From beginning to end, Social Media Week in Los Angeles (with corresponding events in Bogota, Buenos Aires, Milan and Mexico City) was a  productive game, consisting of 95 events in all, of which I attended or facilitated eight.  Toby Daniels, the Founder and Exec Director of Social Media Week, Erick Brownstein, the L.A. producer, Ben Scheim and the Crowdcentric team, along with Meebo, L.A. Weekly and the other title sponsors, know what they’re doing and it showed.

The week’s events demonstrated again and again that what happens in social media doesn’t stay in social media.  Interactions in the social sphere have the potential to turn into valuable real world interactions:  business and personal relationships; jobs; art; activism; entertainment; awakening; health; transactions; fandom; travel; renewable energy; good food and drink; style; and let’s not forget money.  We’re in this to make the economics work, because if the economics don’t work, no one works.

To that end, there was an urgency to the presentations.  If social media is to drive economic growth, how will it happen?  That’s the question underlining every event I attended or heard about.  We pooled a lot of good answers, too, lots of ways that social media can generate ROI.

SMW week showed us that a movement need not begin massively.  Small groups can connect to large networks.  Local action sparks the mass movement, global networks can inform local cultures.  In the social sphere, flow is more important than stock, a trajectory is more indicative of potential than a position, and a community is a better audience than a demographic.

Here are some of my impressions from week:

—>On opening night, at Inner City Arts, a couple of blocks from Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, Sir Ken Robinson simplifies the complex problems of sustaining  a healthy planet, and throws down the gauntlet to the crowd.  Even though he’s already a knight and everything, he wants us to go out and slay dragons!  He makes it sound like a noble quest, so sure, why not?

We don’t really have a choice, do we? As Sir Ken points out, the population of the earth is on a hockey stick, and it’s going to put such stress on the planet’s resources that, unless we can change the way we live and act toward one another, we are in for a bad ride.  The scarcer the resource, the bigger the war?  How’s that sound, for starters?  If we get ourselves into wars that last 10+ years when petroleum supplies are at their current levels, what kind of wars do we think are we going to get into when supplies have passed their peak? If we cling to the current business models, we are literally talking about endless war.  In fact, we may already be talking about endless war if the Pentagon gets it way.  There are currently over 700 military bases around the world.  No one in the military will project the U.S. getting out of there before 2016.  That is a 16-year war, ladies and gentlemen, costing trillions a year–that we know about. It’s military follies like these that, historically, bring nations to their knees.

—->Also on Opening Night, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame performs with two beautiful women, one a violin virtuoso, one a chanteuse with a stunning voice.  They are amazing together, really, especially the part where  Stewart and the violinist improvise a song.  When the singer joins them, they begin performing Eurythmics hits, and the thought strikes me, “That man is going to spend the rest of his career looking for a replacement for Annie Lennox, and he’s never going to find her.”

—->Meebo, Semantic Foundry and CrowdCentric host an event at the Pacific Design Center on Social Media and User Experience.  (It kills me to miss Rob Reed and Jonathan Taplin‘s session on Geo-Location, but those guys are here in L.A., and this event is hosted by a crew from NYC, so I choose the scarcer resource.)  I’m stunned at how deserted the Design Center is at 2 PM on a Tuesday.  It has never been one of those places crawing with pedestrians, most of its showrooms being by-appointment only, but even by those standards, it’s a ghost town.  It’s telling that the only signs of life in the belly of the Big Blue Whale, as far as I can tell, is coming from the 150 or so folks attending the SMW event.  It must mean something.

The presentations on user experience are good and smart, and a breakout session changes the dynamic just enough to hold most of the audience for three hours.  The art of designing user experiences has come a long way since the mid-90s, when no one knew what an ‘information architect’ was.  I like how UX designers are tying the customer experience to narratives.  We’re still not doing such a great job of defining what those narratives are, but we are at least recognizing that narrative is what connects buyers to brands, organizes complex datasets, and generates the trust that binds citizens to community.That recognition is, in itself, huge.

—->On Wednesday, I conduct the first of what will be three GameChangers workshops for SMW. This one is entitled ‘The Revolution Will Be Improvised—Brand Narratives in the Networked World.’ 30 people from all walks of life participate–from MBA students to a Malibu beach girl with a transmedia project funded with Brazilian money, to the V.P. of digital for Deutsch Advertising.  As always, we have a lot of fun, and everyone learns something.

