#1pound40: The Impact of Social Media

Sleepydog CEO, Toby Moores headed to Canary Wharf this week, to take part in a curated unconference on the subject of social media.

The 1pound40 event was hosted by Thomson Reuters and Amplified, and focused on the impact of social media and the future of news and politics. Attendees were encouraged to document the event as much as possible, using audio, video, photos, tweets and live blogs.

You can catch up with all the information from 1pound40 by visiting:

• Reuters
• Amplified
• The Guardian
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Audioboo

All proceeds from the event will be donated to the DEC disaster fund appeal for Indonesia.

Social TV Forum

Sleepydog is the Silver Sponsor at this year’s Social TV Forum, a one day conference and exhibition which examines the impact of social media on the television industry.

The event takes place on 28th September 2009 at London’s Royal Institute of British Architects, and includes a top lineup of speakers from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, MTV, Sky News and Sleepydog’s own Toby Moores.

Topics covered during the event will include:

• Key trends driving social TV
• Social networks as a new entrant to the video market
• The impact and opportunity of social networks for the TV production community
• The challenges in developing and implementing social TV

For further information about the event and to register your attendance, please visit  www.social-tv.net.

The Voice In The Room

Toby Moores and Mark Jones discussing social media from Martin Belam on Vimeo.

Sleepydog CEO, Toby Moores and Mark Jones from Reuters discuss social media at the News Innovation Unconference held in London, July 2009.

During the session, they explore the appeal of social media to politicians, and how using services like 12seconds.tv can capture ‘the voice in the room’. For more, please visit currybet.net.

Many thanks to Martin Belam for the video,

Perfect Storm For Change

Toby Moores on the Perfect Storm for Change from Social Media Club on Vimeo.

Sleepydog CEO, Toby Moores was recently interviewed by Chris Heuer from Social Media Club. During the interview, Toby reflects on how the economic crisis, the shift in management focus from efficiency to innovation and the rise of social media as an amplifier are colliding to create a perfect storm of change.

Social Media Greenroom

Building on some initial forays into politics and social media that myself and Christian Payne made last year, the Sleepydog team have been playing an advisory/brainstorming role with Thomson Reuters that evolved into something we like to call a social media greenroom.

So far we’d used a combination of Twitter and LifeCast to pull in questions / feedback and then create a space for more conversation around the subjects that a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event throws out. When Davos came around we had another brainstorm with the Reuters team to discuss the best way to amplify their presence out in Switzerland. It was very gratifying to see the team out there hit the ground running and also be able to provide some live conversation back here in the UK as feedback to their work.

Having already broken a few barriers with the Labour party and the Conservatives (that event itself was covered by CNN because of the social media angle) we now have our sights set on Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. We hope to build upon the idea of a social media greenroom by making this next one a social media focused event rather than a bolt-on to a regular Newsmaker. This in part is thanks the success of our last SM greenroom event with Bob Zoellick, President of the World Bank, when he was in London for the G20.

Whether its working with movie stars or politicians they (or their handlers) can be very wary of new media or indeed anything that strays too far from the familiar. Describing our set up in old media terms seems to work best. So explaining that sourcing questions via Twitter and answering them live via webcam is simply another way to do a traditional greenroom interview works pretty well.

With all this in mind the Sleepydog developers have been working hard on something called Newsdeck that offers a fully integrated producer hub to help coordinate and amplify an event such as a Newsmaker. So far we’ve been asked to show it to Microsoft (which we did last week) and are still tweaking the features for use by Reuters in the near future.

For myself and Sleepydog this is all a good way to explore how the media landscape will look some time ahead. It’s a little like exploratory drilling, but rather than hoping to strike a rich stream from the past we’re actually tapping into the future.

Thanks to smart people like @ilicco, @MarkJones and @chris_parker we get to do some very cool stuff here and have a few more things up our collective sleeves. Watch this space or follow us on Twitter to keep in the loop.