socialmedia

Two heads are better than one. So, 35 must be exponentially better, right?

At Chinwag, we're big fans of building things collaboratively, so we thought we'd really push the boat out for the initial planning of Social Media Week London 2012 (SMWLDN), 13-17th Feb, in case you're wondering.

On Tuesday evening, after an open invite, 35 people gathered at Ketchum PR's offices in Shoreditch to ruminate, dream and scheme on the themes for next year's SMWLDN. Analysing last year's event and taking informal soundings, the group started to explore five starting points:

You love Google.

It's one of those universal tools everyone has a soft spot for. I secretly imagine people who work at Yahoo use it when their boss isn't watching. Who couldn't adore a company who has an unofficial slogan "Don't be evil."

In April 2010 the search giant purchased "PlinkArt." PlinkArt was originally designed to identify works of art once you took a photo of it. The app was one of three winners of the Education/Reference category of the Google ADC2 (Android Developer Challenge 2). Google then purchased them and added the functionality to what we now know as "Google Goggles" - a visual search engine.

Earlier this year in February, led by Chinwag, Social Media Week London included over 110 events, 12 designed by Chinwag and a whopping 95 created and delivered with love by our 54 event partners, including Dell, Dutch Embassy, British Library, BBC, Channel 4, LikeMinds, Viadeo, We Are Social, techMAP, Ogilvy and more.

44% of events were put on by digital, traditional and social media agencies, the rest were a variety of companies, organisations and individuals from all sectors.

8,500 tickets were snapped up and over 8,500 online viewers watched livestreams. Social Media Week London (#smwldn) trended every day on Twitter surfing the wave of tweets across all the events.

It's almost that time of year again - and we're back taking the lead for Social Media Week London, 13 - 17th February 2012.

Thinking caps on, pretty please - don't worry, nothing too onerous!

Following on from the success of our first Chinwag Insight conference, Chinwag Insight: Facebook Marketing, we're starting to plan for the next event, probably post-Easter 2012.

As with the first event, the aim of these conferences is to delve deep into a topic area. There's lots of options, which is where you come in. If we could beg 15 seconds of your precious brain power, could you fill in the poll below and let us know what you think.

It couldn't be easier. Just one question: which topic should we dive into and explore in-depth? Should we revisit Facebook Marketing, what about Twitter? YouTube? Or for those looking at B2B and recruitment, what about Linkedin?

Square is a company that caught my eye just over a year ago. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. It’s an iPhone / iPad app that lets you receive credit card payments. The start-up (if you can call a company which transfers more than $3 million per day a "start-up") has recently received investment from Richard Branson and is "looking into international expansion in 2012", this excites me greatly, here’s why...

The figures are enough to make your head spin: in the first half of 2011 Facebook revealed it had doubled revenue to $1.6 billion - with $500 million of that pure profit - and is on track to exceed $4 billion by the end of the year. Not bad for what began as an online college yearbook.

Facebook's astonishing growth in revenue is closely tied to user growth. The network has accrued a greater number of users than ever before, rising to over 800 million worldwide, extending to diverse demographics and locales, and enabling advertisers to reach and engage consumers with utmost precision and frequency.