Birmingham Social Media Cafe

Birmingham Social Media Cafe, Jan 09 from Chris Unitt on Vimeo.

That’s a whole lot of networking!

Thanks to everyone for another record turnout to this month’s Social Media Cafe Meet.

Special thanks to our fantastic sponsors Opera Developer Network and to Andy Mabbett who helped make this month’s sponsorship happen.

As many people have said, we may need to look at finding a bigger venue or increase the frequency of meet-ups to fortnightly. Let me know what you think.

Thanks again to Chris Unitt for the video and also for capturing the names of some of those who attended:

If you spot your name on the picture and have a Flickr Pro account, please go tag your contact details.

If you can’t see your name there and did attend, please feel free to add your name in comments here or on Chris’s photo on Flickr.

Also check out the rather excellent photos by Stephen Cooper, which are posted on the Facebook event page.

P.S Due to poor Paul Bradshaw being ill, the editors‘ training was cancelled on Friday. We hope they might be able to make it to next month’s event.

No, not the above neo-post-punk quartet (maybe next time?).

This will be an entirely different but just as pretty quartet of regional newspaper editors from the Trinity Mirror publishing group.

As part of their training here in Birmingham with Paul Bradshaw, they will be popping down to the BSMC this Friday (Jan 30) to find out more about social media and how they might be able to use it at their titles.

They are:

Mark Thomas: Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post
Andrew Campbell: Executive Editor of the Liverpool Echo
Colin Patterson: Editor of the Sunday Sun in Newcastle
Charles Barker: Executive Editor of The Coventry Telegraph

Please do come along and say hello to them – I think they’ll be surprised by some of the opinions you have on the future of the media.

Also, don’t forget the lovely Bruce Lawson, Opera evangelist, will also be at the Cafe to represent this month’s coffee sponsors: Opera Developers Network.

Should be good!

On January 30 all coffees will be sponsored by Opera Developer Network from the creators of the Opera web browser.

For those of you that don’t know the history of the firm: Norwegian-based Opera has been making web browsers since 1995 and made their first mobile phone version back in 1998.

They are big campaigners when it comes to improving Web Standards, including accessibility and cross-device websites, and every month produce a “State of the Mobile Web” report.

Last April one of  these revealed that 40% of traffic on through their Opera Mini browser was to social media sites.

Many thanks go to Opera Evangelist Bruce Lawson for agreeing to sponsor BSMC and to come to the event. Also much gratitude is owed to Andy Mabbett, who had the nouse to ask him to!