‘We are going to need a bigger board’

It has been nearly a month since Social Media Week has finished and the paperwork has been wrapped up, to do lists have been completed and we have already started thinking about next year.

Sam will be doing some serious data analysis on the results with his calculator and Sharpie fuelled by caffeine, cupcakes and retro sweets but I realised that I had not written a blog since Christmas so thought this was a perfect time to catch up and summarise the last few months.

‘We are going to need a bigger board’ In our second staff meeting of the year we starred at our Blue Peter style board (made by the lovely Lauren) and it became clear that SMW was going to be even bigger than expected.

It’s not that our estimates had been conservative, we had big plans for this year and hoped to achieve, in  four months,  50 events in total, five of our own, 45 with other event organisers, with 5,000 people attending throughout the week and we wanted to raise enough sponsorship to make it all free.

The end results blew us away and being a small team at Chinwag we literally could not have done it without all of you. Using the principles of Social Media only works if you have  a community of amazing companies and individuals, with oodles of passion and belief.

Overall there were 110 events, 12 designed by Chinwag and a whopping 95 created and delivered with love by our 54 event partners including Dell, Dutch Embassy, British Library, BBC, Channel 4, LikeMinds, Viadeo, We Are Social, techMAP, Ogilvy.

44% of events were put on by digital, traditional and social media agencies the rest were a variety of companies, organisations and individuals from all sectors.

8,500 tickets weresnapped up and with 8,000 online viewers watching the livestream of the event. Social Media Week London (#smwldn) trended every day on Twitter surfing the wave of tweets across all the events.

Event formats were more varied than ever from the traditional round table, panel discussions, networking events to alternative formats; unconferences, huddles, a pop-up farm and a pop-up shop.

Over 50 amazing venues across London generously donated space including Tate Britain, The Guardian, Design Council, Daily Telegraph, IAB, The Hub, HSBC, Wahaca, EHS 4D, TalkTalk as well as many more.

The topics covered ranged across a large selection of industries from music, games, mobile, public sector, broadcast, charity, museums & galleries, sport, radio, business, recruitment, journalism and theatre.

Throughout the week, our global and city sponsors Nokia performed random acts of kindness in London as well as other cities around the world giving out free phones and also tickets to sold out events. They were a fantastic city sponsor and were happy to get stuck in, contribute, share and enable connections across the week with #nokiaconnects. So a big thank you to them and our other sponsors, event partners, venues and media partners and all of you who participated creating the biggest SMW London to date!

We want to tell the full story of the week and we’d love to hear your stories and experiences, so together we can collectively document what happened. Tell us what you learnt, who you met, deals you did, what inspired you. It would be fantastic if you could share your with us and have the opportunity to win some lovely Kodak cameras with Share buttons!

Leave your stories in the comments below or email them to smwchinwag [dot] com, if you are feeling shy.