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More than 3,000 attendees, 94 speakers (including one professional wrestler) and 19 events—this was the tally for what unfolded at JWT New York during Social Media Week (Feb. 7-11) #SMWNYC.

JWT was firmly in the center of the conversation as industry leaders discussed the role of social media in business, media and communications. Panels covered a broad range of subjects ranging from gamification to the future of location-based marketing to the role of storytelling using digital channels. Many of the panels found here: http://www.livestream.com/smw_newyork_jwt

Here are some of the highlights:

• JWT N.A. CEO/Worldwide Digital Director David Eastman Keynote/Social Gaming: http://bit.ly/f8qqzI

 

• How Social Dynamics are Reshaping Games: http://bit.ly/f8qqzI

 

• Gamify Me: How Game Mechanics Have Infiltrated Marketing: http://bit.ly/hkirdB

 

• Pay Attention: Social Listening Done Right: http://bit.ly/i4C93V

 

• Check In or Check Out: Avoiding Location-Based Nothingness: http://bit.ly/hPMkkY

 

• Creative Storytelling in the Digital Age: http://bit.ly/gVY0Hl

 

To date, more than 15,000 unique viewers have watched the events, held here at JWT, on livestream.com totaling 600,000-plus minutes watched.

During the week, there were more than 1,100 Foursquare Check-ins at JWT New York’s offices and the conversation on Twitter @JWTNewYork, (which flew past 3,000 followers), was lively and positive including:

• At the gorgeous @JWTNewYork HQ to be Gamified! Live tweets imminent.

 

• Even the elevators @JWTNewYork are cool.

 

• @saneel heard you said some nice words about our dataviz app for #smw11 at @JWTNewyork thanks!

 

• @tim_nolan I said it was utterly fantastic and should be its own event. Very nice work. Kinda want it permanently in @bbhnewyork lobby.

 

All in all, it was a fun, educational and informative week. Thank you to everyone involved.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that data is central to what I do. Whether it’s optimizing my tweets based on how many people click on the links to determining how hot a story is based on how many people hit the comments, I’m constantly making decisions based on social analytics. My data usage is pretty basic, mostly based on free tools like Backtype and Hootsuite, but Tuesday’s social analytics panel—chock full of PhDs and data scientists as it was—offered a much more sophisticated discourse.

There was plenty of discussion around the cool stuff we can learn and discover once the mounds of data already being collected is properly organized and indexed. But what I found truly fascinating was the debate around what essentially amounts to the “social contract” of data collection. We all love free apps, but is it OK that opting to download one signals an implicit OK to send all sorts of data to the provider? And how much do we trust these organizations to keep our data safe and not misuse it once it’s collected.

This may give away my millennial status but I’m generally OK and even actively willing to share my data—if I see the benefit. That can mean anything, from a discount from a group-buying site that tracks my buying habits to status on a social network that makes me declare all sorts of information about my daily life. And Tony Jebara, the chief scientist and co-founder of Sense Networks (he’s also an associate professor of Computer Science at Columbia), says he’s seeing that mindset more and more. “My hunch is that this data will start flowing very freely, very soon,” he said. “People want that value. They’ll start to volunteer their data and opt in, and there will be lots more apps.”

As a marketer, this can really mean some exciting potential. It’s the ability to get an intimate view into the life of a mass of consumers, fine-tuned and pinpointed to suit our exact needs. But it also means we assume a level of responsibility to protect, and not misuse, that data. It’s hard to forget the numerous flare-ups around Facebook apps that mine and misappropriate user information, and it’s the quickest way to mar your relationship with customers. “What we need is a culture that encourages responsibility around data,” said Jamie Daves, a cofounder of ThinkSocial and venture partner at City Light Capital.

Once you get past the dark side of data collection, it offers plenty of potential, not just for marketers, but for science and society. Hilary Mason, a data scientist at bit.ly, offered some optimistic predictions for a more intelligent future. “We could eliminate cognitive drudgery, repetitive tasks, organizing information, data recall,” she said. “We’re moving in that direction on the consumer level. Then it’s a question of what’s next when we have that intellectual luxury.”

