Tag: social media week

Crowdcentric’s ‘Instagram Your City’ Contest

In conjunction with New York-based strategy firm Crowdcentric’s Social Media Week, the organizers have launched the Instagram Your City contest, with the winner being able to go to any Social Media Week city of their choosing during the September 24-28 event. Cities include London, Glasgow, Torino, Barcelona, Berlin, Doha, Jeddah, Hong Kong, Seoul, São Paulo, Bogotá, Chicago, Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Below are some samples of Hong Kong and Berlin:

Here are the guidelines for submitting a picture:

Take a picture: Using any smartphone device, take a photo that captures the uniqueness and heart of one of the 14 host cities for Social Media Week. (Note: To qualify for the grand prize, photos must be taken with a smartphone and must be of one of the 14 participating cities.)
Add a filter: Using Instagram, or other filter apps such as Hipstamatic, StreamZoo, or Lightbox, make your photo stand out. While a filter isn’t necessary to enter, it does make it more fun!
Tag & Share: Using #InstagramYourCity, share on Twitter with the city you’re capturing. For example, “Just submitted my entry to @SocialMediaWeek’s #InstagramYourCity for Berlin!”

There is no limit on the numbers of photos a contestant can submit, and an impending Instagram Your City website will showcase the top 14. The deadline for submissions is June 29th.

Toby Daniels, Founder & Executive Director of Social Media Week, states, “As we continue to add new Social Media Week cities and expand to incredible parts of the world, we are looking to fulfill the adage of ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ – As a celebration of the uniqueness of all of our local cities, the Instagram Your City competition will provide a way to tell stories that cross cultural and geographic boundaries.”

Instagram itself isn’t endorsing the contest, but to reiterate, any tech-savvy reader who hasn’t been living under the rock surely knows that the photo-sharing platform was recently acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in cash.

May 16, 2012
People Powered Stories Ad Product Introduced By Microsoft

Microsoft and Bazaarvoice have entered an advertising partnership resulting in the introduction of a new social advertising solution called People Powered Stories. This was revealed in a presentation from Jenn Creegan, General Manager for Display Advertising Experiences at Microsoft Advertising in her Social Media Week presentation.

PPS will incorporate ratings and reviews about products within a rich brand ad, a Microsoft representative tells WebProNews.

“To make this happen, Microsoft Advertising partnered with Bazaarvoice to integrate the consumer ratings and reviews into the PPS ad format,” the rep says. “Advertisers will be able to tap into Microsoft’s highly social and engaged audiences across multiple screens and deliver relevant ads in a way that is targeted and more measurable than is available for social advertising on the web today.”

In a blog post, Creegan explains, “We believe it will give marketers the ability to create ads that tell powerful stories and create brand relevancy beyond just a “Like” by adding the authenticity and believability of real people’s real stories.”

“As an industry, we intuitively know the power of social and the potential it holds for advertisers to engage with consumers,” she says. “We also know that people want to hear what others have to say about various products and services. Despite the brand dollars that are flowing toward social media, advertisers have told me they continue to be frustrated at how difficult it is to measure ROI and confirm whether they are successfully engaging their target audiences.”

“Simply running display ads on social sites doesn’t make those ads social,” BazaarVoice co-founder Brant Barton says. “What make the social space different and powerful are the connections it creates between people. So unless the ad is also doing that – creating a connection between consumers around whatever the ad is promoting – is it really social advertising?”

The solution will be available next month.

February 14, 2012
SMW12: Live Video Feed Lineup From Conference

The Social Media Week conference is happening in 12 cities around the world this week. We discussed the conference in general here earlier. And you can sneak a peek at the lineup for the week here.

There is a wealth of material coming as video via Livestream. The Social Media Week channel at Livestream allows you to look at the videos planned for all their locations so you can watch live. Most cities have a general feed. New York’s feed is broken down into further subcategories:
Advertising and Marketing
Art and Culture
Business and Innovation
Health and Wellness
Media and Entertainment
Social and Environmental Change

Some of the material planned for Livestreaming at the New York events this week include:

“Social Data As a Crystal Ball”

“Need a Job? Use Social Media”

“Digital Voyeurism: How Sharing Real Homes in Real Time Is Changing the Way We Decorate”

“The New Ghostwriter”

“Global Brand Management: Best Practices In a Social World”

“Women, Money and Social Power: What Made the Komen Debacle a Win For
Women”

“Covering the 2012 Election Socially”

“How and Why We Share: Seven Deadly Sind of Social Media”

“Investigative Journalism With Social Media: How It’s Being Done”

“Social Media for Social Good”

February 13, 2012

SMW12: Early Tweets From Social Media Week

To give you an idea of the kinds of activity going on at the Social Media Week 2012 conference (SMW), let’s have a look at some of the tweets coming out of the conference.

You can follow the Twitter feeds and discussions from the event live yourself with the hashtag breakdown found in this earlier article.

