With Ian Wyatt and myself both attending,  ITF had a strong presence at the recent C21 Future Media conference at BAFTA in London’s Piccadilly, which largely focused on how to build audiences and, crucially, commercialise social network content.  Among the speakers were some serious social media players including Karla Geci from Facebook and Jed Simmons from YouTube.

Karla spoke of Facebook’s emergence as a new content platform and about the rich variety of opportunities for producers, broadcasters and rights owners.  She also discussed Timeline, Facebook’s new online visual curriculum vitae-style project which will allow members to put images and details of their lives so far on personal pages.   Director of YouTube Next, Jed Simmons talked about the social video platform’s investment plans and its moves to create more flexible ways to monetise video content online.

Anthony Rose (Zeebox Co-founder) revealed the benefits of his new, freely downloadable app to enable tablets to sync with TVs in second screen viewing, and for users to interact at the same time with their friends elsewhere.

The Digital Frontier of e-publishing was explored by a panel that looked at the new tablet version of The Human Body led by DK Digital Publishing Director Justin Moodie and AKQA Head of Mobile Daniel Rosen, who had turned the bestselling book into a new platform that was faithful to the original style but developed into a new interactive form – including the tablet pulsing like its heart images! Somethin’ Else CCO Paul Bennun talked about collaborating with Richard Dawkins to create the beautiful digital book of The Magic of Reality. And James Huggins (Made in Me MD) showed how his interactive Land of Me enables young children to use a tablet instinctively to create their own visual and audio versions of stories. The speakers all agreed that the evolution of the tablet meant that innovative visual and high quality e-publishing could finally show its true potential.

In the Next Generation Production session, Oil Creative Director Mike Bennett enthused about the creative benefits of two-screen, and working with brands which are increasingly setting the pace, and the funds, rather than broadcasters – illustrated by clips from his “Fallen Angel” Facebook interactive video campaign for Lynx  starring Kelly Brook. We R Interactive games designer Dan Mayers showed extracts from his innovative I Am Playr game in which aspiring soccer champion players are involved in the first person in interactive video drama scenes, with brand placement & funding (Nike, Red Bull & Alfa Romeo).

Other panel highlight contributions from ITF supporters included Matt Campion (The Social Media Factory) on creative content for Facebook, and Peter Cowley (Spirit Digital Media) showing, through his A-Lister hypothetical celebrity culture game, TV show & online video channel, how to monetise and transport audiences to different platforms, which he expands in his regular ITF workshops.

Henry Normal, CEO of ITF member company Baby Cow Productions, also contributed to the session on digital content which looked at how internet and mobile now provide a real and lucrative distribution platform for producers.

If anyone out there still needed persuading of the advantages of forward thinking and embracing social media, then surely Henry’s tale of building content brands and working with new technology were compelling.  Back in 2007, Baby Cow got involved with a company called Twitter to promote Alan Partridge online, when the unfashionable new social network service was less than one year old.  Fast forward to December 2011 and Twitter have 300 million users!  Tweet tweet.