We hope you’ve enjoyed the last two days of interactive debate and discussion at #SMWF as much as we have! Thank you to everyone who attended and made the event so productive and engaging. Here are our photo highlights of the last two days!

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We are pleased to have partnered with the below hotels to offer all #SMWF delegates a discounted room rate for the 17th, 18th and 19th March 2013. We have a limited number of rooms are available at each hotel, so we do recommend making your reservation soon!

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With two jam-packed days of content, frequent networking opportunities and the best of the industry at your fingertips, it’s easy to miss some of the messages being spread at #SMWF N. America.

Merlin Ward, account strategist at Renegade, has six lessons from some of social media’s brightest brains at last year’s New York show:

1. Pair Your Social with Ads

Chris Thorne, Vice President of Social Media & Media at EA, the sports game developer, found that content was more effective when coupled with Facebook advertising. They put extra care into creating content that users could “play” with, essentially gamifying their Timeline; then they made the monetary spend to promote it to as many users as possible. The result was more than just extended reach—they increased virality and sales.

2. Your Content Doesn’t Work Everywhere

Morgan Baden, Director of Social Media and Internal Communications for the book publisher Scholastic, shared their failures and successes with Pinterest. Pinterest is a natural social network for this brand, but they found that not all content is created equal. While female users enjoyed sharing book covers and special quote memes from books, photographs for events and other physical spaces didn’t attract the same interest. It seems that content made for collecting does the best on Pinterest, while amateur point-of-view photography is better left on the shelf.

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Thank you to everyone who came along to this week’s #SMWF at the Sentry Centers in New York. With some of the social media industry’s brightest and best headlining the agenda the two days were jam packed with debate and discussion around the future of social media marketing.

Special thanks go to our friends at Doodle.ly for all their great live doodles during the show! Doodle.ly is a free social drawing platform available online and all mobile devices, find out more here.

@Robharles of @Bloombergnews welcomes everyone to #SMWF
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#SMWF kicks off in New York in two weeks, and we’re excited to announce that Shane Steel, Twitter’s global director of marketing sales is one of our headline keynotes.

Twitter, which took a little over three years to reach a billion tweets, now sees almost the same number of tweets sent every couple of days, 60% of which are sent and viewed on mobile devices.

The platform represents one of the most exciting real-time marketing tools we’ve ever seen, and Steel will discuss how brands are taking advantage of the various marketing tools introduced by Twitter over the last two years.

Promoted Tweets, which caused consternation among hardcore Twitter addicts when first introduced two years ago, are now enjoying engagement rates of between 2% and 3%. (more…)

We’re all BBQ’d out after a lovely (and surprisingly dry) evening at Vibe Bar, Brick Lane! The night was filled with Mama’s tasty Jerk Chicken, social media chatter and pub quiz banter as teams went head to head on the #SMWF Pub Quiz! Big congratulations to the team at @gravytrainLtd for winning the bottle of bubbly at the end of the night.

And for you all you dying to know the answers (in particularly the Pinterest question) we have listed the answers below!

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The arrival of our British summer time has got us in the BBQ mood! We wanted to invite you to come along to our first ever SMWF Summer BBQ taking place at Vibe Bar on 17th July.

It’s a great opportunity to catch up with your social media peers as well as some of our featured SMWF speakers from the event in March. Doors are open from 6pm for the social BBQ and plenty of social media banter.

We’re also planning plenty of fun and games with some fun, fast paced speed networking and the SMWF BBQ Pub Quiz, so come and pit your social media knowledge against the other teams – we’ll also be throwing in plenty of questions around the latest celebrity gossip and other top trivia! There’ll be a special prize for the winning team!

A limited number of tickets are available, so it’s recommended to book your space early! To join us for an evening of chilled schmoozing, chatter & social media banter simply click here to book your spot today!

That’s SMWF Europe over for another year; thanks to everyone who took time out of the ludicrously summery weather to come indoors and listen to a host of social media experts waxing lyrical about the developments in our industry.

After Chris Brogan tore down our preconceptions and misapprehensions on the morning of day one, before building us back up again based on fundamental common sense, we knew we were in for a good show. Thanks to all our speakers and chairs for the benefit of their insight and expertise over the two days.

There’s much debate about whether social media has matured as a market, and as such, whether there’s anything new to be said, but what we saw this week the answer to that question is a resounding no. It’s true that many of the basics and best practice areas are out there, including commonly know tips and tricks, but many of the less glamorous organization’s wide issues are still being worked on. In many cases it’s the organization wide role that hasen’t been addressed, and how ‘social’ is being approached from a top down perspective.     Fundamentally how social is approached from a strategic role and its integration within an organizations wide approach either from a campaign generation or service quality and relationship management perspective. As always, much still needs to be done in terms of best practice, and delivering on the basics is always important.

This year we’ve seen delegates approaching our speakers and exhibitors with complex strategic and operational questions about how they achieve pre-defined objectives. They understand the channels and they know what they want to achieve. That’s a big jump from last year when the majority of conversations centred on why social media was worth getting involved with; the question used to be ‘why’, this year it was most definitely ‘how’.

The top end of social media is forcing its way into the stratosphere, with measurement strategists burrowing ever deeper into the data, returning with philosophical questions about how we define engagement, why we measure it and how we mine applicable insight from it to inform future strategies. As the understanding increases, so the hunger for more data driven insight also grows.

Next year SMWF is moving onwards and upwards to a new venue. Look out for some massive developments in the format and content too. We’re constantly developing, and will introduce a number of new facets, including more in-depth content and new innovation only sessions, breakout workshop sessions, barcamp discussion only tracks for audience participation,  more speed networking with multiple parties and networking opportunities around the event.

We look forward to continuing to connect with you until then. Here’s how this year unfolded, in pictures.

 Keynote conference room

Chris Brogan – Keynote Address

‘Who should create content within an organisation? Everyone.’

‘Checking your Smartphone is the new smoking’

It was great to see everyone and celebrate the industry at the Social Soiree! We hope you’re all feeling fresh and ready for another exciting day of discussion and insight. Today alongside the keynote track the Enterprise and B2B Marketing workshops will be taking place as well as the Mobile Marketing track, there will also be some exciting free sessions taking place in the Marketing Tech area of the exhibition. We’ve picked out our highlights for the day ahead… (more…)

So SMWF has officially kicked off, and boy do we have a jam-packed first day set for you! With so many sessions to feast your eyes on, it’s difficult to whittle it down to just a select few that are unmissable. Today we’ve got the keynote track taking place along with the Social TV and Social Shopping workshops. Here are a few sessions that we think you shouldn’t miss… (more…)