SMC London goes videoblogging

The London experiment with weekly media-making meetups continued this evening with another member getting his first taste of videoblogging. Guy West has been a regular at our discussion groups and kindly recorded some audio at one of the meetings.

We sat in the brand new foyer of the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre which only opened last week and chatted about our social use of the internet. I was showing off a bit pointing the camera in my general direction which results in the people standing behind me being beautifully in focus, but my face (some will no doubt say this is a blessing) is a bit blurry.

No Palme D’or for this one, but at least we had some footage – and it wasn’t just of me! I showed Guy how to transfer from the camera to PC and then do some simple editing tasks and then we topped and tailed it with some titles and credits. We’d stood around for long enough, occasionally getting odd stares from the patrons of the Lesbian & Gay film festival that’s currently running there so I didn’t make Guy watch while we uploaded it to YouTube – he knew how to do that bit anyway.Next week the clocks will have gone forward, we’ll be into British Summer Time, and hopefully it will be a bit warmer for our first Blogwalk.

Watch Lloyd & Guy chat about teh internets in the BFI foyer

London Meetup: Exploiting Sound in Social Media

The Social Media Club folk in London got together last Thursday for our monthly discussion group (thanks to Ben & Hayley at Fleishman for putting us up again!), this month led by Michael Spencer and Ronna Porter of Sound Strategies. Michael, formerly a violinist with the LSO and head of education at the Royal Opera House talked us through a brief history of sound and it’s use in marketing before Ronna took a look at what the social media aspects of this stuff might be.  Here’s the recording of that first part of the session.
We broke into groups to discuss further – I spoke with Suw, Kevin, Ged and Yutong about the delegation of creativity in 20th Century and how we felt we were reclaiming the right to make music. I was aware of Suw’s bass heritage, but I didn’t realise that Kevin was such a muso – it’s clear that we are going to have to get a Social Media Club band together especially after this joint vocal effort

Michael & Ronna’s presentation

FT Article by David Bowen referenced in Michael’s presentation

SMC London Making Media

OK, so my bright idea was a little under-attended last week (yes, I was the only one to turn up) but nevertheless I did one of the things I set out to do which was to make some media.

Tonight we had a 500% increase in the number of attendees and half of the people who came along can be heard in the podcast we made! I met up with Ronna Porter (who’s going to lead our discussion group meeting next week) in the foyer of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. To show her just how easy making a podcast could be, I set up my gear and she set up the gear that she’d borrowed for the night and off we went. We talked a lot about the use of sound and music in advertising and PR and my views on podcasting. A little way in, we were joined by Lars Plougmann, whose contribution, you’ll hear, was repeatedly interrupted by his three friends ringing him to find out where we were. Sadly there aren’t as many massage parlours in this centre of cultural excellence as Chris, Howard and Debbie found in Las Vegas earlier but then they didn’t have a tango band in the background.
I was the only one who’d any experience of podcasting so I showed everyone how simply the file was transferred to my laptop, edited and put through the compressor in Audacity and then exported to mp3. I wasn’t able to upload it to my podcast server while they watched as the large amounts of concrete in the National kept us disconnected from the ThamesOnline network. Ronna kept her recorder running while we did this latter part so there may be another podcast to follow! There was quite a bit of discussion about discoverability, tagging and allowing users to create the metadata they need, rather than trying to control it as a creator.
So next week we return to the 3rd Thursday discussion group indoors with beers and nibbles format but on 22nd we’ll be out and about again, this time with our video cameras teaching each other about video-blogging – watch the wiki page for details.

London February Meetup

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.

SMC in London – January Meetup

Despite large parts of the UK trying to blow away with the attendant travel chaos that staggers those from less civilized climes, we had more than 25 hardy souls braving the elements from as far away as Bonn (yes, as in Germany) and Cardiff (yes, as in Wales), for free beer, wine and nibbles (Thanks, Fleishmann Hillard!) and some incidental chat about social media.

There is quite a churn in these meetings so far, though some suckers keep coming back for more, so we started with round-the-room introductions. There was a wide variety – media consultants, media creators, bloggers, photographers, marketers, entrepreneurs, geeks, visual-thinkers and many more.

We then broke into smaller self-forming discussion groups for the bulk of the time we had together. Broadly summarised there were people talking about:

• Living life completely online vs offline, the problems associated with life-cacheing mixed in with speculation about the shelf-life of YouTube videos and timeliness of social media generally.
• Visualisation as a global language – ask Dave Gray for a picture of this one
• The variety of perspectives and channels in using social media for marketing (pictured above), the problems of measurement and the difficulty of matching ‘channels’ and ‘audiences’ ( not to mention the difficulty of using those words or finding others to use…)
• Where does trust come from? Knowing the source? From the content itself?
• Global perspectives – diverse and complex developments in other parts of the world and the predominance of the mobile phone rather than the desktop as social media tool.

I plugged membership, pointed people to the London wiki and the mailing list as tools to keep in touch and encouraged people to come up with suggestions for topics and activities. I’d very much like us to *do* stuff at these sessions as much as *talk* about doing stuff. We’re going to go with the Third Thursday of the month as a regular slot, though we may shift venue around Central London – 15th February will include a post-Valentine speed-datingnetworking spot