The SIME Barcelona Highlights

Presenting to you the highlights from SIME Barcelona

(Apart from the flickr stream, we have 2 videos titled trailer and what have you learnt from SIME. You can find them below )

SIME Barcelona, feat. global thought leaders and catalysts of change was a 4 hour knowledge orgy bringing to you the best of SIME. Below is a quick compilation of the feedback from the audience on how has  SIME helped them in their business, be change leaders and most importantly stay relevant in the changing digital climate. Thank you Barcelona for the stage and inspiration.

Networking in the Finnish Archipelago

Social networks can be built around nearly anything. But you had better build them around something close to your heart, if you want them to provide any value. And the island of Nagu (around 1500 inhabitants) in the Åbo Archipelago in south-west Finland clearly qualifies as close to my heart. Since 1.1.2009, Nagu is a proud part of the City of Väståboland, whose tourism bureau contacted me in March.

Use social media to support your passion

I was asked to help Väståboland use social media to develop local tourism. My pleasure! I have a vision how the social networks should be used to develop tourism in small, local communities, and I’m happy to contribute to the best of my knowledge. And, all you SIME blog readers, I suggest you to pick your own favourite place to help out. Perhaps you have a weak spot in your heart for where your roots are, and perhaps you could help them get going?

But I’m not a tourist in Nagu! I nearly live there!

The thing is that I’m only a part-time Nagu inhabitant, as I changed my permanent dwellings from Grankulla (outside Helsinki in Finland) to Munich in 2006. That’s where I’ll stay for the time being, but I go to Nagu as often as I can and I grab every opportunity to strengthen my roots there; the latest such opportunity was last summer, when my son followed his father’s footsteps and was confirmed in the Nagu church. My roots in Nagu consist of summers spent there since 1970, from my parents having moved there 1983 (and from the house I inherited from them), from a number of relatives and friends and from my grandparents growing up in Nagu.

Hence, you could be lead to assume that I have nothing to do with tourism, when it comes to Nagu. Almost the entire brochure “Unforgettable Nagu” is known to me, in contrast to what it would be for my neighbours here in Munich. But my vision is vastly different from pushing brochures to complete strangers.

Top tip: Use existing networks!

In my vision for promoting tourism in Nagu, the local tourism bureau builds upon existing networks. And the existing networks primarily consist of the 1500 people already living there, secondarily from the category of “part-time inhabitants” that I represent myself. We feel deeply for Nagu. We have strong ties to Nagu, and thick roots. At the same time, we have other ties to a life outside Nagu, and drag strangers and outsiders to what we perceive to be the most beautiful place in Finland. Who would be better at promoting a place than somebody you know personally, who speaks with passion for that place? Further credibility is added if the person does it voluntarily, without personal gain. And that’s exactly how we part-time Nagu inhabitants behave, and we’re supported in our efforts by many of the guests that have already visited us in Nagu.

If the Väståboland tourism bureau is smart, and that’s how they seem to be after the two-three meetings I’ve had, they will start “bribing” us and let us do the hard work through cultivating our outside-Nagu networks. The bureau of tourism should give us their attention and hand us the tools we need to spread the gospel.

Another top tip: Support the supporters!

But we don’t want payment only in bathing balls, t-shirts and cheerful comments of the “thanks for the good job!” kind. Sure, that’s needed, too. Yet, the most valuable currency we can be paid in is a growing network in Nagu. That we know more locals. That there are more familiar faces to greet at the local store. That Börje (of “Börje’s Fish” fame) recognizes us, both in the Nagu harbour and on his Facebook fan page. That some of our neihbours learn to know us so well, that they recommend us to call Bisa-Pekka when something has to be dug, or Bobi Saarinen when we need to fill part of our garden with sand. That we know ever more participants in the yearly Around Möviken race, or the local Chamber Music festival. That someone tells us about the burglary in the bus outside Martha’s Guest House mid-May. That we get to hear about Eija Lamsijärvi, who can help with catering at parties, about who can help with our construction site, about who can look after our house when we’re far away ourselves. That our children get friends of the same age, and start properly understanding the local dialect of Swedish.

