Our next meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café will take place on Tuesday, 11th October from 6.30pm at the Vertigo bar in Truro .
This month’s event will also serve as pre-tweetup for the Mobile Conference taking place at the Eden project the next day. Along with the normal opportunities to network and catch up with friends, many of the speakers from the conference will be on hand to discuss all aspects of mobile marketing and trends. Continue reading
The March meeting sees our second new venue of the year, Hall for Cornwall. Our friends at Hall for Cornwall have kindly offered to host the evening, providing food and drink and the use of the Assembly Room. The Assembly Room is located above the main foyer overlooking Lemon Quay Plaza, just follow the signs. The venue has excellent facilities including lift access for any disabled guests.
As well as being a great opportunity to catch up with CSMC members old and new, there will also be some exciting news about the forthcoming Twestival Cornwall event on March 24th.
If you’re into social media – for work, study or play – and you’ve never been to a Cornwall Social Media Café meeting before, we’d love to see you. Each month CSMC brings together a great crowd of people from Cornwall’s business, academic, media and public sectors – sometimes just for informal networking and sometimes to hear a guest speaker talk about an interesting aspect of social media and the digital world.
Membership is free – all we ask is that you register your attendance in advance so we have some idea of numbers on the night.
Guests are invited to turn up and chat to other attendees from 6.30pm.
If you have any questions about CSMC or would like to host the May event please contact Aren, or Martin.
We look forward to seeing you all on the 8th.
A quick post to let you know that the February meeting of Cornwall Social Media Café has been confirmed for Monday 22nd February, from 6.30pm at Vertigo in Truro (see map).
As well as being a great opportunity to catch up with CSMC members old and new, there will also be some exciting news about the forthcoming Cornwall Twestival Global event on March 25th.
Matt Franks of Fluid Branding is stepping into Aren’s shoes as lead organiser of Cornwall Twestival and will be on hand to update everyone with the plans for what promises to be a great event in aid of an excellent cause.
If you’re into social media – for work, study or play – and you’ve never been to a Cornwall Social Media Café meeting before, we’d love to see you. Each month CSMC brings together a great crowd of people from Cornwall’s business, academic, media and public sectors – sometimes just for informal networking and sometimes to hear a guest speaker talk about an interesting aspect of social media and the digital world.
Membership is free – all we ask is that you register your attendance in advance so we have some idea of numbers on the night.
Look forward to seeing you on the 22nd!
The next meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café has been confirmed for Monday 23rd November from 6.30pm at the Vertigo bar in Truro – for full details and booking please click here.
If you’ve never come along to a CSMC before, it would be great to see you! We’re a friendly and eclectic mix of students, businesses, academics, the public sector, artists, social enterprises and other walks of live who all share a common interest in social media.
Following last month’s presentation from Tuttle Founder, Lloyd Davis, there will be no formal structure to the event. Guests are invited to turn up and chat to their fellow Tuttlers from 6.30pm in the upstairs Pink Room.
If you have any questions about CSMC or this event please contact Aren, Laura McKay or Fiona.
We look forward to seeing you on the 23rd!
The next meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café (CSMC) will take place from 6pm on Wednesday 21 October at CUC’s Tremough Campus in Penryn. (map). The room is Seminar Room L in the Daphne du Maurier building, and it will be clearly signposted ‘Cornwall Social Media Café’.
It’s a bit of a special one, and we’re very excited about it.
We’re delighted to announce that we will have a VIP guest speaker in the form of Lloyd Davis, the original founder of the Social Media Café / Tuttle Club concept, and legendary man-about-the-social-media-scene in London. You can read more about Lloyd at his blog www.perfectpath.co.uk, and follow him on Twitter at @LloydDavis.
Lloyd will be delivering a talk on social media collaboration earlier in the day to students at UCF, and will stay on at Tremough to talk to the Cornwall Social Media Café in the evening. He’ll share with us the history of London’s Tuttle Club – on which CSMC is modelled – and give his expert view on where he sees social media heading in future.
I’ve attended a couple of events hosted by Lloyd in the past and I can personally vouch for the fact that he’s a very engaging, knowledgeable and inspiring speaker, as well as being generally a lovely person. Definitely worth making a trip to Tremough for!
Lloyd’s talk will be followed by informal networking, giving you the chance to catch up with other CSMC members and make new friends and contacts from Cornwall’s business, academic, media, not-for-profit and public sector communities.
