Social Media Week is February 1-5, 2010.  It’s an international five day event being held simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo to “explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.”

I think it’s a great opportunity to use the social media to tell some stories about how social media are affecting relationships.  Do you want to help me do it?

The Idea

The Social Media Week Story Project

an original comedy about relationships and social media
told entirely in the social media
and presented live February 1-5 2010.

If the girl you’ve been crushing on changes her relationship status to single, do you have to wait more than an hour before asking her out?

Is it okay to check your JDate profile for new matches during a first date?

Is it wrong to set up a Twitter account under a fake name to stalk your own child?

After your first love reconnects on Facebook, do you have to tell your husband?

Is it wrong for a married woman to flirt with total strangers on Twitter?  What if they live on another continent?

Social networks are changing the nature of human relationships.  The aim of the SMW Story Project is to tell some these of stories.

Empathy is the theme of the story project.  Empathy is the fuel that drives social media and the building block of community.  It’s our hope that our funny little story will allow us to understand our fellow human beings a little better.

The Process

1. Blog the experiment from beginning to end, starting with a call for writers, actors, designers and anyone else who might want to collaborate in the project and continuing through every stage.

2. Mine the web to find out how social media is affecting human relationships.
Using a variety of tags, we’ll check out what people are talking about when it comes to dating, friendships, family and social web.  Mothers stalking their kids on Twitter, boyfriends who won’t update the Facebook relationship status, long lost friends who find you through your blog.
(Make all this data publicly available in a FriendFeed group so that anyone interested in the project can add, comment on or favourite the material or use it to create their own characters to interact with the characters and storylines we create.)

3. Put together a story room of five or six smart, funny writers to turn the data into story arcs.

4.  Have each writer create a character on the web using social media tools like blogs, social bookmarking, FriendFeed and Twitter.
They can cast actors to “play” their character in profile pictures, photo albums and other media they may develop.

5. Set up a central website with links to each character’s social media footprint, RSS feeds, widgets and the schedule of performances.

6. During Social Media Week play out the stories of our characters through their social networking activities.
In addition to blogs, podcasts, photo albums and social bookmarks, our characters will meet on Twitter at specified performance times to enact scenes in the dramatic narrative.  These will be improvised by the writers based on scene outlines (think Curb Your Enthusiasm).  Audience members may tune into “watch”.  They can chat with the characters.  Or they may even create their own characters and participate in the drama.

7.  In the final days of Social Media Week, host a free panel discussion to talk about the project and tell stories from the trenches.

The Call to Action

If you want to be part of the writing team, drop me an email to let me know.  If we haven’t worked together before attach a short writing sample please.

There are lots of other ways to participate besides writing.  We’ll need someone to help set up websites and manage RSS feeds.  We could definitely use some design elements.  There are probably tons of things I haven’t anticipated yet. If you want to participate in other ways, let me know how you can help.

Send email to Story2oh (at) gmail (etcetera).