For this vision to come true, the bureau of tourism needs to be brave and see their big-picture duty. They have to start spending time with us, and see us as a combination of voluntary workers and Ambassadors for tourism in the archipelago. They should provide us with great web pages (such as the newly started Facebook.com/Nagu.fi fan page, or Wikipedia pages about Nagu in many languages). We should get to hear local gossip; the somewhat cryptic elderly gentleman Bertel Nagubo already has a Twitter account Twitter.com/Nagubon and his own Facebook page facebook.com/Nagubon, where he has so far entertained his friends not only in the local Swedish dialect, but has also tried his hand at the popular tourist language of German (or Bertel’s own brand thereof). We must be provided with the opportunity to meet each other virtually, through texts and pictures on the Facebook fan page. We must get the opportunity to share our photos of people, nature, sea, of everyday life and of parties — on Facebook, Picasa and Flickr. As our web based networks grow, we must be provided with the opportunity to meet in person during the many events in Nagu, particularly in the summer. It’s now up to the Väståboland tourism authority to oil the machinery, give us the proper channels and platforms, to help us strengthen our networks in Nagu. If we get to know the contacts we need in Nagu, our strong ties strengthen further. We are already passionate, and with a bit of help, the Väståboland Tourism Bureau doesn’t just have four people but four hundred or four thousand.

Go practical: Drive Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and Flickr users to you

It’s around this vision that I’m currently building some concrete suggestions for the Väståboland tourism bureau. They were quick to set up the Facebook fan page for Nagu, which already got over 600 fans. In order for Facebook not to be the sole leg to build upon, I’m promoting the use of the #Nagu hash tag on Twitter. I’m eager to set up a photo competition “Nagu 2010″, where you turn in your entries over Facebook, Flickr or Picasa. I hope for a wifi connection for the ferry waiting lines (Nagu is connected to mainland Finland through a 10 minute ferry service, for 30-50 cars at a time). While waiting, we all have more time to chat and run into each other over the web, than we have when we’ve arrived at our respective destinations in Nagu.

Today’s Good Deed: Go find your own island to support!

The vision is certainly applicable not just for Nagu, which is only a part of Väståboland. But, after all, it’s still just a vision and we’ll need to learn more from reality before we can spread it cost-effectively elsewhere. That’s why I suggest Nagu as a guinea-pig. This summer, expectations aren’t yet overwhelming when it comes to the web presence of a tiny island. Collecting experiences, we’ll be in a great position to spread the experiment to the rest of Väståboland next year. It makes sense to learn from our mistakes in a limited environment.

I’m looking forward to the summer of 2010 as the starting point for an ever stronger network between permanent and part-time Nagu inhabitants. We will see an extensive web presence for Nagu, through pictures and texts provided by us voluntary ambassadors. Local entrepreneurs will earn more money, through a healthy growth of tourism in Nagu. Put us city dwellers to work for you, dear inhabitants of Nagu!

Links:

• The fan page of the Island of Nagu: Facebook.com/Nagu.fi
• The Twitter page of the elderly gentleman Bertel Nagubo: twitter.com/Nagubon
• His Facebook page, requiring knowledge of the local Swedish dialect: Facebook.com/Nagubon

The Barcelona Diary: Bringing you the best of SIME Barcelona

SIME Barcelona was a different kind of a SIME. From a tented venue to the format, it was of a different cadre. And the audience seemed to have liked what they saw. Unfortunately, I was not there in person (what was I thinking?), but the twitverse seemed to have enjoyed their 5 hours of hardcore SIME.  #simebarcelona in twitter can give you a fair idea (its quite sad that typos of the word “some” becomes “sime” which gets indexed too, but hey nobody complains).

Soon you will find the best of SIME Barcelona with videos and pictures here!

Paul Holman and Claudia Gonzalez stand out as the knights in the shining SIME armor. Everyone seems to have been inspired or blown away by them. And the other speakers do not pale in comparison either. With a no BS policy, they were straight to the point, addressing topics from their personal experience, be it in “the marketing panel” or for “innovation at the speed of life”. Ola Ahlvarsson donned his role to perfection, asking pointed questions, giving speakers and the audience much to think about. Ulf Ekberg had interesting ideas about the music industry, and he firmly believes that record labels will be extinct in a few years. He has taken the digital route to his new upcoming album launch in October 2010.

SuiteLife BCN has some of the best bits from the day

Barring a sound system issue (as I understand from one of the twits), the rest made the event one of the best people have attended to this year. And to all SIME friends who were not there in Barcelona, we have put a highlights page together for you bringing multimedia from the event. Videos are being processed as we speak, and they are on their way tell me the communications team. And not to fret, we are doing 4 SIME’s this year, and there should be 1 in a city close to you. Rodrigo is a great friend of the SIME house and has some pictures from his lens.

In the meantime, we are looking around for blogs (Spanish, Swedish, Finnish ..) that covered SIME Barcelona, and did not tweet about it(?). So if you were there, and penned down a few ideas (or plan to), we would love to put some spotlight on to you guys. Thanks for the inspiration and stay tuned.

