Eating Our Own Mobile Dog Food

Back in February, I wrote about my plans to attend Social Media Week New York and about Mobile Perspectives' role in building Social Media Week's mobile website. 

Social Media Week itself is a worldwide event exploring the social, cultural and economic impact of social media. Their mission is to help people and organizations connect through collaboration, learning and the sharing of ideas and information.

During February's Social Media Week, more than 1000 events were held in 12 host cities on 5 continents. September's event takes place in 14 cities, including here in Chicago from September 24-28.

I'm glad I went to SMW NY - the events I attended were well organized with great content and compelling speakers and panelists.  It was also a great opportunity to use the SMW Mobile Website and SMW Mobile Apps as any other attendee would. As a visitor to New York - I was especially grateful for the maps within the event descriptions to help get me from venue to venue.

It was also a great opportunity to see what we could do better - from navigating the event schedule, to accessing more local content, to providing a better integrated experience for attendees using both the SMW mobile website and the SMW mobile apps.

Ahead of the September event, we've worked closely with CrowdCentric (SMW's global coordinator), XOMO Digital (the SMW Mobile Application developers), Techliminal (responsible for the core SMW web and registration platforms), New Media Innovation (our technology platform partner) and with other SMW partners to improve the on-the-go attendee experience.  You can read more about our efforts in Social Media Week's recent blog post "Enhancing The SMW Mobile Experience".

Mobile Perspectives will also be hosting a panel discussion on "Social Media & Mobile: Is Your Social Media Strategy Mobile-Ready" during Social Media Week Chicago on September 27th.

Make sure you visit http://www.socialmediaweek.org to see if Social Media Week is coming to your city. For those of you in Chicago, check out the schedule here - events are filling up fast!

I hope to see you there!

Comments below, email me at todd@mobile-perspectives.com, follow me (@toddshingler) on Twitter or reach out via our website.

Social Media Week Goes Mobile!

I'm excited to be headed to Social Media Week in New York next week for a number of reasons.

For one, I'll be attending as many of the events as possible - though with more than 250 events spread throughout the city I'll clearly be missing some of them. Fortunately, I'll be able to follow along through various Twitter hashtags and also catch many of the events streaming live (including to mobile phones) thanks to Livestream.

It'll be interesting to hear how often the intersection of Social Media and mobile phones is addressed given the explosive growth of Social Media engagement via mobile phones:

• Facebook acknowledged in their recent IPO filing that 425M of their 845M users access Facebook from their mobile phones
• Twitter says more than half of their active users use Twitter on their mobiles, generating 40% of all tweets sent
• YouTube sees more than 400M mobile video plays each day

Brands and businesses need to quickly figure out how they can best leverage the union of mobile & social or they'll be left behind by those that do.  Many of those who have already figured it out will be speaking at SMW in New York or at events in another SMW host city.

I'm also looking forward to SMW NY as it will be a great opportunity to get feedback from other attendees on Mobile Perspectives' latest project - developing the mobile website for the Social Media Week. Working with SMW creators CrowdCentric, Techliminal in San Francisco, Nokia in Finland and our technology partner New Media Innovation out of Australia, we created a mobile website that seamlessly extends Social Media Week to mobile users.

Mobile visitors to SMW can login and see details and access maps for events they've registered for, register for additional events throughout the week, engage SMW globally and locally on various social media platforms, and more.

As a bi-annual global event, Social Media Week is also in Miami, San Francisco, Washington DC, Toronto, São Paulo, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, London, and Hamburg next week. In September, Social Media Week will be in another 12-13 cities including here in Chicago where Mobile Perspectives is based.

Since going live 3 weeks ago, the mobile SMW website has been visited from more than 100 countries and is now seeing many thousands of visitors each day!

Social Media Week recently published an article (SMW In Your Hands - Our New Mobile Site) about the project, including a Q&A with myself and Rob Leishman from New Media Innovation.



Any other mobile & social aficionados out there headed to SMW NY? I'd love to meet up.

Comments below, email me at todd@mobile-perspectives.com, follow me (@toddshingler) on Twitter or reach out via our website.