“A great thing about social media is it enables product users to give feedback. Sometimes that feedback is hard to hear.” @thorpus #smwwdc

— Jill Foster (@Jillfoster) February 13, 2012

I, just like everyone in my generation, can tweet and listen at the same time. #smwwdc

— Jessica Etter (@jnetter) February 13, 2012

Many social media sites are blocked at schools – @NASA creates aggregator sites with filters for youth to come to #smwwdc

— Sam Edelstein (@samedelstein) February 13, 2012

Really interesting challenge for theater companies in social media: participation during a show/concert is viewed as rude. Ironic. #smwwdc

— Maxine Teller (@mixtmedia) February 13, 2012

The point of art is to have a human connection and learn something-that’s where social media comes in #smwwdc

— Cultural Tourism DC (@DCculture) February 13, 2012

@CareerProfiles– attending The Ethics of Social Media in Today’s Workplace #smwwdc!Should be a great event!

— Jess Gundling (@JessGund) February 13, 2012

Interesting #SMWWDC breakfast session. #tweetseat = interest. concept however would be vindictively butchered in the EU 🙂 #RigidEUCulture

— Robin Tim Weis (@RobinTimWeis) February 13, 2012

#smwwdc will be attending “The Ethics of Social Media in Today’s Workplace” at webber shandwick offices today.

— Henry Addo (@Henry_Addo) February 13, 2012

Wish we could attend the Art + Culture talk today! Will someone live tweet it? @SMWWDC #smwwdc

— ARTLAB+ (@artlabplus) February 13, 2012

Attending: Military & Government Use of Social Media: What Works #SMWWDC #SMW12

— MArlinsky (@MikeArlinsky) February 13, 2012

RT @soneil16: RT @MikeKulick: Stop spending so much time analyzing charts and graphs, and just start engaging your audience #smwwdc

— B.Rain (@LoveStar625) February 13, 2012

Social Media Week (SMW) kicks off today. The week-long conference spans 12 cities around the world and encompasses over 1000 events in places like Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington, DC.

News about SMW is easily had on Twitter using the following handles and hashtags:

Hamburg: @SMWHamburg & #SMWHamburg

Hong Kong: @SMWHK & #SMWHK

London: @SMWLdn & #SMWLdn

Miami: @SMWMiami & #SMWMiami

Paris: @SMWParis & #SMWParis

San Francisco: @SMWSF & #SMWSF

Sao Paulo: @SMWSP & #SMWSP

Singapore: @SMW_SG & #SMWSg

Tokyo: @SMWTok & #SMWTok

Toronto: @SMWTo & #SMWTo

Washington DC: @SMWWDC & #SMWWDC

New York: @SMWNYC & #SMWNYC, with major events at #SMWBusiness, #SMWBigFuel, #SMWHealth, #SMWHearst, #SMWJWT, #SMWReuters

There are also teams dedicated to blogging the events of each location so you can keep up with the entire event:

Get the RSS feed or check in every day to see the highlights: Global, Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington DC

Plus there is a mobile app available to help you keep up with all the goings-on at SMW. It is available on 5 platforms and in 6 languages. You can follow the feeds of all cities and they global team, as well as getting the latest social and digital news from The Guardian. You can also access livestream, locate event venues and register for new events- all in one place. Download the mobile app at this page.

Free Smartphones, Butterfingers With Nokia Gift Machine

What if your Foursquare check-ins and Twitter shares gave you more than a sense of accomplishment – what if they could get you free stuff?

That’s the concept behind the “Nokia Gift Machine,” a special vending machine that was created for Social Media Week in Glasgow by social firm 1000heads. Available until September 23rd, the machine dispenses free gifts for the simple act of social media sharing.

Here’s how it works – All you have to do it check-in the the “Nokia Gift Machine @ SMW” on Foursquare, using the hashtag #NokiaConnects. Hopefully you already have your Foursquare and Twitter accounts synched up, because you must share your check-in on Twitter to get your prize. Once you do, out pops either a candy bar, Nokia accessories or even a brand new phone. Over the course of the week, there are 1,000 items to be dispensed via the machine.

When a user checks-in the machine registers that unique log-in and releases one gift. For the remainder of that day, the user may not check-in again until the following day (one check-in per user). Inside the machine are random gifts, ranging from Butterfinger chocolates to Nokia smartphones .

There’s no word on any plans to develop a machine like this outside promotional purposes for this special event. But you can imagine the possibilities – rewarding people for doing social media advertising for your company. It definitely sounds like a workable concept for companies, albeit an expensive proposition to give away phones. Maybe they could set up some sort of check-in based lottery machine.

Anyways, here’s a YouTube video of the thing in action –

The “Nokia Gift Machine” is reminiscent of an advertising campaign we told you about back in March that awarded Foursquare check-ins with free samples…of dog food. German pet food company GranataPet set up billboards that dispensed dog food samples when owners checked-in to the billboards on Foursquare.

And the idea of a “social vending machine” has been thrown around before as well. In April, Pepsi introduced a prototype for a “Social Vending System” that allowed people to gift sodas to friends by pre-purchasing them at the machine. The lucky recipient of the gift would get a text with a message and a code redeemable for their free beverage. The machine even allowed short videos to be recorded as messages.

What do you think about the concept of social vending? Should companies utilize Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook in this way to promote social media advertising? Let us know what you think.