(Boston's not on the list, but check out the view from the MIT Media Lab.)
Every year, Social Media Week draws participants from around the world to discover new trends in mobile and social media. If you’d like a free vacation out of the deal, get out your smartphone. Social Media Week is celebrating its sixth anniversary this fall with a photography contest to highlight this year’s trend of sharing and curating photos.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Nokia looks to be one of the first location-based technology and vending machines working together. You may think that it seems to be a cool match, but will the connection last beyond its introduction at Social Media Week?
The next Social Media Week is set for Sept. 19-23, and Los Angeles will return to the list of event cities, along with new entries Vancouver, British Columbia; Beirut, Lebanon; and Glasgow, Scotland.
Social Media Week organizer Crowdcentric is looking for contributors for a global editorial platform covering worldwide social and mobile media.
Crowdcentric said it expects two to three posts weekly, in English, covering news, analysis, or commentary on social and mobile media developments from contributors’ native countries, adding that interested parties can sign up here, and questions can be emailed to sara@socialmediaweek.org.
The next Social Media Week will be held Sept. 19-13 in 12 cities.
foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was the subject of a keynote interview as part of Social Media Week New York, conducted by Fast Company‘s Austin Carr at JWT’s Media & Communications Hub in Manhattan.
Crowley mentioned that the company has grown from four employees and 100,000 users to 50 employees and some 6.5 million users, saying, “Going from 100,000 users to 6.5 million users, a lot of things break in the middle.”
Describing how the foursquare platform evolved, he said, “You can get 10 random foursquare users in a room and ask them what drew them to the platform, and you’d get 10 different answers. What should I eat? Can I get a special? We threw 10 things at the wall to see what sticks, and all 10 of them stuck. It’s a good thing, because it shows how rich the platform is and how rich it could be. How do you boil everything that foursquare does down to one sentence? I don’t think we want to tell people how to use the product. We want people to teach us how they’re using it. The initial design was, ‘I go out for happy hour, I broadcast my location, and a bunch of people show up.’ ”
Crowley continued, “Can you use game mechanics to incentivize and encourage people to go out and enrich their lives? I think there’s something good about software that can get you to try new experiences. No matter where I’m standing in Manhattan, there’s 1,000 options of things I could be doing right now. foursquare can help me filter those options.”
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were the hot topic at WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience, a Social Media Week New York panel hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum and moderated by its editor and curator, Micah Sifry.
Speakers at the event, in order, were Deanna Zandt, author of Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking; Evgeny Morozov, author of new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; and John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The event was held at Hearst’s Art & Culture Hub in Manhattan.
Zandt made it a point to differentiate between DDoS attacks and hacking, saying, “Denial-of-service attacks are not hacking. Hacking tends to be where systems are broken into and data are compromised. None of the business data or practices was compromised in any way. I do feel that DDOS is a civil form of disobedience.”
Speaking specifically about Anonymous, the group responsible for attacking several corporate Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, she said, “In the past, Anonymous hasn’t done anything in this scale that was explicitly, overtly, hugely political,” adding that the group was made up of “chaos enthusiasts — they’re interested in the drama of chaos unfolding. It’s not as if there was this sleeper cell of people who were ready to attack this big, bad corporation.”
On digital activism in general, Zandt concluded, “I’m often very, very frustrated with what the face of actual digital activism looks like. We have the ability and the freedom to risk ourselves for the benefit of many who don’t. We can’t ultimately rely on these digital tools to do our dirty work. If governments and corporations can easily collude to disable our ability to communicate with one another, what is our response?”
The Science and Technology Hub at Google’s New York outpost was the site of Monday afternoon’s The Internet and Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already in a Post-Social-Media World?, hosted by Wired and moderated by its New York bureau chief, John C. Abell.
Ease of use and access was a point that came up often, as Abell said, “With electricity and an Internet connection, you can whisper in Times Square and be heard anywhere else in the world,” and panelist Susannah Vila, director of content and outreach for Movements.org, added, “The fact that it’s free and easy and cool sort of underlines the need for people to see what’s happening in Egypt and get people together for an advocacy campaign.” Panelist Micah Sifry, co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, pointed to how quickly people in parts of the Middle East are getting mobile phones, adding, “In the past few years, the number of people with mobile phones in Egypt has soared, something like 60 percent — same thing in Tunisia.” Adam Penenberg, assistant director of the business and economic reporting program at New York University, added, “During the civil-rights movement, if they had cell phones, they would have used them. Now we can reach many more people There’s nothing really new here: These are just tools that are amplifying the message we can connect and spread People are more connected: It helps in bringing people together.”
Sifry cautioned against generalizing and jumping to conclusions, saying, “I don’t think we know almost diddly about what’s actually going on. I think we have to be extremely careful before making judgments about the role of social media in Tunisia, Egypt, the rest of the Mideast, or anywhere else. We use the word ‘movement’ too easily. The language of revolution and movements is instead what we hear rather than the reality.”
Social Media Week kicks off Monday in nine cities — New York, San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, London, Hong Kong, and Istanbul — and Crowdcentric CEO and Social Media Week founder and executive director Toby Daniels said year four of the event will be “our most spectacular yet, and one of the largest distributed conferences in the world.”
Speaking at the opening press conference at Hearst Tower in New York, Daniels said, “I am amazed by the creativity and the depth and the variety of the content. What I’m seeing now is a shift away from the technologies and toward specific industry sectors.”
Hearst Magazines president David Carey said:
This is one of the hottest topics in media on one of the coldest weeks of the year. We’ve always felt a special kinship with social media. As a magazine publisher, in many ways, magazines were the original social media. We have many of our top editors lined up to be in panels and programs. We’ve made understanding social media and applying it to our top brands a priority.
The New York portion of Social Media Week, set for Feb. 7-11, will take place in five “Content Hubs” representing key areas of focus.
Global ad agency JWT will host the Business, Media, and Communications Hub. The Paley Center for Media will host People and Society. Red Bull Space will be the site of Music, Sports and Gaming. And the organizers of the event hope to announce locations for the Science and Technology and Art and Culture hubs within the next week.
In addition to New York, Social Media Week will be held simultaneously in London, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Toronto, Hong Kong, São Paulo, and Istanbul, the latter of which was added this week.
The organizers of Social Media Week — scheduled for Feb. 7-11 in New York, London, San Francisco, Toronto, São Paulo, Paris, and Rome, with two or three cities to be added — are looking for more companies to Get Involved.
Crowdcentric CEO and Social Media Week founder and executive director Toby Daniels said in an email that opportunities exist to curate and host events; speak and present; design workshops; set up interviews; sponsor events; provide editorial coverage; and participate on the local host committees.
The local city partners for the February event are Entrinsic for Toronto, Chinwag for London, Sixpix Content for São Paulo, Swirl Integrated Marketing and Social Media Club for San Francisco, and La Netscouade for Paris.
For more information, see the Get Involved in Social Media Week page or email Crowdcentric vice president and Social Media Week global director Ben Scheim at ben@crowdcentric.net.
