Posts Tagged ‘social media cafe’

SMC February

February 20th, 2010

The next Derby/shire Social Media Cafe is this week – Tuesday 23 February 2010 between 6.30 and  9pm in CUBE at Deda, Chapel Street, Derby.

There will be free drinks thanks to sponsorship from Carl Bembridge and the Race for Life Get Social team are hoping to drop in to share how they are using the social web to support women taking part in this year’s events.

Generally it is a chance to network and catch up on all things digital in Derby/shire so come along! See you on Tuesday!

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December social media cafe

December 9th, 2009

Sarah LayThe problem with social media cafe is there are too many interesting people and interesting things to talk about in a short space of time.

We had the second meeting of the Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe last night. It was a great turn out and a really interesting talk about hyperlocal by Will Perrin, Mike Rawlins and Nicky Getgood of Talk About Local and Philip John of the Lichfield Blog.

Will told us all about how he got into hyperlocal blogging, showcased some of the sites they are supporting through Talk About Local and explained their model. We then had a look at The Lichfield Blog with Philip John and there were some interesting points about bloggers being accepted by or even working in collaboration with traditional media.

There were some good questions from the group about the potential legal issues of running a hyperlocal blog, the amount of time it takes, community-generated vs organisation trying to embed in a community (BBC Local or Local People were examples) and some general chat about what hyperlocals exist in Derbyshire.

It’s set me thinking about hyplerlocal again from a personal perspective, but that’s another blog for another day.

Attendee list:

I’m trying to do this from memory so if I’ve missed you off, firstly sorry and secondly just let me know so I can add you!

Sarah Lay
Richard Mackney

Colin Mitchell
Will Perrin
Nicky Getgood
Mike Rawlins
Philip John
Emily Robe

Antoinette Burchill
Darren Holden
Karen Thomas
Nick Moyes
Christine Cawthorne
Hadrian Cawthorne

Bel Harvey
Lee Flanaghan

Lauren Noakes
Sarah Barker
Colin MacKenzie

Emma Bryn-Jones
SubVee
warrenfree
cybrum

Useful links:

There were a few sites and posts mentioned in the presentations and chat which people asked me to link to from here.

You can of course find out about Talk About Local and The Lichfield Blog at their respective sites. Philip John also highlighted a couple of posts on his blog – one about some legal information and one about sharing ideas for hyperlocal sites.

I think we should all check out the sponsor’s site as well – Fish Media - kindly paid for the venue and the drinks so I’m sure we’d all like to thank them for that.

If you liked CUBE at Deda then check out the website for opening times – they’d welcome anyone who wanted to pop in for a coffee, bite to eat and use their wifi!

Tag anything from last night – tweets, blogs, photos – with #smcderby and I’ll aggregate when I get a chance!

Tell me what you want!

Planning is already underway for the next meeting – this will hopefully be earlyFebruary.

Let me know if there is a day / time which is best for you so we can try to set a date suitable for greatest number of people.

And is there a subject you want to talk about as a group like we did with hyperlocal? If no-one has anything in particular we can just have a networking session. Get in touch and let us know your thoughts on last night and what should happen next time!

Until then…

Heads up on hyperlocal

November 24th, 2009

Sarah LayThe next meeting of the SMC in Derby will be themed around hyperlocal. But what the heck is hyperlocal and why could or should it matter to you?

We’ve a couple of speakers coming along to give us the low down – Talk About Local and Philip John (The Lichfield Blog).

Philip said: ” Hyperlocal generally refers to online news reporting on a much more local level than other local media such as newspapers.

“Such sites often focus on a small community, sometimes just a few streets and have a more engaging readership as a result. It’s generally the community themselves that run hyperlocals, out of a passion to become more involved in their community.”

Philip will be covering how a hyperlocal effects and can provide value to us all whether we are public sector, commerical organisation, individual or community group.

Michael Rawlins and Will Perrin (former tech advisor to Tony Blair) will also be at SMC. Will is going to tell us the hyperlocal story on why he set up Talk About Local and Michael will tell us why he believes: “Hyperlocal should be run by the local community for the community” and his experience of running the Pits ‘n’ Pots hyperlocal site.

There’ll be a chance for a group discussion before we take the chance to revert to the informal networking of the previous meet.

Thanks to sponsorship from Fish Media there will be a tab for drinks (first come, first served until the money runs out) so come along and join us at Deda from 6.30pm on Tuesday 8 December.

You don’t need to register but it is useful to get an idea of who might be coming so if you haven’t already please drop me a note on Twitter, comment here, or on the Facebook group. Everyone is welcome so please don’t be shy (and spread the word)!

City of Derby Social Media Map

September 25th, 2009

Paul ColeBy Paul

Ok, maybe not fully mapping Derby and maybe it’s a bit rough round the edges, but this should give you a good idea of the impact of Social Media in Derby and possibly inspire you to do something similar or even better?

A fair few Saturdays ago, I was bored and thought I’d see how much of Derby was on Facebook. I began to search for key areas (political wards or neighbourhood names), issues, people, places etc and plotted them as nodes on a Mind Map using MindMeister.

