Yesterday, I was lucky enough to get to attend Social Media Summit 2012 in Aalborg.
Overall, this was a really good event, and I want the good impressions to be in focus. The main thing is: I would love to be able to attend again in the future, because I truly believe this event has the potential to become Great, instead of just good. I left feeling inspired, and I think that’s the most important thing.
Here we go,
Social Media Summit, 2012, sponsored in part by Konxion (thanks!). A free event for everyone who in some way works with social media professionally – and also for people like me, who hope to work professionally with social media one day.
The summit took place in biocity Aalborg, the place with most facebook check-ins in Nordjylland. In a lot of ways, it was a cool location: comfortable seats, giant screen for presentations, and centrally located in Aalborg. Bonus points.
konXion and the other sponsors took extremely good care of us. We were welcomed with coffee, croissants, and fruit. Lunch was sponsored by sushisushi. Again, high symbolic value: the restaurant in jylland with the most facebook likes. In the afternoon, there was cake and coffee sponsored by… to be honest, I don’t even remember the actual name, but some sort of food college (?). Either way, they were quite tasty.
There was quite a bit of celebrity factor. Henrik Dahl was conferiencier, and he also did a good job (even though I personally might not fully appreciate his humor).
After the opening statements by Thomas Thomsen and Henrik, Mikael Lemberg from Facebook discussed “the power of news feed”. Honestly, this was probably, for me, one of the more interesting presentations. Did you guys know that organizations can now target their facebook campaigns to custom audiences? This is both really cool (from a comm/marketing perspective) and really frightening (from a private perspective).
After a networking and coffee break, Alexander Peiniger from All Facebook Stats presented about facebook KPIs and benchmarking. Lots of numbers, quite interesting, but not really relevant for my specific communications perspective.From a more marketing perspective though, I think it would be great.
During the next break, Pernille Hjarbæk Steenberg presented Social Media Gym. It was fun to see everybody get up and dance and move around. It was also a super idea to get everyone moving. I know I felt stiff and headachey at the end of the day!
Adrian Roessler from Podio presented ‘the podio story’ . I admit I had never heard of Podio before, so it was interesting to learn about the platform. I’ve already limited my thesis to be about external social media though, so unfortunately, it’s not relevant for my thesis. It did spur alot of thoughts and ideas for me though.
After lunch, Lars Ingerslev from LinkedIn discussed “the ‘other’ social network.” Lots of new insights and knowledge about LinkedIn that I did not know.
After another break, we split into workshops. I attended “Communication and Social media” by KonXion, since this sounded like a relevant theme for me. Also – I figured the sponsors would come up with something good.
The other choices included: “Social media platforms”. “Applications and development”, and “Law and social media”.
After the first workshop though, I had a migraine headache and I was eager to return home to Little Dude, so I chose to pass on the last workshop. Even though I skipped the last 45 minutes, I wasn’t home until about 7:30 PM…..
The mood at the event was quite low-key and fun, probably also a result of the demographics of the participants. There weren’t alot of suits in attendance, rather, the average age was lower than any other work related event I’ve ever attended.
In the spirit of social media, we were all encouraged to tweet with the #smsdk hashtag. A screen onstage had live updating of our tweets, and was also used to ask the presenters questions. Unfortunately, the screen was too small for everyone to be able to see the tweets. For a while, I followed the tweets on my own computer until the battery died.
@chriskja 