socialmedia

Taking place on Wednesday 26th Sept at the Sport, Entertainment & Culture Hub at Engine, DOCO's Through the Eyes of a Child: The Social Media World of 6 - 11 Year Olds took the audience on a journey into the mind's of children and how they see and use social media.

Kids are inherently social and are very active on many social media platforms; therefore they are a hugely important part of the social media landscape. Platforms such as Facebook, Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin are arguably making a significant influence on the development of this first generation of social media users, yet this audience is isn’t often discussed and as such is not properly understood.

This discussion focused on what kids are doing on these networking sites, how and why they are so engaged with each other and the platforms, and looked at the psychology behind these behaviours. The event explored what we can learn from today’s generation and what implications these hold for the future.

I love Twitter. I never shy away from admitting I think it’s the best social media platform around at the moment and will continue to be so. Why? Well it knows it’s place online. It knows that people are only using a handful of sites every day so to be one of those sites you need to have content that brings people back.

Twitter is a great place to find things out but this post is more about the main three things that bug me about the platform.

A list of the top brands that 18-24s love has been revealed by The Beans Group. The results are the output of a month-long research project, The Youth 100. We asked young people to reveal their sentiment towards brands across industries ranging from technology, fashion and entertainment to retail, travel, finance and more.

Over 1,000 18-24s gave their views. We used an online survey to measure sentiment, and followed it up with focus groups.

Successful brands who launch their Facebook Page through an agency will always expect to be guaranteed some 'ownership' of it. It's not uncommon for companies of a certain size to switch agency every few years, simply to embrace a fresh skill-set or on the whim of internal politics. I've been in that position myself and dutifully handed over usernames and passwords for the public entities I controlled to the hungry new whippersnappers.

As someone who acknowledges the value of being "behind the scenes", it would never cross my mind to withhold access to a vehicle I had been paid to build for someone else should they wish to take the wheel from me. Not just for reasons of commercial vanity but more so because you owe it to the users, fans and members of whatever you have created who should never be concerned with conflicts on an administration level.

“Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface.”
 
Sounds good… but what exactly does this mean for marketers working in the digital space who are being ever more charged with refining and increasing ROI, adding value and making a tangible impact?

Well, as Google puts it in their oh-so-handy video, ‘Google Tag Manager puts you, the marketer, back in control of your digital marketing’. Using tags to help optimise marketing efforts and increase web traffic shouldn’t be neglected, and Google Tag Manager, promises to make this process easier and quicker. For those of us who don’t have code running through our veins, free tools such as this, that simplify the organisation and administration of digital information comes as a welcome solution.
 

The afternoon of Tuesday 25th at the Sport, Culture & Entertainment Hub saw Eventbrite's How Social Media Powered the Pop-Up. From boutiques to burger bars, cinemas to spas - pop-ups are delighting curious Londoners all over the city.

But how do these one-off ventures create lasting buzz? And what makes some pop-ups mythical, and others missable? Most work without the luxury of big brand marketing budgets.

This panel discussion brought in the experts behind the pop-ups, including Andrew Swain (Boxpark), Alice Hodge (Art of Dining), Max Bergius (Art Wednesday), Sam Michel (Chinwag) and Dan Young (Young & Foodish). Check out the livestream below and get in on the pop-up discussion.

The Impact of Mobile on Social, hosted by The Engine Group took place on Tuesday 25th at the Sport, Entertainment & Culture Hub at Engine.

This panel discussion looked at how mobile became the main platform for brands and agencies to engage consumers, with Dan Beasley, Head of Mobile at JAM (@danbeasley1), Ronan Shields, Reporter for New Media Age (@ronan_shields), and John Bartleson, Director of Marketing D2C at Telefonica Digital (djjohnbee). Check out the livestream below for more.

Tuesday morning at the Sport, Entertainment & Culture Hub at Engine saw The Decision Makers: The Truth Behind the Family Purchase Dynamic, hosted by DOCO London. Catch up with the Livestream below.

Families in the UK spend around £187B a year yet not much is known about the complicated decision making dynamic that goes into how that money is spent. This session looked at who in the family makes what decisions and how the members of the family influence each other and what role social media plays in inter-family communications and the decision making process.

The British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) have announced the shortlist for the 2012 BIMA Awards, hailing it as the most diverse agency spread in recent years.

Finalists for the 27th annual awards included Heinz for Get Well Soup, Skype for Say it with Skype, the Kaiser Chiefs bespoke album creation experience, BBC Sport’s website relaunch, Nike Academy, Pottermore, M&S for Pass the Parcel, and Microsoft for Brandon Generator.

What's Happening to the Memesphere, hosted by Jam's Kate Miltner (@katemiltner) took place on Monday 24th September at the Sport, Entertainment & Culture Hub at Engine. Catch up with the livestream below.

Memes used to be the province of an internet subculture based around sites and forums like 4chan and Something Awful. But over the past few years, memes have gone from “inside jokes your friends don’t get” to a key element of cultural discourse and a part of the mainstream news cycle. During the session, Kate Miltner discussed how the memesphere has evolved, where it might be going and what these changes mean for the online cultural landscape.

We're delighted to announce the line-up for what promises to be an insightful panel at this Wed's Chinwag Live: Webs of Influence event.

The panel spans the worlds of psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics and there'll be plenty of time for audience Q&A, featuring Sarah Wood, Co-Founder of award-winning social video platform Unruly, Dawn Smith from Digitaria, the driving force behind KONY 2012's viral campaign, Jon Murphy from Oban Multilingual an expert in country-specific SEO and cultural insight and Rob Tezska, Cognitive Pyschologist and Science of Magic PhD student.

The debate is chaired by Nathalie Nahai, The Web Psychologist and author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. Nathalie will kick off the session with a whistlestop tour of some of the highlights from her book.

This year was not only the year of the Queen's Jubilee, the Olympics and the Paralympics, but also the only year that Social Media Week London will take place twice within 12 months (therefore, needless to say, there will not be a SMWLDN in February).

Our second Social Media Week London this year has now passed, having moved to it's new home of September, and what a week 24th - 28th September 2012 was.

This September's SMWLDN saw 176 events taking place across the city, with 21 of those being Chinwag events - and all the rest thanks to our 125 wonderful event partners including BBC, Beyond, CIPR, Dachis Group, Dell, McKinsey & Company, Eventbrite, Great British Chefs, Hootsuite, London College of Fashion, Microsoft, Nursing & Midwifery Council, Royal Television Society, Story Worldwide, Skype, Unilever, Yammer and more.