Birmingham Social Media Cafe

The next event will be on Friday 28th October 10am-midday

Venue: Town Hall, Victoria Square, Birmingham B3 3DQ (map)

SPONSORED BY: Go Genie

 Here Alison Smith from Go Genie talks about why she wants to sponsor the October event, and how as a result of meeting attendees and recieving encouragement how she started her first blog, and never looked back!

Would you or your company like to sponsor an event? Sponsoring the Birmingham Social Media Cafe simply involves covering the cost of the coffees (up to £200).

Your name will be included in our communications for that month (email newsletter, twitter, facebook, blog and sponsorship page) and you will have a short slot at the event to introduce yourself and your organisation. To sponsor an event please email: birminghamsmc@gmail.com You can find a list of our previous sponsors here.

Have you been before? If you’ve come along before then you’ll know that you’ll find a group of interesting people working in lots of different areas, all using (or looking to use) social media in what they do, whether that’s for promoting, collaborating or creating things online.

Are you new? If you’ve not come along before then you might like to know that it’s a very informal, friendly and chatty gathering – we try to make new folks feel as welcome as possible. Just come along, grab a drink and join the rest of us for a chat. If you don’t know anybody there, just come and say Hi to event organiser Karen Strunks who will introduce you to other attendees :)

You can also find the Birmingham Social Media Cafe on Twitter, and Facebook and we have a NEW flickr group. Please feel free to upload any social media cafe photos and use the tag of bsmc. If you are a twitter user, the hash tag is #bsmc. Spread the word and tell your friends! :)

Here is a Storify round up of tweets, attendees, photos and video from our September event. Thank you to talk about local  for sponsoring the event. Thank you to Bake Birmingham for the wonderful birthday cakes.

The next Birmingham Social Media Cafe will be at:

10am, Friday 30 April 2010 at the Coffee Lounge

Please pop by and say hello, whether you’re a regular attendee or it’s your first time, as all are welcome.

As yet there’s no sponsor so people will be buying their own coffees (gasp!). But there’s plenty of time yet so we’ll see…

Venue provides free wi-fi – ask at the counter for the password.

Who should come along?

Anyone interested in the future of media, how we organise, share, produce and enjoy it. If you’re an artist, film maker, student, journalist, musician, designer, writer, photographer or anything close or related.

This is well worth a read – Lloyd Davis, founder of the Tuttle Club (that’s London’s Friday morning get-together), has published an Annual Report that explains:

• How it started
• Some of the thinking behind it
• What’s happened in the past year
• Where things might go next

Download the Tuttle Club Annual Report.

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!

You can now see who from the Birmingham Social Media Cafe is on Twitter with our new BSMC  Twitter Group.

The hope is it will help extend your network and to track down some of the interesting folk you might meet at the monthly events.

I imagine  regulars to the Birmingham Social Media Cafe will know Twitter – a free “micro-blogging” service.

For those of you that haven’t, I can throughly reccommend it as a networking tool and, if you are operating in the social media sector, I’d go as far to say understanding it is a must.

However, it is quite tricky to explain the many benefits of Twitter. The best way is to see for yourself.

When you sign up, the difficulty is often finding people to “follow”. Hopefully that is where the BSMC Twitter Group can be useful as a starting place –  a list of Twitterfolk who you may already know or could be useful new contacts!

If you want to expand your network even further Stef Lewandowski, founder and creator of Dad-centric networking site Odadeo,  has drawn up a list of 50 “Twitterers” in Birmingham. Worth a look.

And if you want to find out what is being said about the Cafe on Twitter, check out Twitter Search using the #bsmc tag as the search term.

Happy tweeting!