Fringe smwf: Meet My Peeps

The last and most personal one of my series of posts in covering the SMWF ! TGIF !!

I’d really like to introduce you to the people who I think are innovative forward thinkers and great to be around.

Top participant: Josh Chandler
At 19, he was by far the youngest blogger / influencer. And despite his post on the logistics of the conference, he was also, by far, the most upbeat, about smwf when most were disappointed. AND he also holds the record of the most helpful guy around, running from the conference rooms to the bloggers lounge to lend his iPhone charger to bloggers he’d never met before.

Top brand name and product discovery: wtfJeans ! A line of jean’s specifically designed for geeks, it keeps your stuff (all of it) snug . A great idea by Sanja Rastovac who’s also a blogger.
Sanja is the girl with the red hair and the great ideas: her business card is half the size of yours (not mine, obviously, since I don’t do biz cards) and says “Remember me , I’m the one with red hair!”. Then there are 2 keys, one “delete” and another “save”. The perfect geeky girl statement. I LOVE it !

Friendliest exhibitors: the Viadeo team.
Yes, it is another online social/professional network but its focus markets are the southern ones. Smart thinking. They have properly staffed their stand with 4 people (5 at times) and offered daily sweepstakes for a magnum of Moët & Chandon champagne … and had huge, I mean HUGE, — erm… shall I call them vase-like containers ? — huge containers filled with sweets and lollipops (lollies as they say in the UK) of all sorts.
On top of that, I had the opportunity to talk business with them. I’m actually on their network and well, as you may have noticed, the code of the share button for Viadeo was corrupted and I had to tell them… They thanked me with even more sweets (how old am I, exactly again ?).
—> A special mention to Wayne Gibbins (@waynegibbins) who’s currently on some beach in Asia (it’s ok for some, eh ?) and Rosveisa Curioca (@Rosveisa) their über multi-cultural and social girl. You guys are definitely good at socializing on and off line !!

Multi-lingual blogger Karin Aldea put me to shame. I can speak a few languages but have elected to blog in English. She, on the other hand, tweets and blogs in three languages: English, Hebrew and… not sure about the third one but I think it’s French, eh oui ! She came all the way from Tel Aviv, Israel.
Am impressed.

Finally, an impromptu group of bloggers formed at smwf at the “bloggers lounge”, as the first day was drawing to an end.

I’d spoken to Chloe Nicholls, aka @ThatGirl_Chloe on Twitter but not seen her. She recognized my smile as she came and sat next to me at the lounge.
Sanja I’d met in the morning as I was trying to get connected to the more-than-unreliable wifi juice. She sat there too at the end of the first afternoon.
Nichola Stott was typing away all day and I sort of just walked up to her and started chit chatting. She is very very very much the dream professional and business owner. Her drive and energy are truly inspiring.

Then, last but not least as she’s co-moderating the SixDegs event organization issue with me on here, Hannah Keys, aka @hannahrohi from Skimlinks. Thank you Hannah for diving right in !

So there, see, I did have a good time.

And I networked as usual. This morning, Nichola sent out a really great #FF to me as “Multi-lingual and uber-social @merrybubbles is one kick-ass blogger.”

Thank you !

In conclusion: smwf wasn’t all that bad — thanks to the fringe happenings !

My favorite quotes from smwf

A typical, light-hearted Friday post: quotes heard and collected on and off-stage. Unexpected, funny, geeky, … etc. Here’s my selection of 6 of them. Enjoy !

- Most agreed upon, on and off-stage: “enough of social media… let’s call it something else” – Suggestions were mainly for “digital”

- Most unexpected statement (and funniest): “Hello. I’m on my own, as always”, then turns his back to us. Eh ? I call them words of wisdom from a proud standalone at the Monday PM shindig while two of us were trying to be social as he was standing on his own (yeah, well) in a corner…

- Geekiest: “The pub with the plug”, describing our geeky bloggers’ needs for chilling out and power connection — quench our thirst and plug our devices (mainly laptops and iPhones, if you must know)

- Most tweeted single line: “Can anyone lend me his/her iPhone charger please ?” — a huge shortage apparently. Which practically raised status of the owners and lenders to semi-gods for geeks (I love geeks)

- Gimmick: “Control is so 20th century” — Lewis PR COO Paul Charles, advocating for clear and up-to-date internal digital guidelines

- Most personal – as it’s my personal branding line: I don’t do business cards, I connect to people and send emails right away. People were most of the time giving me the look, the bad one. But hey, guess what: another woman was doing the same… as blogger Josh Chandler reported: “I met Rebecca Hollis of Intuit yesterday, and she really drove home this message of “Not accepting business cards, and making a real-life connection with someone”. There, thanks Rebecca for the punchline !

Happy Friday everyone and thank you for reading my Friday mash !

SMWF Bloggers’ De-Light: voice how you feel and make suggestions for SixDegs

Hello,

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’ve seen tweets going around: we’re collecting your comments and will be sending them onto SixDegrees.

Ian, SixDegs’ Managing Director, has gotten in touch with us and we’ve decided to step up to the plate and be constructive about it.
Thank you to those of you who have already left they contribution on the original post , they will be taken into account.

We’re setting this one up just for you to vent (yes!) and contribute positively :

–> what were your expectations for smwf ?
–> how would you suggest SixDegrees deals with it at next year’s event ?

Hannah Keys, aka Hannarohi of Skimlinks and myself have joined forces to co-moderate.

The floor is yours, fire away !

Image source: SAUWS

Top 5 trending and hot topics at #smwf 2010

Content at the Social Media World Forum (#smwf) 2010 was mostly articulated around strategy applied to various objectives and environments (government, politics, PR, crisis communication, etc). From this stem my three trending topics.
A few nuggets however also made their way to the surface: those are “hot topics”.

