The Platform
Social Media Week, a worldwide technology and marketing conference that takes place in 30+ cities annually. As the SVP - Head of Design of Design and technology, I, amongst other tasks, design,d evelop, and continue to build the SMW Global platform.
SMW Global is a website and a CMS that's built on the Wordpress Multisite codebase. It's essentially the skeleton that keeps all other SMW-related platform sites and projects in check and functioning. It houses nearly 7 years of conference related data, thousands of articles, hundreds of thousands of users, and much more.
The global platform is also a CMS that our own team uses to manage the content across all other SMW sites.
To the user, on the other hand, it's the global website for everything SMW; a series of pages which lay out the conference schedules of each SMW city, as well as as a news platform composed of editorial content and industry news.
SMW City Strategy on SMW Global
When I first began my role at the company, I created and managed all SMW cities (including those operated by our independent partners). Local city organizers, simply managed the content. A lot has changed since then. At the moment, SMW runs and operates three key flagship cities. The remaining cities are operated off-site. New cities are added on a monthly basis, based on the outcome of applications that come through to us via the SMW global platform.
The Editorial and News Content
The global platform also houses SMW News. Several years ago, a decision was made to consolidate all of our editorial content across all SMW city sites that used to publish and manage their own, and make it reside only on the global site.
Our editorial team now carefully curates, schedules, and publishes content, as well as crafts promotional material for Facebook and newsletter mailings. I've continued to work on refining this process, as well as designing and developing features for showcasing this news content.
What's Next?
In 2019, I plan on enhancing the categorization and the user's ability to be able to quickly browse and search through the vast library of editorial content.
I've already made great strives in improving the SEO of SMW News, which has had a significant impact on the discovery of our editorial headlines on search results.
