What are Social Media Week Cities?
Social Media Week (SMW) Cities are micro-websites that reside on the SMW Global platform. Each city is responsible for communicating with, selling passes to, and providing tools to attendees via interactive agenda, session, and speaker sections.
The history of my design and development of these micro-websites has come a long way over the years; I will focus on how they look, function, and behave in the present.
How Global Data Feeds Cities
Each SMW city pulls data directly from the global platform - this data comes in the form of session and speaker information. There's a process in which our team receives speaker and session applications, reviews, approves them, and eventually publishes them onto the platform, tagging it appropriately so that it correctly populates the correct city.
With multiple cities conducting their conferences throughout the year, this process is part of an on-going, uninterrupted strategy that our entire company takes part in. It is critical for everything to function flawlessly, 24-7.
You can learn more about my work in developing and maintainig the SMW Global platform below.
How Each City Sells Passes
Each SMW city takes part in selling passes to its conference via a robust ecommerce platform, via a marketing timeline carefully crafted for each city. Just as with conference content, this too is a process that cannot be interrupted. Quantities and types of passes will differ, as will the timeline of various pass discounts; however, we strive to conduct a similar pass selling strategy across all of these cities.
I've developed several intergrations with platforms such as Slack to notify us of pass sales. While we conduct various quantity reports on a weekly basis, sometimes it's gratifying in seeing ecommerce report in real-time.
Design Powered by Content
I subscribe to the idea that a platform's interface should be visually enhanced by the quality of content; both copy and image-based. I've demanded and deployed strategies that our team now follows in gathering only the best type of digital assets - as ultimately, it will be those assets that enhance the visual appeal of the site to our attendees.
Good assets and good design take time, but it's that investment in time that ultimately provides better aesthetics.
That's a Wrap!
Each city adapts, adjusts, and positions content specific to every device. I'll continue to sound like a broken record, but every platform that I architect is responsive. It's not a switch, or a copy and pasted code, it's simply extra time and effort put towards the planning of each site. In our business, understanding that attendees at the conference will heavily favor their smartphones heavily influenced my engineering of the site's interface on mobile.
What's Next?
SMW Cities will continue to evolve. It's inevitable. In my 5 years with the company, I've gone through at least 4 major design and development revisions.
I feel that my greatest achievement within the company has been being able to bend, twist, and adapt the entire platform to any new direction that the company pivoted to - it's a testament to the way that I approach design as well as the way I structure and organize code.
