SMW Community,
For the past several months we’ve been hard at work planning the 12th edition of Social Media Week New York. While we are excited for this year’s conference and have never been more proud of the program we are working hard to produce, we are also seriously monitoring the current situation around the COVID-19 outbreak. We have no plans to cancel the conference at this time, but will continue to stay up to date on important developments as our first priority is to the health and wellbeing of our participants.
With just over two months until kickoff, we remain hopeful that the virus can be contained and/or managed prior to the first week of May. In terms of this specific event, we’ve looked closely at where our attendees, speakers, and sponsors will be traveling from and can confirm there are no large groups attending from high-risk countries.
Our team appreciates your patience as the situation evolves and asks for your continued commitment to Social Media Week. We’re pleased to see that we’re currently tracking ahead of last year in terms of registrations, and we will continue with our relentless efforts to make this an incredibly valuable learning, sharing, and networking experience.
In line with the WHO’s guidelines around planning for mass gatherings in the context of this global health issue, our decision to move forward with the program is based on a thorough risk assessment. This includes taking all recommendations from the New York City government and the CDC seriously and following relevant conferences within our industry for best practice examples. We are also staying in regular communication with our venue, The Sheraton Times Square, and our existing partners.
Beyond our own precautions, we realize many of you are involved in your own company’s response plans and protocols and we offer our well wishes for success in coping with this challenging and unpredictable situation. If your business must adhere to travel bans, we fully respect this and are prepared to offer a number of alternative options to take advantage of such as:
Pass Transfers:
- You can transfer your pass to a friend or colleague who would receive permission to attend SMW New York 2020.
- We can apply the pass credit for the same city in 2021, or any one of our other flagship conferences in 2020 (SMW Los Angeles or SMW London)
SMW Insider: If pass transferring is not of interest, your pass provides you access to SMW Insider, where you can watch the livestream of the majority of mainstage sessions, together with over 450 hours talks, panels and interviews from past SMW Flagship events.
Mobile App Networking: You can also still download the mobile app to network with fellow SMW delegates where you can connect with like-minded industry peers to complement the content experience provided by SMW Insider. We are excited to announce that we are launching a new attendee app experience in early April that will have enhanced networking features.
As always, please feel free to contact our team directly with any questions you may have at newyork@socialmediaweek.org.
Thank you so much for your continued support and participation,