SIME Barcelona is tomorrow. See you at Fira de Barcelona

Lovely folks, the big day at Barcelona is tomorrow. It promises to be filled with great speakers, panelists and discussions. SIME Barcelona is a quick downloadable version from 0930 – 1330 (4 hours only) bringing to you the best of SIME business, knowledge, inspiration and fun. There is a by invite only match-making session, a meet-the-entrepreneurs lunch, and workshops after the event.

Event Web: http://sime.nu/10/barcelona

Location: http://sime.nu/10/barcelona/location/

Twitter: #simebarcelona (@simeblog)

Very welcome to take the leap with us.

Sara Öhrvall talks about whether iPad is the savior the media industry has been waiting for

If the App Store has got the operators by the neck, the iPad and iBooks embraces the publishing industry. It is a new distribution channel that publishers can track engage emot and connect with their audience. People love the experience on an Apple device like an iPad and automatically the layout and framework makes them like the content they see from different publishers too.

Sara Öhrvall, Senior Vice President, Research & Development, the Bonnier Group and a featured SIME speaker from 2009 (her take on the 5 trends to watch out for) was at DLD Women in Munich, a partner conference to SIME featuring women in the June 10-11 edition. Sara is responsible for the Bonnier Mag+ project, bringing print magazines to digital on the iPad – and future devices. Here she talks about the iPad and similar devices and how Bonnier Media Group is using such channels to connect with their audience better.

Read her blog post on SIME here

The Barcelona Diary: How to be the creator of the Universe

Come Wednesday, the smartest people will go missing, 5500 of them. The good thing is they can be found at the Fira de Barcelona (Barcelona Trade Fair), in the square situated between the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc and the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion.

Location of SIME Barcelona

With SIME Barcelona right in the horizon, we feature some of the panels we are strongly looking forward to in the Barcelona Diary – a collection of posts about SIME Barcelona and around. Today, we feature a panel on digital genesis, yep genesis.

09.55 How to be a Creator of the Universe

A journey to different worlds, the worlds of Eve Online and Erepublik, two of the world’s most successful game worlds.

Alexis Bonté (Erepublik)
Sigurlína V. Ingvarsdottír (CCP Games)

Check their profiles here

The Concept of Online Gaming

Gaming has been one of the strongest gains in the last 2 years, be it on the console (pills = slow growth), MMORPG (vitamins = growing quite well)or social games (steroids = Ethiopian growth). May be, social games is a far winner in metrics such as number of new users, referrals and advertising. However, in terms of time spent, MMORPG might attract a handful compared to the social ecosystem, but the niche is hardcore. Their day starts and probably ends with their favorite game – be it World of Warcraft / Defense of the Ancients or whatever fansy game is out there.

A screenshot from one of the research reports published  GP BullHound’s research
(Per Roman one of the founders of GP BullHound is also one of the speakers)

And 0955 is just about that. What’s working in the gaming world, what’s not, how does it feel to be the creator of the Universe, what kind of demographics play, what’s the future of such gaming in the light of Zynga and the likes … (trust Ola Ahlvarsson the moderator has better arsenal of questions lined up).

Who is this panel for?

a) Developer of Games
b) Player of Games
c) The Rest

Everyone likes gaming; everyone likes to see the way the gaming industry has grown leaps and bounds with plentiful graphics and glitz loaded in, and you ought to be impressed by what these kids are hooked onto.

Welcome to SIME Barcelona and the Day of the Entrepreneur

The Barcelona Diary: Andreas Akesson, speaker SIME Barcelona talks about why Performance Marketing is the new black

Andreas Akesson has a profile thats heavily drenched in marketing and creating brand perception and transactions through different vectors. Presently his day job is as a Partner in Result helping companies grow from different markets into Spain – specifically Barcelona where he has his base.

Rewind to 1996, Andreas joined Olé, the biggest Spanish search engine company managing Olé 1-2-3 (which today would be an equivalent to Google Adwords). In 2000 he founded his own online marketing agency, Active Internet Consulting which has worked with companies such as Autoscout24, Friendscout24, Cofidis, Planeta, Liberty Insurance, Extrafilm, Godo, and Unidad Editorial. Andreas also started a VC company focusing on new technologies (VC More, 2000-2001), an IT firm (Glaukopis, 2002-2004) and an ecommerce solution company applying artificial intelligence (Aibits, 2004-2006).

You can read Andreas’s profile here

We grabbed him to ask him a few questions about his talk at SIME Barcelona and why he thinks Performance Marketing is the new black.

Why do you think Performance Marketing has reinvented the concept of marketing again?
With Performance Based Marketing we mean the possibility, not only to track and know what advertising channel performs, but also in real time optimize the campaings in order to improve your results in terms of return on investment.

