The sky reflects on the logo of the World Economic Forum on the eve annual WEF meeting in Davos. (photo: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)
A guest post from business author Don Tapscott:
If you can’t be in Davos, do the next best thing: participate online. The Forum is using social media to make its proceedings more visible and help the public engage with attendees. The Forum wants to shake its elitist reputation and be seen as an open forum for global discussions.
Most of the major sessions will be streamed live online or posted later on YouTube. Many sessions will take questions from the online audience. Don’t like what a speaker said? Post a video saying why you think the person is wrong. If you think Davos should be focusing on different issues, say so.
Follow up-to-the-minute discussions on Facebook or Twitter.
So if you can’t be here in body, you can certainly be here in spirit.
All press conferences and key plenary sessions will be streamed live on Livestream. During press conferences anyone can submit questions directly to the panelists via Twitter and Facebook.
The plenary sessions will also be available on demand on the Forum’s YouTube channel.
In the run-up to the Forum, organizers ran an “Ask a Leader” challenge on YouTube, inviting the public to submit their most pressing questions. The Forum will put a selection of the top-voted questions to the world leaders.
The Forum will conduct live interviews with selected participants that will be streamed on its Facebook page.
In selected sessions, the Forum will tap into the collective wisdom of the online population through the use of “pulses,” which are quick polls on Facebook. The pulses can capture the opinion of several thousand Facebook users in a matter of minutes. Their views will be fed back into the panel discussion.
The Forum has compiled an official Twitter list including 400 participants active on the micro-blogging service. During the meeting, their tweets will provide insights and news. A Twitter list of journalists covering the meeting is also available on the Davos Media list. The official hashtag of the Annual Meeting 2011 is #WEF.
Follow the Forum on @Davos as well as on its live tweet account @WEF where key quotes will be tweeted from public plenary sessions and where most of the Twitter chatter will happen. Forum communities are also on Twitter at: @SchwabFound @TechPioneers and @YGLVoices.
Blogging
Guest posts from selected participants will be available on the World Economic Forum blog. The Forum will also aggregate all media portals and partner blogs about the Annual Meeting on Netvibes.
World Economic Forum App
And, of course, there’s an app for that. The Forum has developed an application for iPhone and Android smartphones for the general public available in the app stores. The application integrates all of the Forum’s social media output – Twitter, Blog, YouTube and Flickr. Go to http://wef.ch/apps for details.
Don Tapscott (@dtapscott on Twitter) recently co-authored “Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.”