Social Media Week

Here at Fort Bozboz, every week is social media week, but this particular week we’ve been watching with interest as the official Social Media Week 2012 took place across the globe.

The UK event took place in London, organised by Chinwag with headline sponsorship from Nokia. Over 150 events were scheduled across a wide range of venues ranging from the Design Council to the London Eye. Representatives from all the major networks and the big brands were there, but anyone could host an event and the majority were free to attend. 

The theme was ‘Empowering Change through Collaboration’, (or as we call it: ‘making exciting new stuff happen by talking to each other)’. Here’s a quick round up of the highlights:   

This year’s buzz word is definitely ‘mobilisation’. 

The usual arguments took place about the place of brands in social, with the main opinion seeming to be that ‘yes, they can play, but only if they’re any good at it’. 

There was talk of Twitter changing the face of global journalism for good, and the future of censorship and regulation. 

Seminars invited us to learn how to maximise social media engagement for children, families, artists, healthcare professionals and of course, big business. 

Others asked whether social media is having a physical impact on brain development (insert your own Facebook joke here) and some fascinating stuff on behaviour from psychologists and anthropologists (the people who study other people). This included an appearance at Google’s own event from the legendary Robin Dunbar, inventor of Dunbar’s Number, or why human beings have a limit of 150 stable social relationships at any one time, be it in a medieval village or on Facebook.    

Analysis aside, we’ve also been hearing about fund raising supper clubs for food bloggers, lots of informal networking (or as we like to call it, ‘drinking’) and we were thrilled to discover what is now our favourite event title ever from the ‘Women in a Room’ team: 

‘Is a woman’s opinion “the miniskirt of the internet”?’ 

Headline news from Chinwag’s: ‘Mind the Gap; Avoiding a Social Media Skills Crisis’, cited research claiming that corporations have increased their spend on social media talent by 50%. But stats released by business software provider Sage UK this week found that a whopping 82% of SMEs DON’T use social media at all, with 77% using no mobile tools other than email. So there’s clearly a lot more work to be done. 

The next global Social Media Week happens in September, with Glasgow taking a role as Host City, and it will be interesting to see what has already changed by then. Should Brighton be fighting for a position as a UK Host City in 2013?