Three trending topics:
- Strategy: what it is, how to draw one, what to look for when devising one, asking the right questions.
A tip from Muhammad Karim, Senior Brand Manager for Mars: DON’T launch into or try anything if you don’t have a strategy. Sounds obvious but apparently it’s not unusual that people launch into “campaigns” without having built a clear roadmap.

- Metrics: surprise, surprise — NOT (…) ! Measuring your impact. Keywords: ROI, results, brand. Luckily we were spared the awful “conversion rate”, which, apparently took front stage at SXSW (South By South West, held in Austin, Texas).
I noticed a certain schizophrenia on the part of the speakers who kept on oscillating between “how many” and “who” — quantitative vs qualitative.
Within the metrics issue lays the question of the measuring tools. The question was debated on and off-stage: free applications vs professional apps.
—> here’s another tip from Muhammad Karim : the difference is that you gain time on the long term with professional apps

- Facebook came up in 95% of conversations, on and off stage. Big buzz. There were also dedicated Facebook 101 workshops, called “Facebook Developers Garage” (Why garage, by the way ? Can someone tell me ? ). But where was LinkedIn ? The biggest buzz deficit I noticed was there. Although they had sent top representatives, it was hardly mentioned in official talks or lobby chats. On the other hand, the Viadeo representatives were very much there and very actively networking.

Two hot topics:
- Geotagging is the next big thing. It has great revenue-generating potential through its cross use on multiple platforms. Geotagging enables 1) to provide the user with information regarding services existing in his/her direct, immediate environment at any given time and 2) to provide tailor-made offers and suggestions to users locally as well as worldwide.
—> guess what ? Facebook is ready to launch its app. Get ready ! Yes, this raises the issue of privacy, indeed. But it’s another debate altogether.

- Virtual gaming: it is a growth market, with the U.S. representing a mere 1/5th of the size of the Chinese market. Currently, Asia is the sector leader. [thank you, Nichola Stott for the figures as I hadn't attended that session].
For Muhammad Karim, the Social Gaming Market will be the biggest gaming market in the world in five years.
And according to Trevor Johnson, Facebook’s Head of Strategy and Planning, EMEA, virtual branded gifts are really big, especially with the virtual economy being valued at 10 billion usd in 2010.

There’s a controversy that makes me smile and I want to share it with you to wrap this up: it’s about Zynga’s Farmville game on Facebook.

Facebook's Trevor Johnson talks about Zynga's Farmville at the Social Media World Forum 2010

About 1% of the world population plays Farmville. Trevor Johnson said that even real-life farmers enjoy playing it. Yes, it’s truly addictive, and I have no shame to testify myself, after having declined offers to play for a year, I’m now hooked. So the debate is a matter of “addictive” vs “I’m worried for the human race”.

… So what’s *your* take on it ?

Bloggers’ de-light: top misses at the Social Media World Forum

This year’s was the second edition of the event, the Social Media World Forum, aka #smwf. SixDegrees, who organizes it, did a good job of buzzing it through the roof. They proudly – and rightly so – reported a record 4000+ participants, more than doubling the first edition’s attendance.

H O W E V E R …

With success comes challenge and with commitment should come delivery. There were a few misses there, and especially regarding bloggers. The light went out on some of us… de-light.

A really friendly crew from PicturePerfectTV came to interview me on the morning of the first day and all I did was rant about the lack of organization and the bloggers’ plight. The short reel was released today, no wonder they cut me out of it !
The journalist seemed to be genuinely sorry for us (hello Andrew Psarianos!) but a ranting French person was not exactly the sexiest ad SixDegs could have dreamt of.

Therefore, I’ve decided to give this a positive and dynamic spin by listing suggestions for improvement instead of just ranting…

- When recording over 4000 pre-registrations, make sure to devote the right staff and enough staff to the actual registration on the opening day.
Because making people line up for over 30 minutes for registration on the Monday AM is NOT a good first impression.
Failing to provide proper guidance as to the line bloggers should stand in (general or media? Some of us went one way and the others went the other way) can be interpreted as a lack of interest. Just like when you build a community, if you fail to respond in an appropriate and timely manner, the people/users leave your group.

- When offering specific, differentiated participants categories, it’s always better to stick to those and deliver on the promises made to the various demographics
Because not delivering on official commitment to provide bloggers with red/white bracelet that would give “comfort” privileges (as in food and refreshments or ability to participate to the evening shindig party) is yet AGAIN a good cause for discontent.
Bloggers are business-minded people, you know. Just do NOT propose and commit to something that you cannot deliver on, it’s really bad for your reputation.

- When bloggers are promised a “bloggers’ lounge”, they sure expect more than a tiny space with a dozen bean bags, 3 tables (4 bags per table) and afew plugs. This doesn’t really go down well, especially when we all know that the number of bloggers will easily surpass that 12 big cushions lot.

- The quality of the speakers line up was uneven and the general feeling was that of disappointment: very little new content and quite a lot of pure theory that can easily be found in books (see Petra Semantia’s post).

Basically, what I’m saying is that there is a reason why you invite bloggers to attend your event. But for the partnership to be mutually beneficial, you need to cut through the noise to have bloggers hear your voice as they’re already snowed under by brands and companies willing to have good press. You have to be different and stick out.
But first and foremost, all you really need to do is show you care… The basics are the same as those of Social Media: talk to us vs talk at us.
To read more on this topic, see also Josh Chandler’s post.

Wait, it’s not all negative ! Read on …