November 1, 2012

Guide to events & conferences in December

A scene from Le Web London this summer. The original Le Web, in Paris, returns next month (Photo by kmeron on Flickr).

December, with all its holiday cheer, eases the pace of conferences and events in social media, marketing, and technology.

This December I’m most excited about Le Web in Paris, the city of lights, love and Internet innovation. This year Le Web will focus on how Internet-driven devices are taking over the world; just look at how much time people spend surfing “le web” on their phones. I’m also thoroughly excited for the 2012 startup competition where sixteen emerging startups will duke it out on stage. To learn more about this great conference read my take on Le Web.

For the full year, see our full Calendar of 2012 social media, tech and marketing conferences.

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June 30, 2010

Social Media Marketing 2010 comes to SF

At Social Media Marketing London on June 17, 2010.

Anew social marketing conference makes its U.S. debut next week in San Francisco, and Socialmedia.biz readers get a 10 percent price discount by registering with the code Socialmediajd.

Called Social Media Marketing 2010, the gathering will bring together social media experts such as Brian Solis, Chris Heuer and Sarah Austin to discuss the latest campaigns, techniques and theories for achieving successful campaigns. Join in and follow the conversation on twitter at #smmsf

“Social Media Marketing is an essential event for anyone who’s serious about social media in San Francisco. You can either spend months learning by trial and error, or you can attend this event and learn it all in a day,” said conference organizer Murray Newlands, a UK blogger and director of the agency Influence People.

The consulting group is planning a series of events across the United States this autumn and is kicking things off in San Francisco after an inaugural event that drew a crowd of 200 at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London two weeks ago.

On the agenda: Viral Social Media Campaigns, What Works; The Press Talks: How to get Digital PR for your Company; Insider Look: How Tech Writers Cover Social Media; A/B Testing for Social Media; How to Build Communities for Brands; Social Media Marketing Metrics and Monetizing Social Media. See the program agenda.

Speakers include Chris Heuer, Ben Parr, Richard Jalichandra, David Gelles, Joe Vazquez, Tom Foremski, Kym McNicholas, Jon Swartz, Dan Martell, Jennifer Neeley Lindsay, Hiten Shah, Vinnie Lauria, Aaron Strout, Sarah Austin, Murray Newlands and Marissa Louie.

When: July 8
Where: Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St., San Francisco
Tickets: $250 (register with code Socialmediajd to get a 10% discount), includes a drink reception.

I plan to attend, hope to see you there. Continue reading →

June 14, 2009

Corporate social media workshop in LA June 24

To help corporate social media champions and consultants

I‘m really excited about presenting the Social Network Roadmap in Los Angeles at the Social Networking Conference, so I won’t pretend to be impartial here.

If you are trying to persuade risk-adverse colleagues or clients to adopt social media more quickly, read on. The roadmap is a suite of management tools that helps users to manage the risks that adopting social networks poses for large organizations. I’ll also share the agenda and ask for your comments.

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January 28, 2009

Social networks maturing fast

Twitter and Facebook top of mind: The nascent power of weak ties and small touches

What a difference a year makes! The Social Networking Conference debuted several years ago as a forum for social networking sites and vendors, with enterprise clients few and far between. Miami 2009 took place January 22-23, 2009 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and it was a veritable enterprise 2.0 conference. Many of the presenters hailed from enterprise-focused high technology vendors, but they spoke as social networking practitioners. The good practices they shared reflected the maturation of social networks. Don’t get me wrong, we are still in early days, but it was obvious to see that social networks would be completely mainstream this year. Enterprise-focused vendors provided additional evidence by explaining some of the new social network features in their offerings.

You may download this report as a PDF:

Social Networking Watch’s Mark Brooks gave an overview of key trends, while jetBlue’s Morgan Johnston and IBM’s Adam Christensen drove home the message that companies could be rewarded for trusting their customers in social networks. Ford’s Scott Monty, Sun’s Lou Ordorica and Microsoft’s Marty Collins shared how they were using social networking to evolve their companies by opening up to customers and adopting P2P, two-way communications.Yammer’s David Schwartz and Faceforce’s Clara Shih presented two tech innovators that promised significant disruptive potential. SAP’s Steve Mann, Opera’s Thomas Ford and Dow Jones’ Tom Aley all shared fascinating social networking elements of their portfolios, which were all enterprise-focused. Awareness Networks’ John Bruce was on hand to share good practices and pitfalls. I presented the only industry-focused preso, focused on how social networks were beginning to disrupt the U.S. healthcare industry. I also gave the pre-conference workshop, Successful Social Networking Projects in the Enterprise.
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January 8, 2009

P2P Media Summit at CES

Here’s the thing about Macworld Expo (in San Francisco) and the Consumer Electronics Show (in Las Vegas) being held on the same week: It drives tech fanatics like me crazy because you only have time to record media and take in a handful of product announcements or interesting events because much of your time is spent socializing with friends, meeting new people, traveling and trying to navigate the logistics of a show, like CES, that is so physically draining.

I’ve been hitting a few of the high points over at Twitter (and actually made a number of new Twitter friends as well as met several folks, like Scott Monty and Joseph Jaffe, whom I’ve already been following).

I just remarked to @stevegarfield that this is the first conference I’ve attended where people are exchanging Twitter IDs rather than email addresses. Actually, that’s not an insignificant shift.

After I arrived yesterday, I made straight for the P2P Media Summit organized by Marty Lafferty and the Distributed Computing Industry Association. The gathering brought together some of the thought leaders around digital media, but as I said on the panel, I get worried whenever I’m at a conference where the most frequently used terms are "distribution," "content," "consumers," "monetize" and "protection." If this were a drinking game, we would have all hit the sauce heavily.

I’ll briefly mention the points I raised during our panel on Creating the Commercial P2P Ecosystem with Dave Ulmer of Motorola, Boh Dupree of Verizon Communications, Mike King of Abacast, Jonathan Lee of PiCAST Streaming Solutions and Neerav Shah of Verimatrix.

I suggested that rarely have we seen such a clear demarcation between eras as when the Obama administration begins in 12 days, and that new approach to politics and governing also applies to similar advances happening in social media, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Echoing Ulmer’s good point that the technology should be secondary to what the end user wants to accomplish, I suggested that the plumbing (P2P, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), cloud computing) shouldn’t determine a startup’s choice of business models, and that the opportunities provided by the cloud dramatically reduces the cost of a startup when IT infrastructure costs are offloaded. The cloud holds out transformative possibilities in culture, commerce, public policy, national security and personal interaction.

The panel was cut short before I could make my prediction for 2009: that commercial interactions will begin to transform from impersonal experiences to more personal, social and contextual relationships that foster deeper commercial connections. Reputation and identity will begin to play a greater role (in addition to perpetual considerations like price and convenience) in online transactions.

Took some nice photos today, will see if I’ll upload them Friday or Saturday.