This month, the London Chapter met at the offices of Blue Rubicon - actually, I’m not very comfortable calling it a chapter - the only organisation I associate that with is Hell’s Angels, so we shall see… Again, there were new faces but there is a small core of regulars emerging and around 20 people made it altogether, which was just right for the size of room. I had two e-mails from members of the Project Redstripe team (who arrived late and left early, leading Alan Patrick to quip that perhaps as economists they figured bringing 6 people for half an hour was equivalent to having one person stay for the whole thing) so they are forgiven.

But where were the women? Joanna came from Redstripe, but when they’d gone it was boys only. Was it something I said?

We spent the first half an hour speed networking - I got to meet Tom and Stewart from Redstripe, Steve who is a headhunter and Tav (who likes the prefix meta- a lot).

We then had a go at seeing how we could best come up with discussion topics. I pushed again my desire to “do something productive” and I think we came to a compromise which was to agree discussion subjects on the wiki, but that discussion leaders would commit to writing, podcasting or videoblogging something afterwards. I said that I would get in touch with people just before the next one to remind them to check out the wiki.

We broke into small conversation groups and I picked off Vikram Shah to talk about how he sees social media - I also managed to capture part of a conversation about blogs and conversations, just so that you know we have the same chats at our meetups as anywhere else, just in a cooler accent. I’ll add this video here as soon as I can.

Since the meeting (and a great conference call I took part in with Chris, Howard, Kristie and lots of other local leaders) I had another idea about how to do this in London. I would like to keep the third Thursday for this kind of discussion and networking activity, but expand what we do (probably spread quite thinly at first) to establish a weekly meetup of one form or another so that we can say to anyone in London, “Thursday Night is Social Media Night.” What I suggest is that anyone can come along at 6pm at a pre-arranged location to take pictures, make some audio or video, or just walk around town and blog about it, somewhere in London according to the following schedule:

• 1st Thursday: Photo-sharing
• 2nd Thursday: Podcasting & Audioblogging
• 3rd Thursday: Hosted Discussion & Networking
• 4th Thursday: Videoblogging
• 5th Thursday: Blogwalk

Except for the 3rd week, these will be out and about somewhere in London, maybe pub-based when weather gets rough, but dedicated to improving social media skills by doing as much as by talking.

I’m committing to starting this in March (I have something next Thursday) with a photo walk about in Soho, meeting at the John Snow pub in Broadwick St (bring your camera) - yes, it will have just got dark at 6pm so the theme will be “Things you can photograph in Soho in the dark without getting arrested or your face smashed in”. Frankly, I’ll be happy if I get just one other person to come with me, but the more the merrier.

I will expand on this further here and on my own blog but welcome comments and suggestions for where and how to make this happen.