#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.

MacBook Aircraft?

I’ve still not got around to seeing Transformers 2 – although I’ve been told by several people not to bother! But after seeing this video my appetite is well and truly wetted!

Thanks to @philcampbell for tweeting this.

Triumph

Working for the past few months immersed in a science fiction show has been a lot of fun. Lots of work too, of course, but when a big part of the research has been revisiting shows that ran and ran such as Mission: Impossible, Columbo and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. it’s not the kind of work day that you drag your feet towards.

The great part of writing a show like Slingers is that a lot of the reference material is so readily available – for the most part I don’t have to worry too much about the future as in many ways (for better or worse) we’re already living in it. For example, the above image is taken from the trailer for upcoming apocalyptic thriller The Road. It’s a stunning image of a familiar world gone wrong, but what’s more stunning is what I read in this Esquire preview:

“When they pass through a city, there’s a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There’s a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape.”

Kinda horrifying.

A much more beautiful example was this shot of the Space Shuttle Atlantis caught as just a speck against the backdrop of the sun (uncropped image here). When you take into account that Atlantis is almost 25 years old and quite an old fashioned idea herself (often described as a brick with a stick by those piloting her back into our atmosphere) there’s something almost retro about our Shuttle missions.

One real piece of real life science fiction that touched me recently was the Phoenix Mars Mission from NASA and the genius stroke to anthropomorphise the little craft by giving it a voice via Twitter:

It was a thing of wonder to have the reports come back and see the little guy interact with its followers, but then as the mission came towards its end it suddenly became heartbreaking:

I used to think living in the future was all jetpacks and rocket ships, but it turns out it was all about projecting a little of our humanity out into the darkness…

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.