Social Media Week hit Manhattan last week, and the LaunchSquad NY team was thrilled to attend many of the fun and educational events around the city. Since Social Media Week encourages connections and conversation around emerging trends in social and mobile media, we were more than excited to participate. Social Media Week’s global roster of events brings together hundreds of thousands of people each year in an effort to advance our understanding of social media’s role in society.
Kicking off the festivities, Mike and Matt attended the inaugural GovGeeks and Drinks event hosted by the OpenNY Forum at New Work City. The OpenNY Forum brings together New York’s many civic-minded communities and institutions in an effort to build a more open and connected city and state. While mingling with attendees before the program officially began, we were eagerly anticipating the identity of the surprise keynote speaker.
Social Media Week
To our delight, the keynote speaker was Rachel Sterne, New York City’s first Chief Digital Officer. Rachel spoke about her mandate to make the city more social media-friendly and the work she is doing to coordinate the digital initiatives of the city’s disparate agencies like the MTA, the Department of Education, and many others. A good portion of her talk dealt with how the city’s thriving community of developers can access city data to create programs and applications that make navigating city government easier for the community; it was inspiring to hear such dedication to technology coming from both the government and the citizenry.
A couple LaunchSquad foodies, Aly and Christina, attended EATS+APPS hosted by Food+Tech Connect, Mouth of the Border, and Noble Rot. Heavy on applications and lean on appetizers, the event showcased new culinary mobile and desktop technologies, such as Food Network’s iPad app, Gourmet Live, and FoodSpotting. Among our favorite recent launches were Dinevore, a location-based restaurants rating and reviews platform, and Gojee, a social Mint.com for grocery shopping. In an effort to de-stress the daunting task of bread baking, food writer Michael Ruhlman built an iPad application that allows users to create personalized bread recipes by selecting various permutations of ingredients. We left with a hankering for sundried tomato ciabatta and galvanized to learn more about these creative companies.
Marissa walked over to the Paley Center for New Media to indulge on a relevant discussion surrounding the value of traditional and emerging media companies. Media is at such an interesting place and digital integrations have transformed the way we search, discover and digest information. AOL’s recent acquisition of Huffington Post, Demand Media’s IPO, and the launch of The Daily provoked several perspectives on what makes media companies valuable and the panelists ultimately honed in on a key theme: Companies with valuable content are in demand and if content is discoverable, it is valuable. Funny to think that the real value is not as much focused on great, quality content but on better understanding of how to push content to the top of crowded search results and clogged status feeds. Very interesting discussion that will certainly be taking on a new angle at next year’s Social Media Week.
The LaunchSquad NY team had a blast experiencing all that Social Media Week had to offer. Whether using digital tools to streamline city government, food-related applications, or the convergence of old and new media, it was inspiring to see so many voices committed to using technology to improve and enhance our lives. We’re already looking forward to Social Media Week 2012!