Below are the submissions for our next social media event. Read the descriptions here, and then vote over on our Facebook page. The eight with most votes will be our presenters for 21 Slides!
For those not in Seattle, by the way, we are working out details on setting up a webcast for the event. We’re considering TwitCam, but we’re happy to here any other suggestions, if you have a favorite tool.
1. Lessons Learned from LOLcats.
There's a lot to be learned from the popular LOLcat meme. Why is www.icanhascheezburger.com so successful? What attracts users and keeps them coming back? Are there lessons to be learned from this phenomenon? (yes!) My presentation will include a brief history of the LOL meme, explore the magic ingredients of this social media success story, and present a few key takeaways that can be applied to social media and digital marketing in general.
2. Pulling the Pages out of Facebook: Social Web Optimization
Recent moves towards the vision of the Semantic Web by Google and Yahoo! are accelerating adoption of geeky sounding things like XFN, Microformats, and RDFa. These standards have the potential to move social networking out of walled gardens and into the open Internet itself. I'll look at how semantic markup adds social value to Web sites now, and speculate on what the social future of the Semantic Web might look like.
3.The Social Media Mindset: An InfoCamp case study
The 15th of October is 4 days after the 3rd annual InfoCamp (which I can already tell you is going to kick ass). This year, attendance grew sharply, and interest in InfoCamp hit a critical mass of sorts. InfoCamp is a crowdsourced conference. It is real-time, in-person social media inside a conference format. It is the Wikipedia to more traditional conferences’ Encyclopedia Britannica. This gravitation towards InfoCamp is part of a larger expectation that drives social media – that users can and should generate their own content in a variety of formats, not just digital ones. I’ll show how we used social media to promote InfoCamp. I’ll show examples of how people used our Wiki, twitter, and Facebook presence before the event. I’ll show examples of how social media was used during and after the event.
4. Social Media: All that Glitters is not Gold
A covert mission of exposing a very traditional retail company to social media. One woman. No budget. Few tools. And now with internet restrictions!
5. OMG my (online) life is over. Mom's on Facebook.
How to gracefully deal with the generation gap as your parents, aunts, uncles, and even grandparents join in this "social media" thing. Mom keeps spamming your Facebook posts with mom-comments, Dad got lost in quizzes, but at least neither of them Twitter (whew).
6. The Desperate Housewives of Facebook: Why are they so goddamn bored?!
Facebook recently published an audience statistic that stated the most prolific segment on their site was married women between the ages of 35-40. Basically, housefraus. And honestly, we know it's true. From their seemingly exhausting ability to post up-to-the-minute updates on their over-achieving children, their opinions of Oprah's afternoon guest, how precious someone's twins are, and what god awful family vacation they're planning. Why do they torture us so? And, more importantly, why are they addicted to FaceCrack? This presentation works off this crazy data point to get to the bottom of the Facebook Housewife craze -- and exposes the horror below.
7. Cinching All My Love to You: A Social Media Romance
Here’s a little story about Jack and Diane two American kids growing up in the heartland. No wait, that’s been done before. This presentation is the story of Jo and Nancy, a relationship that starts, develops, and ultimately meets its end on CinchCast.com. Through the words, voice, images and text of our two love birds, attendees will experience the excitement new love can bring...and the drama when things don’t work out as planned. This presentation will be better than any Knot’s Landing or Melrose Place re-run. It is love social media style.
8. Humanizing Social Media: A Few Stories.
Social media is the place where stories are shared and experiences are formed. Only when brands provide return on emotion to their customers, can they fully benefit from social media. People want to know that they’re being heard. By acknowledging their contributions, and teaming up with their most loyal customers, brands can begin to build stronger relationships with their fans. I’d like to share some collected examples of how companies are using social media to build deep and long lasting relationships with their enthusiasts. Some you’ve heard of, others will surely be new.
9. Are you ready for a mobile makeover?
I spearheaded a campaign in which I was able to get the attention of the powers that be over at Waggener Edstrom. A very special twitter page, a Facebook fan page and some fabulous videos on YouTube, helped me break the mold.
10. Government is no longer the bureaucratic monolith you thought it was
At the Washington State Department of Transportation we are using Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and Flickr and other social media tools to reach audiences. While I don't want to focus on any one element or tool I plan to share amazing stories of how we used them during "snowpocalypse" to help people get home, and won several national awards for it. Also we have incredible direct messaging features that folks in Seattle should be aware of. Did you know you can get Seattle area travel times, mountain pass reports and border wait times via Twitter direct message?
11. Social Telephone Game :: It’s never what they say, it’s what they mean
Do you flinch every time you see your brand being drug through the mud on the social web? Are your inboxes across various social media tools filling up with hate mail? Your unhappiest customer is not likely what they appear to be. Learn how to read between the lines of your social community and harness them for the brand advocates they are.
12. Defamation and Social Media – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
Should you really send that tweet calling your competitor a “douchebag”? What about that status update letting the world know how your mechanic is a “lying, cheating scumbag who would steal medicine from a pediatric ward?” How liable are you for giving all the baddies out there a well-deserved, spleen-filled bitch-slap? In this session, I will walk through a very quick explanation of defamation law and explain how it might apply to the social media landscape. I will also provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.
13. An Ecosystem Approach to Social Media: Turning Crap Into Fertilizer
The landscape of social media is a complex system. So are ecosystems: gardens, wetlands, and forests are full of complex webs of dependencies (nutrients, shelter, food) and controls (checks & balances). There are well-established methods for describing and designing ecosystems to produce desired results - and revenue. So the question is: how do we design social media to satisfied customers and cold, hard cash? The answer: Crap. In nature, it's the "nightsoil" that keeps the system going. One creature's crap is another's food. We can identify the byproducts of social media - the waste, the shite, the cruft, the fluff - and find ways to make it feed the system, we've created a self-sustaining Poop Loop. In fact, if we DON'T have a strategy to process the crap, it'll poison the system. So we need to find ways to turn social media manure into fertilizer. How is it done? First identify role types. Then map their inputs and outputs. Finally, design mechanisms to connect one entity's outputs to another's inputs. Congratulations, you've just turned crap into fertilizer. Just one of the many lessons we can learn from ecosystem science.
14. Itsy Bitsy Spiders: Everything I need to know about social media I learned in Kindergarten.
A simple but powerful perspective on social media which shows how it is different from other online tasks like SEO or website design and content. It is NOT about the BIG spider (Google) but all the itsy bitsy spiders that weave their own small webs and catch only the tastiest stuff. What makes social media interesting is not real-time search, but selective, passive content delivery. All we have to do is remember show-and-tell from kindergarten. Find the good stuff, tell your class about it.
15. Two Manifestos: 500 Years of Social Media History repeats itself
A 5 minute journey from Martin Luther and his 95 theses that resulted in Protestantism (1517); to the Cluetrain Manifesto and their 95 theses that defined modern social media (1999).
Martin Luther demanded that the Catholic Church stop selling religion and Cluetrain demanded that companies stop selling their message. The story of two manifestos with the same message: stop trying to profit from being an intermediary and be honest.
The presentation will tell the story of the tithes that the Catholic Church sold as God-proxies. This imposition of a tax for access to God led to the Protestant Reformation. Protestantism was founded on disintermediation. Not by accident, this act of rebellion was followed almost 500 years later by a similar message by some of the original founders and drivers of the Internet and web. They felt that corporations had largely begun to take the role roughly equivalent to the Catholic church - speaking in Latin (corporate-speak) and profiting by the control of information and access. The Cluetrain Manifesto put them on notice.
So many fantastic ideas! Cast your vote now!
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