Last week Social Media Week took place across London, New York and many other cities throughout the world. Five days were dedicated to all things social media, with events organised across each city for marketers to get together and mull over the conundrum that is social media. In London, free events were held at venues around the city, from trendy Soho restaurants, to digital agencies and conference centres, each promising insight into a different aspect of social media and how it can be used in every walk of life.
Events promising to tell us all we needed to know about social media in politics and finance, the impact of the Olympics on what we do as marketers, the Google+ dilemma, and whether Pinterest is here to stay drew in the crowds. With so much going on it’s difficult to single out any specific event, so below I’ve included a few of our team’s favourite insights.
Anti wifi paint. Heard of it? Neither had we, but this relatively new kind of paint that blocks out wifi signals is being hailed by some as the saviour of analogue experiences. In an age when discussion of digital de-toxing is a la mode, this paint through which signals can’t pass could provide just the escape digital hippies are looking for. Perhaps a bigger implication for this is security – this would be a quick and cheap way of preventing access to sensitive data from unauthorised users.
Everything happens so quickly today that news breaks on social media in real time, and 24 hour news coverage means that news is reported straight away, with less and less time for reflection and rigour. To combat this, a new type of ‘slow journalism’ is coming to the fore. One example of this is ‘Delayed Gratification’, a publication looking at stories from the last 3 months in more detail, with more rumination about the longer-term implications of events or about what the real implication of something was, after the hype has died down. So, will slow journalism be the saviour of print?
This feeds in to another event that we attended at which the panel talked about all the data that we give away to companies as payment for all the ‘free’ perks we get. Loyalty cards are a prime example of this, but the problem many companies have is that they are unable to properly use and process data to gain real insight from it. One particularly interesting part was the observation that we’re likely to see far more behavioural and mental health issues arising from the inability of people to deal with the large amount of data that social media expose us to.
My particular favourite take away from the week was an analogy used to describe social media in the minds of marketers by a panellist at the CIM Social Media Benchmark launch. Social media is like teenage sex, he announced. We all want it desperately, it’s a bit disappointing at first, but then we practice and practice and it gets better. Social Media Week 2012 showed to me that as a collection of marketers, we’re all very much in the keep practicing till it gets better stage!
Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform
Tags: Change Management, data insight, Digital Consultancy, Management Consultancy, Pinterest, social media strategy, Social Media Week