Speaking of infographics, Social Media Week, with the help of Nokia and The Guardian is publishing a real-time infographic on their homepage that tracks a real-time Twitter feed, FourSquare checkins and the answers to polls.

 

There is a tonne of great content created and shared at Social Media Week’s 1,040 events. Here are few items of interest.

Highlights from SMW San Francisco

Michael Procopio collected presentations from San Francisco social media week events and published them via storify. I love the range and variety of topics covered.

Creating Music Community in the Digital Age

From Social Media Week NYC comes this report on a keynote by Chris Kaskie, president of Pitchfork Media, a site established in 1995 and devoted to music with a healthy dose of indie rock.

If anything, Kaskie was grieving over the disappearance of the carefully curated, tangible collections of music recordings we used to own — like the LP collection he still looks forward to handing down to his children, rather than the password to a cloud full of digital playlists that seem likely to be more commonplace. “You don’t own anything anymore,” he said. “How do you get people excited about anything when it’s so fleeting?” Of course, Kaskie and his panelists had a ready answer to that: you get people excited about music by turning it from an industry into a community. In days of yore — Kaskie joined Pitchfork in 2004, when Friendster was still in ascendance — building a community meant launching a music festival where people could share the experience of music. (Indeed, Pitchfork’s festival has become a centerpiece of the summer festival schedule in its hometown of Chicago. Last October, the franchise expanded to Paris.) Today, community means Twitter, where Pitchfork readers endlessly debate the site’s notoriously polarizing reviews. Community also means Spotify, feeding a steady, frictionless stream of your music tastes to your Facebook friends.

SAP Conference for Social Media Week 2012

Maggie was in Palo Alto this week with our clients at SAP for their Social Media Week celebrations. SAP is one of the most progressive social enterprises on the planet with over two million members in the SAP Community Network. Their Social Media Week offerings did not disappoint. Check out the video replays on their site. The most popular video is CMO Jonathan Becher on the challenges of transforming his organization to embrace social media as part of their DNA and not treat it as a marketing megaphone. Check it out.

Presentations from SMG’s own Social Media Week Event

Never ones to back away from a challenge, today SMG delivered an Ignite-inspired event called Spark! for Social Media Week Toronto. Six members of the SMG team delivered 5-minute presentations on topics as diverse as Data Democracy, creating content to cut through the noise and Transmedia Storytelling. Check them out on SlideShare.

We’ll be back with videos of each of the talks in the next week or so.

More Linky Goodness from Social Media Week

Forbes: Shoutlet and the “Lin-sanity” of Social Media Week [disclosure: SMG uses Shoutlet software]

SmartBlog on Social Media: Live from Social Media Week: Suxorz – the worst social media screw-ups of 2011

Forbes: Top Brands on Social Media Week: What Internal, Adobe, Wells Fargo, Edelman and SAP said

Final Peek at SMG's SMWTO event happening tomorrow!

The Ignite-inspired Social Media Group Spark event for Social Media Week Toronto is happening tomorrow morning!

Here is a little preview from our final two speakers:

Lindsay’s talk is called “Inspire and Ignite: The New Wave of Visual Content Curation”. With less time and more content to sift through, new emerging visual curation platforms have taken off in a big way. Tapping into our desire for authentic and personal inspiration, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest have changed the way we explore and share content. Find out how brands get on board and ride the wave.

James will explore the emerging trend of transmedia storytelling, which is storytelling across multiple platforms and formats using digital technologies. This talk will illustrate how, more than ever, brands have an opportunity to create a continuous content narrative that engages an audience through multiple media formats.

In case you missed yesterday’s and Tuesday’s blog posts, I shared details from our four other SMG speakers.

This event sold out almost immediately, but we’ve opened up a few extra spots! Visit here to register.  We also know we’ve got lots of fans who don’t live in Toronto. But we want everyone to be able to participate, so we’re offering live streaming during the event! Visit http://socialmediagroup.com/social-media-week-2012 to find out more about tomorrow’s event and check back on Friday morning at 9am EDT to watch live!