Is performance marketing the next step in the marriage between technology and marketing?
More and more we learn about the true value that Technology can offer in Performance Marketing. Criteo for instance improve optimizations based on their technology and so does most of the modern adservers. The displays that perform the best in terms of Cost per Sale will be the one exposed to the consumers. SEM is popular because it performs, not because Google is such a great brand.

Can any brand engage in performance marketing campaigns?
Performance Based campaigns or Direct Response campaigns is born through transactional modules but I believe that any type of brand should start to dig deeper on how and why they spend their advertising budget. BMW might not sell directly cars online but they can be able to measure response by building communities and making their consumers interact with the brand and in this way provide them with valid opinions. That is worth gold for any marketeer.

Is this one more nail in the coffin for traditional media focused brands and agencies?
I am sure that we will see a situation in the future where people say, “how could we spend expensive TV ads and not knowing the Return of investment and furthermore not being able to change the ads if nothing comes out of it”.

You can catch Andreas at SIME Barcelona. Have you registered yet?

Reliving SIME Barcelona 09 – Flickr Stream

[Do you have better photos to share from SIME Barcelona 09?]

The Barcelona Diary: Perform or get the hell out of my marketing budget

The Barcelona Diary will focus on an agenda topic a day, and the speaker(s) involved in the topic for SIME Barcelona. SIME Barcelona is to be held on June 16th with Barcelona Day of the Entrepreneur featuring over 5000 business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and press representatives.

You can read up about the agenda and register for SIME Barcelona here

Getting back to the agenda, the featured topic for today is the one at 10: 15 titled: Perform or get the hell out of my marketing budget

The experts featured in this panel are:

Andreas Åkesson, internationalization Internet strategy experts Result. Rewind to 1996,  Andreas joined Olé, the biggest Spanish search engine company managing Olé 1-2-3 (which today would be an equivalent to Google Adwords). In 2000 he founded his own online marketing agency, Active Internet Consulting which has worked with companies such as Autoscout24, Friendscout24, Cofidis, Planeta, Liberty Insurance, Extrafilm, Godo, and Unidad Editorial. Andreas also started a VC company focusing on new technologies (VC More, 2000-2001), an IT firm (Glaukopis, 2002-2004) and an ecommerce solution company applying artificial intelligence (Aibits, 2004-2006) and is currently working with Result as a Partner

Heiko Rauch, co-founder  and CFO / COO of Zanox one of Europe’s leading advertising networks and a global market leader for performance-based online marketing. Before joining the zanox executive team, Heiko served as a project manager for Bankgesellschaft in Berlin. His strengths in developing and maintaining lean, efficient organisational structures coupled with his strong financial competencies have proved a driving force in the success of zanox’ European and international expansion. It was also Heiko who established zanox’ subsidiary in the US – a strategic move to realise the vision of a globally spanning network covering Europe, Asia and the Northern American markets.

Grégory Gazagne, Criteo.com – Europe’s fastest growing retargeting company. Founded in 2005, Criteo provides the world leading pay per click (PPC) personalized retargeting solution. Criteo’s advanced technology enables online e-commerce sites to re-engage with potential customers who have left their website via dynamic banners containing the most relevant product specific recommendations that are generated in real-time for each individual.

Who is this panel for?

The focus of the panel will be on

• the latest trends in online marketing – more measurable, more ROI, more accountability …
• why performance based marketing is the new black – the deeper marriage between technology and marketing
• how you can turn clicks into cash with little or no risk – segmenting your  potential consumers from the rest.

Rest assured, the guys in the panel have been in the business of defining this new age marketing growing their clients visibility and revenue multifold.  If you are a marketer, a brand manager, a big company trying to understand the technology behind the idea or simply an enthusiast of new age marketing, you know which room to be in if you are in Barcelona.

Very welcome to take the leap with us at SIME Barcelona.

Christoffer Granfelt, the CEO of SIME has a special message for you

He wants you to beware of trends that will hit you at SIME Barcelona.
(Actually, we would also advise you to watch the road while crossing)

Take the leap with us at SIME Barcelona, June 16th

About SIME Barcelona

June 16th SIME Barcelona brings together some of the sharpest brains from the international digital arena. SIME Barcelona is a day with the best of SIME followed by business matchmaking for companies interested in doing business in Spain and Barcelona as well as expert workshops with international speakers.

SIME is hosted together with Barcelona Day of the Entrepreneur with 10 000 entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors and representatives of the press. SIME Barcelona is offered free and matchmaking and knowledge tracks are charged separately based on your needs.

More about the agenda, location and speakers here!

Welcome to a day of inspiration, knowledge, business and fun!