Silicon Valley is about to get an overdose of social media. This week happens to be Social Media Week around the world and San Francisco has been chosen as one of the 12 cities that will be celebrating this annual event. This year, the theme of Social Media Week (at least here in the San Francisco Bay Area) will be “Shareonomics: The Rise of Social Economy” where each event will focus on the value that one gets from sharing content with others. The term “shareonomics” was coined by the digital agency Beyond and the hope is that attendees will be able to gain some insight into the impact of this phenomenon. David Hargreaves, CEO of Beyond, says “At the heart of this value creation is the notion that social media makes the process of collaboration and sharing things almost entirely frictionless.”
Over the course of the next 5-6 days, San Francisco will be home to nightly events of panels, seminars, parties and tweetups geared to get people talking about sharing. Content “hubs” will also be made available by Social Media Week sponsors specializing in different topics: Adobe will house the social data & analytics hub while IBM/Razorfish will cater to social tech & analytics. Other hubs: Cisco/SAP will handle social enterprise, Beyond/Trulia/San Francisco State University will be for social central, AOL for social lifestyle, eBay for social commerce, gyro for media, Adobe for entertainment & games, and San Francisco State University will curate social good. It seems that all of these hubs are assigned to companies/organizations that specialize in these topics–probably a good way to have people talk to experts if they have questions.
In its third year, Social Media Week has been holding events and promoting social media in over 21 cities around the world. This year, San Francisco is joining participants from Tokyo, New York City, Washington, DC, Singapore, Miami, Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Sao Paulo, and Paris to share a common interest. San Francisco’s Social Media Week calendar of events has been posted online for you to check out what great events will be taking place.