P.S. Don’t forget to Tweet using our event hashtag: #smwtoSMGspark.

A Sneak Peek at SMG's SMWTO event this Friday!

If you didn’t catch my post yesterday, this Friday Social Media Group is holding an Ignite-inspired event, Spark for Social Media Week Toronto. At Spark, SMG presenters will share their personal and professional passions, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of just five minutes for each presentation.

Here is another sneak peak from two more of our speakers:

Patrick will talk about the democratization of data.  The new online world and communication landscape has made consumer and market data ubiquitous. Marketers of all stripes have unprecedented access to consumer information and are looking to action that data in almost real time. The reality is that clients and agencies have always had access to data, but the real target is insights, not anecdotes.

Cam will discuss data mining & social good. Big Data has quickly becme an industry buzz term and with it promises of exciting opportunities for consumer intelligence. However, increasing privacy concerns and the logistics associated with data refinement bring their own unique set of challenges for marketers. In his session, Cam will outline some emerging solutions to address these concerns as well as innovative opportunities for social good through real-time data analysis.

Incase you missed it, in yesterday’s blog post I shared details from two of our other SMG speakers.

The event sold out in no time but we are offering live streaming during the event! Visit http://socialmediagroup.com/social-media-week-2012 to read more about Friday’s event and check back on Friday morning at 9am EDT to register and watch live!

And don’t forget to Tweet using our event hashtag: #smwtoSMGspark.

SMG's Ignite-inspired SMWTO event this Friday!

 

Inspired by Ignite, which is a geek event in over 100 cities worldwide, Social Media Group presents Spark for Social Media Week Toronto. This Friday the 17th at 9 am EDT, members of the SMG team will talk about their passions, experience and expertise in business, innovation, collaboration, community and content. With only five minutes per session, this event is perfect for short attention spans. You’ll be inspired in no time!

Here is a little sneak peak from two of our speakers:

Michelle will address a popular, but misguided request in social media marketing: making a piece of content “go viral.” This session will cover why “viral” isn’t a useful term, what executives really mean when they ask for content to go viral, and how we can design content so that users are likely to spread it throughout their networks.

Brandon will discuss the barrier to entry for anyone to create content has dissolved in the age of affordable technology. How can your content make an impact when it’s competing with nearly  everyone on the planet? Brandon talks about Pop Culture and the importance of taking the road less traveled to make an impact in the digital age.

This event sold out almost immediately, and we know we’ve got lots of fans who don’t live in Toronto. But we want everyone to be able to participate, so we’re offering live streaming during the event! Visit http://socialmediagroup.com/social-media-week-2012 to read more about Friday’s event and check back on Friday morning at 9am EDT to register and watch live!

P.S. Don’t forget to Tweet using our event hashtag: #smwtoSMGspark.

Best Thinkers Webinar Series: How is Big Media Adapting to a Social Media World

Join Maggie Fox next Tuesday February 21st at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST for an exclusive live webinar from Social Media Today on How is Big Media Adapting to a Social Media World.

Big Media got big in the ages of broadcast and print, when corporations controlled the flow of content and consumers had few opportunities to interact and contribute. That balance has shifted radically over the past decade, as billions of consumers have discovered the social Web and mobile communication and were given easy tools to become content creators themselves.

In this webinar, our panel of experts will discuss the plight of Big Media – whether old business models have become obsolete, and how audiences have changed – and what it’s doing to save itself as an industry. We’ll consider questions like the following:

  • Where is today’s audience spending time and what content sources do they pay attention to?
  • Where is Big Media behind the curve of change in how it provides and gets paid for content?
  • What scares media corporations about the content models being invented on the Net?
  • What has the industry done so far in its attempt to retain its power?
  • How must Big Media evolve to stay profitable?

Sure to be a great discussion! Register now, HERE!