Last night I popped along to the 11th Manchester Social Media Cafe – for those of you who’ve not yet attended, the Social Media Cafe is an open forum where people share ideas and work.

Next month marks the 12 month anniversary, and the organisers opened up the floor to decide what should become of the format to those who attend.

The round table sessions were insightful, for a start, few held the same view of what social media cafe was. Many objected to its recent home at the BBC, claiming it attracted the ‘wrong crowd’ and others felt that much of what was said was simply preaching to the converted.

From my own point of view, i do love the exploritary nature of the sessions, but with so much knowledge, skill and intelligence in the room, i can’t help but feel frustrated with the the current ‘show and tell’ format.

In fact, the round table session on the future of the cafe encouraged greater debate, and better understanding of the view points of others, than i’ve seen at the SMC in a longtime.

My opinion is that the SMC would benefit from holding more discussion groups offering people the opportunity to create debate about challenges and problems they are facing and tackle some of the questions that we’re all asked (Is there a role for SEO in social media?!).

Maybe then Manchester will have the chance to carve out its own reputation as a thought leader in social media and the SMC can fulfill its potential.

The 1st anniversary of the SMC is at the Band on the Wall in November so  – if you’re interested, pop along.

Really good smc_mcr meetup last night. It’s always worth heading out of the office after a busy day to chat with the huge variety of people gathered at The Northern.

This time I listened to Drew Hemment, the founder and Artistic Director of Futuresonic as well as full time academic at Lancaster Uni, talk about how the Futuresonic project was born and what they’re up to this year. The project that caught the imagination of the audience was a link with the met office where Manchester residents will help them record wind patterns with bubble makers.

An interesting discussion about privacy followed where one participant admitted to having a fake Facebook profile and so far fooling 200 plus people. The people you meet eh…

Last night, the team headed over to the Northern for the monthly social media cafe. With so many events happening in the digital world at the moment we don’t get along as often as we’d like to, but it’s a great place to meet people and chat all things social.

With presentations on TwitterTitters and Futuresonic to choose from – i opted for the presentation by Louise Boulton (and Linda Jones) on her recent fundraising activity for Comic Relief.

The dynamic duo, which expanded to a trio with the addition of a publisher, decided to create a book of short stories to raise money for Comic Relief and to use Twitter as the main medium to promote it.

With time against them (just three weeks from start to finish), they used Twitter to appeal for stories (and received over 70 submissions), found judges and even scooped a celebrity foreword to give the project media appeal.

Recognising the power of Twitter needed to be enhanced by a more detailed information source the team launched a blog to follow the success of the project.

The publisher decided that selling through lulu in an online or printed version would be the way forward, and although they hit barrier after frustrating barrier, they managed to get their book on sale 10 days before Comic Relief.

Being journalists, the creators had many a PR follower on Twitter and appealed to those to retweet their messages about sales of the book and their very entertaining TwitterTitters jokes to get people in the mood and drive awareness. After much persuading, they even managed to get Stephen Fry to retweet – and traffic to the blog spiked.

On the big day itself, a London journalist decided to take a pop at the campaign and insinuate that the activity wasn’t an official comic relief project – and the action of this one person sadly took the shine away from a campaign that sold 200 books and raised over £700 for the charity.

Tips from the team on people wanting to use social media as a tool: Recognise the power of the retweet (and plan for this with the characters you use), use small hash tags and build in ways to use other social media tools so that the campaign can be bookmarked.

Tips from us at Democracy PR to TwitterTitters: Twitter, while great, needs to be supported with an offline PR campaign and presence in other social networks and seeding the message on relevant communities and be prepared for when people have a pop at you (cos they always will), respond if required and then move on. Oh – and give yourself lots more time.

The book is still on sale and is very funny – buy your copy of TwitterTitters from lulu here.