—->On Thursday morning, I give a one-hour presentation entitled ‘Communication Trifecta’ at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, in which we focus on ‘three levels of meaning’ – Cosmetic, Emotional, Meta.Several people in the audience indicate that they’ve had improv training, so at the end of the talk, I call on one of them, and the two of us perform an exercise I call ‘the Geico Game,’ which turns out great, because she is so good. Always nice to end a scene energetically.

—->That afternoon, I conduct a three-hour GameChangers workshop focused on science communication for students and faculty at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The class is part of a graduate seminar in science journalism taught by the renowned science journalist, KC Cole, at whose invitation I am here. It is a continuation of a program initated by Alan Alda, who joins us on Skype for the last 30 minutes of the workshop.  During the workshop, we play two Biomimicry games suggested to me by my friend, Belina Raffy, of Imprology in the U.K. It is the first time I have coached these particular games.  I could have done a better job of explaining them, but they work.

Over Skype, Alda and I talk shop for a few minutes which is awesome, because he is one of the original legends of the improv community. At the same time, I am a little self-conscious, because the class is just sitting there, listening to him ask me questions like, “Did you do any contact work?” “How did you create the focus that got them outside their heads?” “Did you find that ego was getting in their way?”

A few people step in front of the camera and do short presentations for Alda. One of the biomimicry games, played by six grad students, has resulted in a silly design for an imaginary animal. Alda points out that what I thought was a shortcoming of their design, its ‘silliness,’ indicates that the group has collaborated freely, unconstrained by the ‘rational’ judgments of the left brain, and compliments them on it.  In pointing this out, Alda himself demonstrates one of the principles of improvisation—there’s opportunity in everything, even in what we might at first perceive as silly or inconsequential. 

—->Thursday evening at The Cimarron Group, a high end entertainment marketing agency….a ‘Fanthropology’ workshop for movie studio and music company marketing execs. I consulted with Cimarron’s social media team on this, but have no responsibilities for presenting it, and we’re there early, so Rick Shaughnessy, who flew in from Chicago for the week, and I sit in the Cimarron Bar, which is an old set from Melrose Place, and talk shop. The event itself is very well produced. Henry Jenkins, the famed author of Convergence Culture, is the featured panelist and Kevin Winston of Digital LA is the moderator. Within the space of an hour, the panel offers dozens of data points that are relevant to any brand looking to create and manage fan communities.

—->Friday…the Closing Night Party at The Room nightclub in Hollywood. Members of the SMW planning committee, the sponsors, and worldwide producers are all here. I’m especially happy to see smiles on the faces of Erick Brownstein of The New Agency, and the members of his L.A. team, including Dawn Sinko and Wendy Walz, who did such incredible work to pull together the week’s 95 events.   We all take a collective breath. Social media is a pebble dropped into the water, and we are all optimistic about where the ripples can carry us.

—->[CODA] On Saturday, Lee Fox, the energetic founder of KooDooz, a cause-related application for kids, hosts an event at the Santa Monica Library, about dealing with all the plastic in the ecosphere. There’s more than you want to know. I thought there was one gyre, as the massive island of floating trash in the Northern Pacific is called. Turns out there are three, each of them larger than the state of Texas. Lee screens the excellent documentary Bag It, a story told by a funny and personable guy named Jeb Barrier, who decides to take a closer look at the plastics industry after he gets some personal news about his family. I meet Ian Moise, the founder and CEO of Reuse Connection, and make a mental note to introduce him to my friend Deb Maher in D.C., where Ian is based, to tell him about Deb’s plan for turning recycled plastic into shipping pallets to replace the wooden ones that predominate today.

I take a picture of a kid wearing a costume made of plastic bottletops, which we learn in Bag It cannot be recycled, and often end up killing the sea animals who eat them. The kid gets it. We cannot deal with the challenges we face as problems to be overcome. They are too big, too overwhelming. In fact, in Bag It, one environmentalist says of the gyres, “There’s nothing we can do about them.” No, the only way to deal with the problem is for all of us to emulate the kid in the bottletop costume–to see a problem as art that has not yet been created, as a story that has not yet been told.