As a marketer, you’re probably excited about what you can do and learn with data. But as a consumer, are you comfortable with how much organizations can know about the most mundane details of your life? Or is it worth it, if that somehow makes your life easier or more convenient?

Warren Raisch is the Executive Vice President at Digitaria Interactive Inc., a full service digital agency based out of San Diego, California. Warren will be a panelist on Friday’s Social Media Week panel, Check In or Check Out: Avoiding Location-Based Nothingness.

What was your social media eureka moment?
My Social Eureka moment was when I read a news article about two girls who were caught in a flash flood and swept down a storm drain…even though they were holding a phone in there hand they opted to post their cries for help on Facebook updates and were saved by their social networking friends. 

What do you use on a daily basis and how?  
On a daily basis I use Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin Groups where I manage a group. and my own personal blog. 

What is hot and what is just hype?
I believe social marketing has permeated all aspects of marketing and the new mantra for marketers is to think Social, Think Cross-Channel and Think Cross-Device Marketing. 

What do you see as being the next big thing at next year’s conference?
I think the convergence of Social, Mobile and Location Based Platforms will be the next big thing. 

What is the one takeaway you hope everyone gets from your panel?
The one big takeaway is that I believe that we have crossed a tipping point and now – All Marketing is Social Marketing –  When thinking about offline, online, mobile or even event marketing Social has a part in all forms of marketing moving forward. 

Vivian Rosenthal is CEO of GoldRUN, a new augmented reality platform that enables users to locate, interact with and take photos of GPS-linked virtual objects positioned in the real world. She’ll be a panelist on Friday’s Social Media Week panel, Check In or Check Out: Avoiding Location-Based Nothingness. 

What was your social media eureka moment?
It was realizing that I could use social media to galvanize people  into action,  gather friends around an event, or reach fans about a  launch. Social media had the power to democratize things, to give anyone a voice, to shift the power from them to us, from brand to  consumer.

What do you use on a daily basis and how?
Email, which I really hate and Twitter, which I really love. Email is something I have to do, it’s a laborious and overused form of  communication. Twitter is something I choose to use, and it reaches  more people and wastes less of my time.

 What is hot and what is just hype?
Anything has the potential to be hot, that’s what Malcolm Gladwell  explains so well in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

What do you see as being the next big thing at next year’s conference?
The further integration of games and brands.

What is the one takeaway you hope everyone gets from your panel?
Our physical and digital lives are forever going to change with the
widespread adoption of augmented reality.

More information on GoldRUN:

GoldRun is a new augmented reality platform that enables users to locate, interact with and take photos of GPS-linked virtual objects positioned in the real world. A powerful promotional tool tailored for the mobile environment, the app hosts AR-driven social media games, guides, virtual photo booths and loyalty programs designed to drive traffic to physical and online destinations, increase product sales, enhance brand engagement and bolster viral impact.

GoldRun users take pictures alongside virtual objects and can immediately post these photos to Facebook. By helping brands tap into this image sharing impulse, the app turns social networks into even more effective distribution channels as GoldRunners share images of themselves interacting with everything from scenes in blockbuster films, to iconic sports figures and the season’s must have fashion items.

What was your social media eureka moment?
I remember the mass Twitter adoption at SXSW in 2007 —that weekend has been bronzed in geek lore, and it was a legitimately huge moment for social networking. We were all using this new tool to see which parties our friends were at, and to track audience responses to panel discussions, and it was a live demo of the power of real-time one-to-many communication. It was a newish idea back then, and this was before everyone had iPhones, so a lot of it was text-message-based. The nerds used it to facilitate this great weekend of parties and connectedness, and then we all went home and tried to sell our friends and bosses on it. That was the hard part (and still is, to a certain extent).

