Social Media Week, Lagos, Off To An Awesome Start

From Left, Michael Williams, Nzan Ogbe, Mo Abudu and Confidence Tawo, at the SMW event on Calabar Carnival.

For the first time, in Nigeria, Social Media Week, a global event on social media deployment and future, is in Lagos. The event, which has been promoted since last year, is finally here, and will involve a series of talks, discussions that will be online, and at selected venues. The first events were held today, including one on the Calabar Carnival and Music Festival, at Terra Culture. The discussion was on the history of the carnival, its growth, expansion for the 2013 and 2014 carnivals and how social media has been helpful in recent years for the event. The panel, comprising of Nzan Ogbe, the Chairman of Calabar Carnival; Mo Abudu, CEO of Calabar based Ebony-Life TV; Michael Williams, MD Tourism Bureau and Confidence Tawo, Head of ICT for Calabar Carnival, spoke about merchandising for memorabilia of the festival and how the event is usually streamed online, and people get interactive via social media. They spoke about the world coming to Obudu in 2014, and the Jazz festival planned in this year’s event. There was also another event on Entrepreneurship in the Digital Age, where the panelists discussed business development and response on Twitter.

The event continues today, through this week, and is streamed online and also on social media with hashtags and the SMW keyword.