On November 17 and 18, 1.200 people gathered in Stockholm for one of Europe´s most innovative conference formats: SIME. We had two incredibly interesting and inspiring days, met tons of great people and heard some of today’s most successful and promising companies talk about their business and communication strategies and visions.

SIME 10 was all about storytelling. The topic has been around at media conferences for a while now, but there is still much to learn about it. Storytelling is becoming an increasingly important skill, for brands as well as for service providers, advertisers, marketeers and personas.

The Real Social Media Revolution

Social media still hasn’t left the building. After roughly five years the term is still used in every presentation at every media related conference, and so it was at SIME.
Martin Deinhoff and the nutty professor Fredrik Marcus (@fm) showed how they build marketing into a product at Creuna (Swedens biggest web-agency) using social media. Refreshingly, instead of using real products as examples for their strategy, they used product visions like a “beaming system” (They tried beaming a mouse from one side of the stage to the other. We have justified doubt about the seriousness of the attempt.)

In a social media case safari Matthias Lüfkens, Head of PR at the World Economic Forum in Davoz, showed how political leaders use social networks, especially twitter. Later on, in a discussion with Joakim Jardenberg, a Swedish social media “pundit”, Lüfkens presented how the WEF uses social media in their PR and stated that it is the number of interactions that counts instead of the amount of fans. Companies or in that case an event and organisation should interact in a personal way with those who are interested in them. Lüfkens thinks that “CEOs can be thought leaders on twitter, the PR managers should be recognizable as such”. “Social media is valuable as soon as it enables two people to communicate, who wouldn't usually get in touch” says Jardenberg. Those people who don´t really want to take this step and work continuously in that channel, shouldn’t start using it in the first place (but will miss helpful feedback and the step into the future communication).
View the whole discussion on YouTube.
Jardenberg, and other Speakers such as Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, once more underlined  the crucial function of social validation by social media. He stated that with Gowalla social validation is becoming a game, and the affirmation you get through sharing with your friends is a big driver of acitvity in the “real world”. “You can conserve special moments in time, share it with people important to you, without letting it fall out of their newsfeed”

A refreshingly critical view on social media was presented by the digital ethnographer Dr. Stefana Broadbent. Concerning the topic of social validation through social networks she said, that the validation there is not really needed, it is just nice to have, “but it doesn´t hurt when you get your validation elsewhere”. One of her research focuses is the way people's communication patterns change and how the internet enables intimacy. “There is no change in the people´s communication patters or in our amount of close contacts at all”. The communication in the new channel social networks is just that: an added channel. The inner circle of your contacts remains the same, you just generate more weak ties.
In her studies she found out, that the intimate space of a person only consists of 5 persons, the close circle of 15, and the rest of your contacts are weak ties. And this is the status of most of your social network friends. The further away a contact is, the more rarely we use other channels than social networks. "Or would you dare to call all of your facebook friends to tell them what you´re doing right now?" This doesn´t mean that we´re not connected with our closest friends on facebook though, it just doesn´t work the other way around.

Talking of social networks, of course Facebook went on stage at SIME 10. Christian Gallardo Hernandez, international director of Facebook didn´t actually reveal any new fancy features, but he presented a pretty impressing amount of numbers. Facebook has 500 million user plus 200 million mobile users, together all users put over 900 million objects on Facebook. The average hours spent on Facebook in the US is 5 hours and 25 seconds per day, which beats all the other communication channels. With the possibility to put their like button on every webpage (3 million sites did), they create one billion page impressions every day - and they give their users the possibility to take their social graph and identity with them, said Hernandez. Unexpectedly 65 plus is the fastest growing segment of facebook users. When asked about the data discussions, Hernandez said “The users trust us with their data, in return we give them great value”.