If you’ve never attended a CSMC event before, this would be an excellent one to start with. You’ll get a great introduction to the Social Media Café concept from the founder himself, as well as getting to know other keen social media users from across the county.
CSMC events are free to attend, and new members are always very welcome. All we ask is that you register your attendance in advance so we have a rough idea of numbers on the night.
Teas, coffees and biscuits will be served on arrival.
In the meantime if you have any questions, please contact Aren, Laura or me.
Looking forward to seeing you on the 21st!
Many thanks to everyone who made it to Vertigo on Tuesday night for the August CSMC meeting – our largest ever! It was great to see so many people from different walks of life, and from across the whole county, come together because of a shared interest in social media.
The full attendee list was as follows (please let me know if I’ve missed anyone!)
After drinks in the garden and conservatory, we took over the upstairs room once again, where Aren updated everyone on plans for the forthcoming Cornwall Twestival Local event planned for next month.
Cornwall Twestival Local will take place at the Bedruthan Steps Hotel in Mawgan Porth on the evening of Saturday 12th September from 7.30pm to midnight. Reflecting the hotel’s stunning coastal location, the theme will be ‘Beach Chic’ – formal evening wear with a beach-inspired twist.
Planning is already well underway, with ten event sponsors and three media sponsors signed up, and a raft of fantastic auction prizes donated by local businesses. You can see all the details on the Cornwall Twestival blog.
Tickets are on sale now (click here to book yours) at £20 each – although if you’re very quick you may be able to snap up one of the few remaining early-bird tickets at just £15.
Aren called on CSMC members to spread the word about Twestival to their online and offline contacts, which many have already been doing. We also saw a surge in Twestival ticket sales following Tuesday’s meeting, thanks to CSMC members signing up, so it should be a good night!
Toby Parkins of UKNetWeb made an excellent suggestion – to offer ‘apology’ tickets for those who can’t attend on the night but would still like to make a donation. These are now available on the Twestival ticket booking site priced at £15 each.
There will be no CSMC meet in September due to Twestival taking place, so we hope to see as many of you there as possible. Plans are already afoot for the October meet, though, and we should be able to update you on that very soon.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions for speakers, venues or activities for future events, please do contact Aren, Laura or me.
The next meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café has been confirmed for Tuesday 18th August from 6.30pm at the Vertigo bar in Truro (see map)
Attendance is of course free, but we do ask that you register in advance so we know roughly what kind of numbers to expect. Register here.
If you’ve never come along to a CSMC before, it would be great to see you! We’re a friendly and eclectic mix of people from business, academia and the public sector who all share an interest in social media and what it can do for our work and social lives.
As well as the usual informal networking, we’ll be discussing the plans for the forthcoming Cornwall Twestival Local, to be held on 12th September at a glam coastal venue!
Aren Grimshaw will update the group on the plans for Twestival, which will again be part of a global network of events, but this time with the aim of raising money to support a local charity. It would be great if you could take a moment to vote for the charity you’d like Twestival to support.
Because of Twestival there will be no separate CSMC meeting in September, but exciting plans are already afoot for the October meet, with a very interesting London-based speaker confirmed for the evening. More details soon.
If you have any questions about Twestival or CSMC, please contact Aren, Laura McKay or me.
Look forward to seeing you on the 18th!
Many thanks to everyone who turned out in torrential rain last night to attend the fourth meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Café at the Greenbank Hotel in Falmouth.
Aren and Laura had promised us something a bit different this time and they didn’t disappoint: after informal drinks in the bar overlooking a stormy Falmouth Harbour we were all ushered down into the basement for a spot of speed networking. Anyone who’s been speed dating will be familiar with the idea – you get four minutes to chat to someone you haven’t met before and find out three things about them before moving on to your next ‘victim’. Only we weren’t sizing up potential girlfriends or boyfriends (or I don’t know, maybe some of you *were*), but looking to meet new people, share tips and experiences of using social media, and make some useful contacts.
With a varied crowd and quite a few newcomers, this session worked very well. I certainly got to meet some interesting people from completely different walks of life from my own – like Steve Cannon, diversity officer for Devon and Cornwall Police, Dean Harvey, who’s organising the multicultural Respect Festival in Truro in August, and Jacqui from Pentreath Industries, a charity that helps people recovering from mental illnesses to get back into work.
