The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010 has opened up to the wider world through the cutting edge use of social media. The global public had the opportunity to follow debates live, send their video and text comments in specific sessions and discuss on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Overall the Forum has reached a worldwide audience of 430 million readers online through the use of social networks.

Facebook

The Forum tapped into the collective wisdom of the 400 million strong Facebook crowd. In several key sessions, the social networking platform Facebook ran real-time pulses, polling over 200,000 people and bringing their views into the discussions at Davos. Check out how these Facebook polls were used in the NDTV debate in Davos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL9LKLNudAs#t=4m30s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL9LKLNudAs#t=31m45s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL9LKLNudAs#t=40m37s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL9LKLNudAs#t=1h00m04s

The World Economic Forum now has over 7,100 fans on Facebook.

Livestream

The Forum webcast all public sessions on Livestream reaching a cumulated audience of over 73,000 viewers. Press conferences were seen by over 36,000 people, and they could put questions to panellists via Twitter and Facebook

Twitter

Twitter was a-buzz during the Annual Meeting with over 250 participants and 120 journalists continuously sharing their impressions on the microblog. A Twitterwall allowed participants to see a running micro-commentary on the meeting as it progressed. The Forum live tweeted quotes from key sessions sending a total of 150 tweets during the five-day meeting. ‘Davos’, ‘WEF’ and ‘WorldEconomicForum’ were mentioned 30,000 times on Twitter. 1,551,130 people are now following the Forum on Twitter (http://twitter.com/davos), placing the World Economic Forum into the top 100 Twitter accounts worldwide. The Forum also tweeted in Chinese on the Sina microblog.

YouTube

The Davos Debates on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/davos) have been watched over 600,000 times. We have received countless questions from the global public which participants answered at a special video corner at the Congress Centre. Among the participants who came to the Davos Debates video booth were several heads of state and government such as the Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico, Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, President of Colombia, George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece, Abhisit Vejjajiva, Prime Minister of Thailand. Watch all of the responses here.

80 of the 220 sessions of the Annual Meeting were posted to YouTube (http://youtube.com/worldeconomicforum) and have been watched over 140,000 times.

Julia Lalla-Maharajh from End FGM Now, won the YouTube Davos Debates and spent a week in Davos meeting with world leaders including Bill Clinton. She brought the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) to a special panel at the Annual Meeting which was also live-srteamed on YouTube.

MySpace

MySpace partnered with the Wall Street Journal to send Sloane Berrent as a “citizen reporter” to Davos. Check out Sloane’s reports on the ins and outs of the Annual Meeting at http://www.myspace.com/myspacejournal. The Forum now has 447 friends on MySpace.

Flickr

Over 350 pictures from the Annual Meeting shot by Swiss-Image and made available on Flickr.com http://www.flickr.com/worldeconomicforum have been viewed over 30,000 times during the week of the Annual Meeting.

Updated 11.02.2010