What do you use on a daily basis and how?
Wow, there’s a lot. I use the combo of Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, and HootSuite (and sometimes Trillian) for updating all of them at once. Twitter long ago became my main news source…I haven’t used an RSS reader regularly in years. I use Radian6, CoTweet, and BackType almost daily for social media monitoring at work. I’m not on FourSquare a lot, but I check in when I remember to—maybe once a week, but I’m not really sure why I do it. Similar to how I use Quora…I have a great social graph going on Quora but I don’t really use it for much. I have a couple Tumblr blogs, a couple WordPress blogs, and some Blogger blogs that I contribute to when I have time, and my bands maintain a presence on MySpace and Facebook. It sounds like a lot to maintain, but it really isn’t.

What is hot and what is just hype?
That’s a tough question. I tend to think of Quora as kind of hype-y, if only because startup blogs are peeing themselves over it, and everyone’s joining it, but few are actually using it. Likewise, everyone has an opinion on FourSquare but most of the opiners don’t really know what it’s for—I personally don’t think there’s much of a use-case beyond urban young adults. I spent a couple weeks in the suburbs this winter and there just wasn’t the same drive or opportunity to find cool, interesting places to check in from. That sounds terribly snobby, but let’s be real: FourSquare is about checking in from cool places that make you look interesting.
In terms of what’s hot, analytics tools come to mind. BackType and HootSuite are free and awesome, ChartBeat is pretty amazing, Radian6 is great. We’re getting more data and context and information out of this big social mess of a web, and that’s really exciting—not just on a marketing level, but on a cultural anthropology level, and on a nerd level.

What do you see as being the next big thing at next year’s conference?
Definitely social video…and it will be called the next big thing in 2012, with wider-spread adoption in 2013. We need to find ways to fuse our social graphs with our media consumption in the location where most of us actually consume the bulk of our media: on a couch in the living room watching a big TV. The process for chatting about Glee or college basketball with our friends is way too clunky right now. And friend recommendations should be integrated into our DVRs; my TiVo should know what my friends watch and what they talk about, and be smart enough to record it for me.

What is the one takeaway you hope everyone gets from your panel?
I’m hoping we can deliver practical advice on implementing smart social listening strategies. It’s difficult, but the people on the panel have done it before, and succeeded at it, so hopefully we have something useful to offer.

Today’s Gamification panel at Social Media Week was all about convincing the marketers in attendance that using game theory is an effective way to increase audience engagement, sharing, and mindshare.  

And gamification doesn’t have to be about Farmville.

“Many of the experience that best represent gaming, the user doesn’t say ‘oh I’m playing a game,’” said Gabe Zicherman, head of the Gamification Summit. According to Gabe, gamification is about making everyday experiences more fun. And for marketers, it’s about making brand experiences and content more fun, which we tend not to do, according to him. “I’m constantly surprised by the boring shit that’s out there.”

And gamification doesn’t have to be about FourSquare either.

“Pointsification is not gamification, badgeification is not gamification,” said Demetri Detsaridis, of Zynga NY (formerly Area Code). “What it all adds up to as an experience. If what you’re looking to create is fun, then you’re creating a game.” 

But there does need to be an incentive or an objective for people to engage with game-like objects, and in order to choose a good incentive, we need to know what our audiences are interested in—how they prioritize rewards. Gabe says marketers have thus far been pretty bad at that.

He uses an acronym to set up the reward priorities that drive human behavior: SAPS (status, access, power, stuff). He describes the system in detail on his blog, but the underlying premise is that giving “stuff” away, unless it’s a big bag of money, is not the most effective motivator. Instead, we should be focusing on intangibles like community status or privileges.

He also said that gamified systems, if effective, can rewire the way we think about things. Gabe used the Amex card system as an example.

“The Amex Green/Gold/Platinum/Black system is an amazing story,” he said. “It forces us to ask questions. Amex had a good enough system to make Black the top…but black could have been any color.”

The Olympics have taught us a standard metallic hierarchy of achievement: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Amex’s system of Green, Gold, Platinum, and Black cards turns that metallic ordering on its head, but it was effective enough that card holders now accept that there are levels beyond gold, including the super-premium Black card.

