CyberFootprint

Right off the bat: let me invite you to Social Marketers Summit. It is a conference about social media taking place in Prague on 9 September, 2010 at Slovanský Dům (Na Příkopě 859/22, 110 00 Prague 1).

No matter in what city or country you live in, a conference or a workshop dedicated to online PR and social media is bound to happen near you. Most of them are average at best and remind the visitors of pre-ordained kabuki. A local icon or a social media guru comes on stage and starts going on and on about “the challenges facing the marketing and PR industry in the age of new media and user-generated content”, while boring the audience to sleep. This summit isn’t going to be like that.

As every conference depends on the people who organise it, I believe this one is set up for success. Behind the scenes are Pavel Hacker from Viral Booster and Jakub Svoboda from tyinternety.cz, the Czech equivalent of Mashable. Both are very industrious and open-minded individuals. Besides, they have been to a countless number of boring conferences, so they know what to avoid.

It’s not only about the organizers, though. Social Marketers Summit will have a plenty of interesting people who will feed our minds with interesting topics. I’m looking forward to these three speakers. I am sure there will be more

Erica Swallow, an Editorial Assistant at Mashable: Community projects on the rise we have not heard about much yet. I have no idea what I should imagine under the title of this presentation, but it sounds intriguing.

Marek Prchal, a freelance idea maker: PR and social media in commercial sector. This man is a Czech social media trailblazer and it would be very interesting to hear about the thought processes and assumptions that have led to his innovative campaings.

Josef Slerka, the chief of R&D at Ataxo Interactive: Seeing is believing, measuring is knowing. The social media, and especially online PR is suffering from the lack of clear and objective measurement. Josef’s talk isn’t likely to bring anything new into the discussion, but I am hoping to learn how to set the objectives in a way, so they can be tracked and measured.

Update: Josef will not talk about measurement and analytics – I misunderstood what he is going to talk about. The speech bears the title of Selling users is good business. As far as I know, the speech should be geared towards utilising data mined from the social media.

I hope that I gave you enough of reasons for visiting the conference. For more information, look at www.socialsummit.cz or their Facebook page.