On the heels of last quarter’s digitally-focused DCWEEK conference, the first Social Media Week festival in the nation’s capital has come to a close.
Focusing on the recent impact of new developments in the areas of social media and mobile to our local sphere of businesses, iStrategyLabs curated a week of free events including networking parties, meetups, panels of speakers, and keynotes at various venues around town. The schedule of events blanketed across most industries including: Tech, Media, Government, Healthcare, Politics, Advertising/Marketing and even Fashion. In DC? Who knew?
I chose to attend ANTI-SOCIAL: Starting the Conversation (#smwAntiSocial), which was hosted by nclud and Whitmoyer at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company: a three-part panel presentation of developers and designers “too-busy-to-tweet” and proud of the wealth of DC area companies who have played a part in revolutionizing the online presence (Geico), video content (Discovery) and essentially the way we read news (WaPo Labs.)
LivingSocial, WaPo labs and the White House allowed us to borrow their top designers and developers through a nicely-moderated Q&A session on the latest and greatest new developments and rollouts…at least the ones they could divulge.
Top takeaways to tweet from Nick Whitmoyer of Whitmoyer consulting (@Whitmoyer): No matter how small your digital team, have big conversations with clients regarding large-scale social campaigns. Think like a startup. Think like CLAY, not CONCRETE, in terms of client projects. INTEGRATE with social media sites; ITERATE by commenting and sharing opinions; and INNOVATE internally with hackathons, show & tells, even Innovation Days. In other words, LEARN from each other. And learn from your USERS. Think USERS, not internal politics.
Next, we heard from Marty Madrid (@martymadrid) on Keeping the Conversation Going: He took us through a rapid-fire history of the web, from becoming online and dynamic, next scalable and flexible, then creating standards, to finally becoming standard and mobile, where we can access the web anytime, anywhere. At the end of the day, it comes down to creating online content that is publically accessible, presented in a branded context.
He went on to speak about branding on the web. Everything starts with understanding the total brand experience. All of your content is in the context of the brand that holds it, so it is much more important to determine what the user experience will be. Content needs to be organized so that we may be able to access and display content simply and responsibly to accommodate the masses.
As always, the question is “What’s next?”
The reading environment of our audience is much more dynamic. We will soon be able to publish to anything and consume everywhere. Consumption is the new distribution. This then led to a spirited debate on the idea of Social Cross-Integration, or contextual relevance (Foursquare, for example) that is shared socially. (Imagine if Bloomberg and LinkedIn held hands? What if AT&T and Twitter went to the prom?)
Social Media technology is changing so rapidly that, before our eyes, a few developers within the audience held up their hands and replied that projects like these are in the works, if not already completed. Very fashion-forward, DC! Well, at least, socially speaking.
Author Name – Shannon Benton
Twitter – @sayhi2shannon
