The Social Media Week Lagos (SMWLagos) has become a Mecca to thousands of people eager to keep up with trends in an ever-evolving digital world.
For the past nine years digital technology enthusiasts, professionals, experts, government officials and public workers from across the country and outside Nigeria have participated in the week-long event that usually takes place in the month of February.
It is arguably the most popular, consistently well attended and informative tech event in Nigeria.
Every year while the theme of the conference changes as well as the topics, the location stays the same – Lagos.
For Ngozi Odita, co-founder and executive director of Social Media Week Lagos, the success of the event comes with great responsibility and an obligation to use the influence to move Africa forward.
How it all started
Social Media Week (SMW) is a franchise that started in New York City. Prior to securing a franchise license, Odita was going to conferences in different schools speaking around reframing the conversation around the use of social media on the continent in the 21st-century context.
“It is what I will talk about at conferences. I did that for a few years and I started to feel like a soundboard. I was going everywhere talking about how awesome Africa was and how tech and digital culture was really different,” Odita told BusinessDay. “I began then to feel like it would be much better and a lot more authentic if people just hear it from the people on the ground.”
It wasn’t until her third event at the Social Media Week that she decided she would rather do it on the continent. She applied for the franchise licence. It was about a three-month process and they approved.
Since securing that licence, Odita and her team have learned a few things in planning big tech events.
A full year of planning
Planning a big event like the Social Media Week Lagos takes more than just putting together the right team and meeting sponsors. Those are very important.
But, Odita told BusinessDay that there is a full year of planning ahead of every event. As soon as one event is ending, the plan for the next edition begins.
“I run very very small teams, but there is a lot of work to be done amongst the very few people. It is a tremendous amount of planning just because we always want to ensure that we are doing better and that we are providing more,” she said. “So every year we want people to notice the difference, so the changes have to feel like it is not the same event every year. That takes a lot of innovation at our end.”
Localising a global theme
Every year the theme of the Social Media Week Lagos changes. In 2019, the theme was ‘Stories’, however in 2020 it changed to ‘Human X’.
Odita explains that the theme of the year is generated from the global theme. The 2020 ‘Human X’ theme was seen through a marketing landscape and how businesses can be more human in the type of marketing they create.
Haven received the general theme, the Lagos team are expected to crystalize it into a local context. The theme is looked at across the board through interactions on social media, feedback from the community and periodical survey.
“So our approach is a little bit different,” Odita said.
About 60 percent of the programming of Social Media Week Lagos comes from the feedback from the community. For the 2020 edition, the team organised a focus group in November where they got a chance to hear about what the community was interested in.
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Foreign participation is growing
Although seeing through a successful conference represents a milestone for the team, but a better indication is the growing number of foreigners’ participation at the Social Media Week Lagos.
People attending from outside Nigeria accounted for 13 percent of the crowd in the 2020 edition. Odita says this is a result of a deliberate strategy to plan the conference in such a way that it is not only relevant to people in Lagos but also people outside the state and Nigeria. Thus, Social Media Week Lagos is evolving into a pan-African event.
“It is relevant to anyone who is interested in doing business across the continent,” Odita said.
No plans for SMW outside Lagos
While the team has received several invitations to host the conference outside Lagos, Odita insists there would not be an SMW event in Abuja or other Nigerian states in the near future.
“We try to make people understand that we are building an event that is for everyone, it just so happens to be in Lagos,” she said.
For her, the idea isn’t to go everywhere and recreate Social Media Week; it is more of how her team can create the best event in the city of Lagos that is of service to all Nigerians.
