With time and energy and a New York geocode, I filled Social Media Week 2011, Feb. 7-11, with sessions that stretched my mind and my definition of social media. Toby Daniels, founder and executive director of Social Media Week, and his team brought in top speakers and sponsors to produce a rich program in enticing venues. Perceptions of social media varied from room to room.
Marketers mine real-time social media for emerging issues that their clients can profit from, or possibly lose money on if they are not addressed. If you want to capitalize on pop culture moments in social media, “you need to be there with them in real time,” said Shiv Singh, head of digital for PepsiCo Beverages, during a panel discussion on social listening.
Real-time information also can promote humanitarian goals, particularly at times of crisis. At a program at the Paley Center on the Media sponsored by the United Nation’s Global Pulse, Corinne Woods, director of the UN Millennium Campaign, said immediate feedback can remove bottlenecks and speed solutions. Opportunities are lost, she said, if agencies wait for field workers to publish a report.
Speaking at Google’s New York headquarters, Alan Spector, vice president of Research and Special Initiatives, told how crowdsourcing and real-time information helped Google.org add details in Map Maker and reunite people with people finding tools after the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.
For many, Facebook is the face of social media. The social network was a common thread during the week, but speakers gave it more identities than “The Three Faces of Eve.”
In a keynote interview at Google, Doug Rushkoff, a media theorist whose most recent book is “Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age,” said “We talk more about Facebook than it deserves. Facebook is an easy way not to use HTML.”
At a session with marketers on social listening at JWT, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, open access to all Facebook conversations was called the “Holy Grail.” Facebook is so attractive because it is more about personal experience than Twitter. Panelists bemoaned being only able to see a slice of what is happening on Facebook.
“Twitter feels like a public forum, whereas Facebook feels like a cocktail party,” said Brian Clark, chief executive officer of GMD Studios. He also said that good social listening is closely related to stalking, warning that the novelty of consumers finding that a brand is listening could be replaced by creepiness.
A creepy feeling had come days earlier while sitting in Google’s auditorium after enjoying a free lunch from the company. A panel considering the Internet and uprisings in the Arab world warned that users cannot rely on capitalistic businesses like Facebook, Twitter and even our host, Google, to do the right thing.
Susannah Vila, director of content and outreach for Movements.org, said American’s privacy concerns about Facebook are nothing compared to those of people in oppressive countries. She said her group has lobbied Facebook to add HTTPS to its accounts throughout the world, but the company has resisted because the change is costly.
“Facebook has democracy like Singapore has democracy,” said Micah Sifry, co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum. He said he was “terrified of relying on corporate entities” for digital media. He cited the blacklisting of Wikileaks by Amazon as an example how companies can “arbitrarily kick people off the cloud.”
“Nothing is really private,” said Adam Penenberg, a former investigative reporter who now teaches journalism at New York University. “Anonymity and privacy are very different.”
Facebook Connect got credit in several sessions for making conversations on the Web less anonymous. A speaker at a marketing session noted that newspapers are finding that comments are higher quality when people identify themselves.
The group Anonymous and anonymity got attention at a program on Wikileaks held on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower, with a view overlooking Central Park. The focus of the session was the absence of an international Bill of Rights for online users, personal responsibility and questions about when online civil disobedience, including denial-of-service attacks, cross over into crime.
“Anonymity is something you need to preserve. If they don’t win this thing, there are going to be a lot of dead Twitterers,” said John Perry Barlow, co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a few days before Hosni Mubarak ended his authoritarian rule of Egypt.
Barlow spoke at a session dealing with strong encryption, the ability of TOR to protect identity, international secrets and FCC rules, and even there Facebook was discussed. “Facebook seems like a global suburb,” Barlow said. “It’s the same nutrition as high fructose corn syrup but not a complete and balanced diet.”
That social media has a strong connection was clear during Social Media Week. Most sessions were free and many featured breakfast snacks, lunch or, later in the day, open bars. Locations included the Hearst Tower, Red Bull, the Paley Center for Media, The New York Times, a stately room beyond a “staff only” sign at the New York Public Library, and, of course, Google.
It’s not easy to get into the New York Stock Exchange, perhaps the most security-conscious building in New York, but Social Media Week did the trick as Paul Murphy of the Financial Times talked about the recent launch of FT Tilt, followed by ”News Dissemination in a Social Finance World”, coordinated by StockTwits. The conversations at the bar and on the panel along with the venue’s 20-foot ceilings, marble halls and thick Oriental carpets were all about money.
Investors are not casual readers. They are, Murphy said, “readers who sit forward at their desks looking for news that will make them money.” Financial reporters may find Twitter helpful, but investors are concerned with accuracy and they will pay for curation and insight.
A presentation representing much money and a model also based on curation had Brian Farnham, editor in chief of Patch, speaking at the Paley Center two days after AOL announced the purchase of The Huffington Post for $315 million. After launching its first three sites in February 2011, AOL’s Patch ended 2010 with 800 sites. Farnham said he wants to have 1,000 by the end of the year. According to The New York Times, AOL said it spent up to $50 million on Patch in 2010.
The session, “Building Hyperlocal at Scale,” was more about new media than social media. I signed up to better understand how Patch could be sustained. Certainly, local news is an important commodity and most communities are underserved, but the strength of Patch’s business model was not made clear and there was no insight on how Huff-Po might collaborate.
Patch, Farnham noted, hired more journalists last year than any other company. For those interested in jobs, he said that Patch looks for “Four Virtues:” community journalism experience, Internet savvy, local knowledge and – most important – passion.
One more note about Facebook: I didn’t update my status all week. I was too busy in the physical world.
