This Tuesday in DCU, wa had our first conference in the amazing Helix. As the « get social » conference, the theme has turned around the different social networks like twitter or facebook, but also around the different video platforms like youtube. We had the chance to have seven speakers, who teached us a lot of things about how does this part of internet works, with a lot of examples, statistics and videos.
Here is a little summary of this poignancy event !
We had first of all a speech thanks to Dr Theo Lynn, about the different possibilities to know and predict what the people want, thanks to internet and the different social networks. What they want to consume, what they like, what kind of hobbies they practice, where they would like to go on holidays etc.
Then it has turned around the prevention of the cyberbullying by using the same method as just before: finding automaticly the different piece of information. How is it possible ? by using a large data bank of stereotipes, which can lead to find if a piece of information is categorized in this bank.
In the same kind of theme, the second speaker Deirdre Hogan from GAJO (an internet finder) has spoken about the burning issue which is how to find people, and espacially in social media. In GAJO’s laboratory they try to make machine understand what they have to look for in an accurate way. As an exemple GAJO’s team try to make their computer able to find opportunities for the firms by themself; like by finding where it is possible to place ads, by analysing which ads are seen the more to be able to offer the right product to the right costumer, by analysing the tweets on Twitter to find where the people want to go on holidays etc. All this is possible through the use of keywords, for exemple the tweets are categorized thanks to the keywords and then analysed in a specific way depending on which category they are.
The third speaker was Jane McDaid, the Creative Director from Thinkhouse, here is a short presentation video about the firm.
She described us what was for her the seven categories of videos avaible on the internet, punctuating her speech with some stats as « 53% of the youtube’s videos are seen less than 500 times » or « nowadays youtube is seen as more important than TV ». The seven differents categories are:
1) lol: the funny videos, not especially with a specific message. 2) epic: impressive videos on which you can see people doing amazing stuffs, it can be used to promote a brand in some cases. 3) emotive: this gategory is aimed at making people react by seeing this video to make them help, like by donating. 4) wtf ?: videos where there is no thread, it can be recorded randomly or done on purpose to promote something. 5) zeitgeist: videos which make the people react and think about a new conception of our world. 6) nsfw (not safe for work): this category is all about the curves of the female population, just for pleasure or to catch people’s attention during an advertising (especially men’s attention). 7) informative: this last category is defined by highlighting information.
So here is a short video from Thinkhouse, I let you guess in wich category it is !
The fourth speaker was Lucy Campbell, Marketing Director from RTé Digital, a firm about Drive innovation, meet audience needs, suporting in ireland for digital economy, creating a digital organisation culture and support rté’s commercial goals. The specificity of this part of the brand is that it is specially focused on smartphones, and how/where/when they are used on internet. This was a transition to a short speech about GAAGO which is the premium video service of RTé.
By the use of GAAGO and RTé digital, RTé is now leading the audience on his market on ireland but also in the rest of the world. And it is partially due to RTé if Ireland has been the second contry in the world in terms of audiance grown (10% last year behind Italy).
We had then a speech turning around Google thanks to Alan Coleman from Wolfgang Digital, with some serious statistics explaining how much Google has conquered internet (search engine, youtube, google+ etc). As en exemple when Google crashed, the 27 of august in 2013, that was only for four minutes; but internet slowed down and was working at only 44%. This is an evidence which shows the importance of this Brand on the internet’s market.
Our next speaker was the classy Nicolas Cappiello who was the EMEA Sales Director of Linkedin. He explained us that the main goal of his company is to connect the world’s professionals and to make them more productive and successful. He showed us how Linkedin has changed, from an only proffessional social network to a new kind of network mixing proffessional skills and only contents. Since Linkedin was opened to contents, they have grown to be now 6 times more used as the informations in direct contact with the jobs. But this is important to understand that contents and pieces of informations are used to work together in the same way. This is a new step in the business web community, which shows that a new era already came with all the social networks; even in the professional world. The long term vision is still to build the first « world economic graph » to visualize and be able to use every single opportunity int the business world.
The last speaker was Eric Weaver, Chief Social Officer from IPG Media Brands. His objective is to focuse primarily on helping companies understand ongoing shifts in culture. Apart from a huge list of places where he worked, Eric has not given us further information or what he was doing nor his vision of the Internet nowadays. It was interesting to follow his career and his diferent steps in the business world, however the theme of his speech was not oriented towards the get social theme (at least the majority).
If I had to sum this conference I would say that it was an extremely rewarding experience for all of us. The different speakers allowed us to better understand how social networks work. They allowed me personally to change perspective and realize how social networks were much more than only entertainment.
Thanks to DCU university which welcomed and organised this event, and of course thanks to all the speakers !
Here is a link if you want to have a look by yourself of what happened !
Don’t forget to read all my others articles about the other conferences, and to comment to tell me/everybody what you think or how you react !
DICE conferences 