I tweeted to Tim that I was doing this and invited him to collaborate. It grew exponentially as we both edited it live and quickly moved beyond Facebook into something more indicative of the many sites in use by or known to both of us.

You can view the map for yourself below and draw your own conclusions about what it tells us. Everything on the map is freely available to public searches. All we have done is carry out those searches for you and put them all in one place.

A Mind Map illustrating the extent of usage of Social Media in Derby, UK.

A Mind Map illustrating the extent of usage of Social Media in Derby, UK.

Creative Commons License
City of Derby Social Media Map by Paul Cole and Tim Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The map was briefly made available at LocalGovCamp in a session I ran entitled, “Are we listening?”. This session and the discussions it raised have been covered very well already by Sarah Lay, Jack Pickard and Pete Ashton. All posts are definitely worth a read.

I had hoped to have a hyperlink (the small arrow) from each node taking you straight to each web page. Unfortunately, these have only (mostly) been added to Facebook so far.

You should be aware that there is an issue with the links to most of the Facebook Groups as I incorrectly pasted the link to the search results for the group and not the actual group address. This will take me a while to rectify, if I do it at all. To get to a Facebook group with a faulty link, simply copy and paste the exact title as it appears on the node into the search bar on Facebook. Links I have added for Facebook Pages and other sites should be OK.

The map is presented as is, that is, as it was created on that day. It may not be organised perfectly or logically, but it does its job as far as I’m concerned.

The simple experience of searching for and finding what is out there was a good learning experience in itself. You can take what you want from it or try it for yourself in your city or area.

Please share your thoughts with us.

What are we?

September 17th, 2009

by Sarah

Just a couple of weeks to go now until Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe meets for the first time. This is a bit of a round-up post of things you might be interested in and a couple of things which have merely been passing through my mind.

So – first off – Emily Robe, a social media virtual assistant from Derby, gave a great interview on Radio Derby’s Aleena Naylor show on Wednesday 16 September. They talked about Emily’s job, how social media can help businesses and marketing through platforms such as Twitter. Emily also gave the social media cafe a mention – so if you’re checking the blog after hearing her on the radio, welcome!

If you missed it you can hear the interview on Listen Again until next Wednesday. Emily’s interview starts at about 1 hour 11 minutes in. Enjoy!

Elsewhere there have been a number of new social media cafes getting off the ground. Lichfield and Devon both held their first meetings on Tuesday 15 September and the Coventry and Warwickshire Social Media Cafe will be launching on Friday 18 September. All three are linked in the Other Social Media Cafes section of this blog.

It’s interesting to see the social media and wider community gather at these events – each run slightly differently on a localised version of the Tuttle model. I’m sure if you are in the area when one is taking place they’d be only too pleased to welcome you to a meeting – take a look at their blogs to see what they’re talking about.

Both of these things got me thinking about what the Derbyshire version of the cafe is, and perhaps even more importantly is not. I’m keen to let it grow somewhat organically from these early days but there are few things I’m pretty sure on in my head. So here is what I think the cafe is and is not. Would be great to have views from other people coming along.

It is:

  • An informal networking event.
  • Open to all sectors (public, private, third) and both those who work directly with online communications, digital and social media and those who want to find out more about it for personal or community use.
  • Mainly for Derby and Derbyshire but welcomes others from outside these geographical boundaries as the experiences and knowledge they have to share.
  • (More a it should than an is) Try to capture knowledge relevant to us all and shared at the cafe through this blog and other online spaces. Let us know if you have any ideas about how / where we could do this.

It isn’t:

  • A place to sell your product – there are conferences and better places for that. The cafe is about sharing and collaborating not getting a sales pitch
  • Affiliated with any one organisation or agenda.
  • Over-organised. To a certain extent each meeting will be decided on by the group. I’ve set out some rough ideas about frequency and location in previous posts but it’s one of the things I’d be interested to hear your views on at the first meeting.

So, if you think I’ve missed something vital off these lists let me know. Don’t forget to pop over to Nurphy to join the introductions conversation and see what you think of the platform. Otherwise the blog is open to comments, the #smcderby stream on Twitter is running and the Facebook group and event listing is available too.

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Preparing to launch

September 8th, 2009

by Sarah

Word is getting out – the Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe launches on Thursday 1 October 2009 in the cafe bar at Quad Derby.

I’m really pleased with the interest we’ve had so far and am looking forward to chatting with so many different people (drop-in any time between 2 and 5pm!) on the day.

I would be eternally grateful if you could reply to this post or sign up on the Facebook event page if you’re intending to come along. While everything is pretty informal – the cafe won’t be exclusively for our use, you’ll have to pay for your own coffee, we have no agenda other than to meet and chat – it would be great to have an idea of numbers!

For future cafes we’ll probably make sign up easier via a wiki or eventbrite (or let us know if you know a better way) but if you’re coming just let me know!

I’d also be interested to hear from you if you’d like to have come but can’t because of the day, time or location. We can then take this into consideration as we plan future meets.

Quad has lots of advice on their website about getting to the venue by car, train, air, foot, bicycle or bus as well as information on accommodation if you want to make a night of it. Take a look at their directions page.

Look forward to seeing you on the 1 October!

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