Those are some of the quotes from the panel that jumped out at me. If you’ve got more, feel free to share them in the comments (or post a link).

BTW, Meghan wrote a good primer on gamification last week…worth checking out.

Panelists: Rajat Paharia, Gabe Zicherman, Samantha Skey, Demetri Detsaridis

This is a guest post by Nicole Price Fasig, Content Strategist at JWT

The Super Bowl ads sucked this year. This was the overarching theme of this afternoon’s Social Media Week panel “Participation, Aggregation, and Criticism in the Digital Age.” The spots were the same as every other year, and that just might be a product of the insularity of the industry, said Fast Company senior writer Danielle Sacks. “As an industry junkie, sometimes you get caught up and it’s hard to know what people are actually watching” (An interesting side note about my team’s relationship with Sacks: She penned Fast Company’s feature on The Future of Advertising saying traditional agencies just can’t keep up the innovation of digital boutiques in this day and age. My colleague Jim rebutted in a column on AdWeek saying “digital is at the heart of what we do.”).

So how do you get around this blind spot? Each panelist had a different idea. Jay Rosen, a press critic, writer and journalism professor at NYU, said it’s as simple as the end of traditional models. Instead of creating a message that is intended to appeal to a wide audience, the Internet offers that ability to narrow the message through user data and social channels. “It’s the elimination of that inherent inefficiency that I think is transforming advertising,” he said.

On the flip side, Jamal Henderson, brand manager for PepsiCo, suggested that if you want to appeal to a mass audience (and with a brand as all-inclusive as Pepsi, he says you don’t have a choice), you have to make them co-creators throughout the process. That means posting ad trailers on YouTube and watching views, comments, and social sharing. It also means soliciting user-generated content and taking full advantage of social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Jonah Peretti, Founder of BuzzFeed, opened the topic of social sharing, saying advertisers need to not only put out creative, but also track and tweak it constantly. “Nowadays, advertisers are saying, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to make interesting content that people want to share?’” No surprise, engagement is the name of the game.

While I’m very familiar with many of these arguments—we utilize a few of them in our brand journalism practice here at JWT—there was one surprising point I really enjoyed. Being students of new media, Peretti said that over at BuzzFeed, they’re also looking back to the past.

When has advertising—and media in general—not been in flux? If it’s not the Internet, it’s the coming of radio, or TV, any other “new media” that shook up the paradigms of mass media. And what were advertising execs discovering 50 years ago? Comic books. That’s right, back in the day executives were big fans, and comic books were a bold new frontier. The ”gamification of the ‘60s,” perhaps?

So which is it: Bold new world for advertisers, or the same state of flux the industry has always been in? Or both?

For the month of February, CSI is using its Facebook game, CSI: Crime City, to motivate fans to keep watching the show by posting a question each week that can be answered only by viewing the episode (e.g., “What is the number of the missing DV-tape?”). Correct answers win credits good for in-game bonuses. This blend of social gaming and tune-in is another demonstration of the increasing social-ness of TV viewing. Fans of the show are likely to discuss the effort in their communities and beyond, which will spread awareness even further.

With marketers striving to refine their strategies around TV-Web integration, we’ll see more brands blending social/TV concepts. As new platforms come to market, brands will have myriad opportunities to sponsor activations, content discussion areas, fan recognitions and other levels of consumer engagement that come with integrated use of smart TV apps, tablets and other mobile channels alongside broadcast.

Link: JWT’s CEO discusses innovation in Social Media Week keynote

In his keynote address this morning, David Eastman, CEO of JWT North America touched on innovation and shed light on the possibilities for brands, society and innovators thanks to social media. Eastman urged the audience to avoid getting hung up on using social media to announce what they’re doing, but to actually spend their time doing great things.

For more on Eastman’s keynote, check out Alex Palmer’s article in Direct Marketing News. Additionally, if you missed this morning’s keynote, you can catch the full speech here.

(photo via)