Social Media Week to debut in Australia this September
A social media conference aligned with the international event Social Media Week is launch in Australia in September.
Sydney-based social media and content marketing agencies Rinsed Insights and Evolve Social have partnered to bring the event Down Under for the first time since it was founded in the US five years ago. It has since spread to five continents and sixteen cities.
The event aims to capture, curate and share ideas, trends and best practices with regard to social media’s impact on Australian business, society and culture with a theme of ‘The Future of Now’.
Founder and Rinsed creative director Simon Micarone told Mumbrella while the event will draw on international themes: “We’ve got some interesting spins that make it quite culturally Australian.
“We’ll try and put those themes together but in keeping with what we are really trying to do is to bring ideas and strategies and insights from the people who are shaping this digital economy.”
The team is also drawing on the international success of SMW for inspiration, with a producer attending the New York SMW and feeding ideas back to Australia.
“We’ll take some interesting ideas that were presented over there because they’re a mature market, they’ve been going since 2009 so there’s a lot for us to learn in our first year,” said Micarone. “One of the great things that we’ve picked up is ‘defend your tweet’ which was a live version of responding to Tweets.”
The event program will comprise of three streams: innovation, culture, and advertising and marketing.
“We’ve picked three main umbrella themes to sit under the theme and that’s to really resonate culturally with advertising and marketing audiences and promote innovation and entrepreneurship,” Micarone said.
The event Micarone said is about collaboration and bringing the industry together.
“We really want to foster great camaraderie and collaboration within the industry,” he said.
As part of the development of the week-long conference, a SMW Advisory Board has been established with seven social media industry experts appointed who will contribute to the the direction of the week.
The board consists of Futurist and author, Ross Dawson; general manager of asku, Gavin Heaton; head of strategy and digital at Jack Morton Worldwide, Katie Chatfield; general manager of Edelman Sydney, Matthew Gain; co-founder of social media intelligence firm SR7, James Griffin; social strategy director at M&C Saatchi, Tiphereth Gloria; and founder of Mudo Media, Michael Watkins.
The board is also inviting individuals and organisations to apply to host their own event as part of SMW.
“There’s another unique part of this which has really worked successfully abroad,” said Micarone. “Yes, we are putting together in excess of thirty events which we’ll curate and define content for, which hopefully will appeal to audiences but also individuals or organisations who would like to take part in Social Media Week can actually submit to host an event.”
Interested parties submit their ideas to the SMW Advisory Board which then review the idea.
SMW Sydney will take place from September 22 to 26 alongside simultaneous events around the globe.
Miranda Ward
