As #IWNY (Internet Week New York) barrels through it’s easy to get caught up in the 10 day soiree of panels, conferences, and parties. Day Two, aka the Mashable Summit, still sticks out in my mind. Much like in social media, content and experience collided to bring together stories and experience from multiple digital sectors. Video, social, traditional, mobile, and applications were all covered by days end.
For those who were not as fortunate to attend here are the cliff notes of my favorite presentations:
COLLEGE HUMOR
College Humor kicked off the day with a clear message: Is it good web content? Branded content is becoming more prevalent and the more legal get involved the more sterile it’s going to be. And viewers or readers are going to see right through it. As specialists in developing entertaining web content, Ricky Van Veen co-founder of CollegeHumor.com, demo’d their Trojan condom campaign: Rudolph got an STD the night before Christmas. If that’s not going to get the attention of teen and twenty something Trojan customers the sterile legal version certainly won’t.
SPORTSCASTER LEN BERMAN
The well-known sports caster, Len Berman, has built the second half of his career using digital media. One of his most successful online ventures: “Cheat Sheet Water Cooler Email Blast” which keeps people in the know on the sports scores for those that need a quick update to be in the know. He even loves the interaction that is now available between him and his audience. He jokingly even admitted that “If it’s more than one paragraph delete delete delete.” The it being any form of written interaction. Warning: be sure to keep your emails short. And if you want the news in a jiffy “No faster way to get and send the news than Twitter.” If a traditional cat can adapt then there’s hope the digital momentum will continue its upward trend.
FOURSQUARE TEAMS UP WITH CNN
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley announced the partnership and new CNN World Cup Badges. The location-based social network is connecting fans all over the world throughout the tournament, which will give fans the ability to share with their friends where they are watching as well as the chance to provide “tips” to other Foursquare users for each location.
Click here to get the details…
HOLLYWOOD GOES SOCIAL FOR CHARITY
Edward Norton made a guest appearance to tell everyone about the launch of his new venture: social platform Crowdrise that leverages social media to raise money and awareness for service projects.
YAHOO RESEARCH W/ DUNCAN WATTS
Is it a small world? According to Paul Lazarsfeld, the original study resulted in an average 6 degrees of separation to reach one single identified contact.
Is it still a small world today? When Yahoo ran the experiment recently they found it’s mostly a small world. So how have things changed as it relates to 6 degrees of separation in the digital age? Popular things become MUCH more popular, less popular things become less popular. And it is becoming even more difficult to predict which will be popular.
Twitter is an ideal study of diffusion. When yahoo fully observed “who listens to whom” on Twitter you see all kinds of different cascades of information.
99% of tweets go nowhere. The exciting events happen very un-occassional as most is below the visibility threshold. So with all of this new information what can search predict? Can we predict box office revenue off of search results? Watts says “Yes, you can do a pretty good job.” Might be time for us all to use more analytics in our business projections?
DR. SANJAY GUPTA (CNN), KC ESTENSON (CNN) AND PETE CASHMORE
Among my favorites! And not just because social’s leading man was on the panel. I have a sweet spot for traditional media as the first five years of my career were solely dedicated to capturing and crafting the news as a Bostonian reporter. And as my alma mater, the Boston Globe, faces big changes in the face of digitalization. For traditional news outlets like CNN that can adapt there is a huge opportunity to bring the news full circle and to multiple channels. Estenson even admitted they often are tweeting out the news as it’s being filmed onsite and not appearing live on CNN for another week.