National Geographic’s Grosvenor Auditorium hosted #DCWEEK’s Media 2.0 Day. A co-production of Shiny Heart Ventures and iStrategyLabs, Digital Capital Week, or #DCWEEK as it is tagged on Twitter, is an umbrella of an estimated 185 events with over 5,000 registered attendees occurring over 10 days.
Even as iStrategyLabs’s CEO, Peter Corbett, opened the morning session with the figures, he seemed genuinely astounded.
Any one person might be – after all, the festival was only announced 3 months ago. The quick story behind DCWEEK’s origin is that Frank Gruber (Shiny Heart Ventures), Peter Corbett and Nick O’Neill (Allfacebook.com) initially set out to create Digital Capital Week back in 2008 but didn’t have the resources to bring it to life. It was only recently that the founder co-producers felt they could pull off such a feat. Corbett is known for pulling of mass community experiments, the best known is his Apps for Democracy contest launched in conjunction with the DC’s Office of Technology.
DCWEEK’s creators asked the online community to register and start thinking about what their festival should look like. Registrants proposed sessions, project labs, panels, social events, and offered up venues and volunteer talent upon registration via EventBrite. It wasn’t long before weekend brainstorming sessions to make #DCWEEK productive began to materialize at iStrategyLabs’s Dupont offices and at George Washington University which has been a big partner and sponsor.
The key questions put to today’s Media 2.0 audience of press, bloggers, and technologists: What can news organizations do to engage and innovate? How can we convert that engagement to something more than just traffic including a positive business result?
Local heavy hitters, Andy Carvin (NPR), Robert Michael Murray (National Geographic), Brian Dresher (USA Today), and Benet Wilson (McGraw-Hill) came out in swinging discussion of their digital strategies and resource management to bringing their respective organizations into a more digitally-oriented age. Wilson commented, “I see a lot of people who know they need to do this but they don’t know how.” Dresher agreed, “Helping [traditional journalists] understand what it’s like to be in the atmosphere is key. It’s like dressing for an occasion, you wouldn’t where a business suit to a pool party.”
Looking at the benefits of engagement and measurement Dresher pointed out, “we measure things in ROIII: Return on Interaction, Influence, and Investment.” Carvin cited the products NPR’s community has produced when called upon, “they see interacting and volunteering with us as a serious public service. – Like working at a soup kitchen or teaching a kid to read.” “[When hurricane Gustav was about to hit the coast] we didn’t have anyone in house who had real expertise in building maps, so volunteers who were professional cartographers and developers came out of the woodwork.”
140Conf and Vonage founder, Jeff Pulver, gave his take on The State of Now. “I learned everything about social media by the time I was 13 because I’ve been social with media.” Pulver received his Hamm radio license at 12 after becoming enamored with the connection he felt through interacting with the technology as a youngster.
Even today the former Wall Street Trader sees value added through the platforms. Having the information people provide as it happens as key, “Arbitrage is still a good business and if you know the future four seconds in advance you can make a good trade, 40 seconds – even better. And 40 minutes? You can place some good trades.” Today’s market is on social networks, “I think you’re a moron to leave Facebook. If you leave a place where there are 500 million people to do business with, you might as well go live in a cave. You gotta go where the people are and where the trends are.”
The trends were also the prime topic of the next presenter, Pew’s Internet and the American Life Project Director, Lee Rainie. Rainie discussed the results of a new addition to the project’s survey data set which debuted just last week. The general trends show that technology is comfortably permeating our lifestyles with increased availability and accessibility throughout all demographics. Though we might still be deciding individually what levels of privacy create a sense of safety, we’re allowing the waters to be tested and see a net benefit from technological advances as they relate to our personal relationships.
Echoing the Pew study’s findings, Vijay Ravindran, Digital VP of The Washington Post Company felt the challenge for individual publishers “will be how many touch points you have as an advertiser. Consumers haven’t figured out how comfortable they are.” Approaching the same topic from the business to business side, Jim Bankoff, CEO of SBNation.com said, “I think it’s all market based. Those ad budgets are coming back.”