Lots of online and offline contact details were exchanged and I gather that some potential business partnerships were forged over the mini chocolate mousses, so it must have been a good session for others as well!
The group later repaired to the bar where Tim Warren and I had a great chat with Sam Lanyon of ConceptShed, sometime inventor and interactive exhibition display wizard, who actually does work from a genuine shed. And just as I was pulling on my wellies for a rainy walk home (from which I was saved at the last minute by the lovely Matt Collins from Ampersand Industries giving me a lift back to Penryn), Aren and Laura collared me and asked if I’d like to help with writing this blog (seeing as I’m a copywriter and all), which is why I’m here at the CSMC blogging controls now.
All in all a very good night and it was great to see so many new faces.
The full list of attendees is as follows (please let me know if I’ve got anything wrong or missed anyone):
Andrea Edlin
Aren Grimshaw
Ashley Hayward
Barry Frost
Charlotte MacKenzie
Chris Humphris
Dean Harvey
Dorian Spackman
Fiona Campbell-Howes
Gerard Hofmaier
Jacqui from Pentreath Industries (sorry Jacqui, didn’t get your surname)
James Martin
Laura McKay
Matt Collins
Peter Graves
Piers Roberts
Rob Edlin
Sam Lanyon
Simon Hill
Steve Cannon
Tim Warren
William St Aubyn
Annie Moore of Cornwall Council sent apologies.
Many thanks are due to Rob and Andrea Edlin of Niddocks Internet Marketing for sponsoring the event, and to Aren and Laura as always for organising.
The date and location for the next meeting are yet to be decided, but Aren did announce that Saturday 12th September will see another Twestival coming to Cornwall – this time it’s Twestival Local, one of many such events being organised by Twitterers around the country in support of local charities. More details on that to come nearer the time, but in the meantime mark your diaries!
Look forward to seeing you at the next CSMC in August – and if you have any questions or suggestions for speakers, venues or activities for future events, please do contact Aren, Laura or me.
This month’s Cornwall Social Media Café is going to be an altogether more relaxed affair with the emphasis on us all getting to know each other a little better.
After three successful events in Truro, we’re now taking the Social Media Café out on the road with next week’s event taking place in the Greenbank Hotel, Falmouth on Thursday (16th July).
Although there will be no formal speaker or ‘unconference’ style discussion we hope to get everyone mingling and talking a little more. There are some really interesting members in the group and it would be good to encourage the conversations started at events to continue online.
We will be working with you on the night to ensure that everyone gets to meet everybody else. The idea being to find out more about the interests of your fellow CSMC member, their social media profiles (Twitter IDs, Facebook usernames etc), their blogs or websites and anything else you might like to share with each other.
The evening will get underway from 6.30pm. After some informal chat we’ll look to hook you up with other members from 7.15pm. Thanks to this month’s sponsor, Niddocks Internet Martketing for offering to support the evening, it means we can provide everyone with a light snack shortly after 8pm.
Please book in for the event using the usual EventBrite booking system which can be found here. Also, why not encourage your contacts to join us by sharing your booking on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn? – the more the merrier!
We look forward to seeing everyone next week.
Aren & Laura
As many of you will be aware, last month’s Social Media Cafe attracted a lot of discussion around the Government’s Digital Britain report – an action plan intended to secure the UK’s place at the forefront of innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries.
As a group many of us felt that the report just didn’t go far enough, and in fact many felt it would not put us in a competitive position for the future. A focus for this concern was our own local situation with uncertaintly about what plans, if any, were in place for Cornwall.
To help us get the answers we need we are delighted to have Nigel Ashcroft, Director of NGA (Next Generation Access) for Cornwall and colleague and NGA Development Manager, Julian Cowans at the next meeting to answer your questions.
So far questions have been a bit light off the ground and we are keen to maximise on this exciting opportunity to gain insight from those in charge of our digital future here in Cornwall. At the bottom of this post I have copied the questions recieved so far through the EventBrite bookings. Please take a look and add your own questions to the the comments at the end of this post.
For more information or to help jog your memory why not refer to the Digital Britian report, the details of discussions at the previous Social Media Cafe or read the final feedback report submitted by the Digital Britain Unconference team available through the linked text.
We look forward to seeing you at the next event on Tuesday 16th June – Don’t forget to book your free ticket online here.
Questions received so far…
Cornwall Social Media Cafe 