First off, maybe I only blog via email now when I even do blog. I have been on a little hiatus from the blog. Spending my time on Twitter and well living life in the real ‘verse (I should insert a photo stream here). Been thinking about trying the audio or video format – do them while I am on the train. Your thoughts on this via a postcard please.
Local Social Summit (LSS or soon to be ‘re hash tagged’ as #LSX) was asked to put together an event as part of Social Media Week in London. My co-curator @simon_baptist did most of the work on this event. Nice job. The event was success. We had 4 interesting speakers – 3 from the 1st LSS and 1 new one (a case study). It lasted 2 hours and was held in a nice venue in Covent Garden. Things ended up at the pub – always good.
Speaker recap/comments:
1. Dr Bernie Hogan – Rebuilding The Collapsed Contexts In Social Media: Talking again about social networking stress, access and the challenge of making sense of all the date. He even did a quick on the fly anaylsis which you can find here. My key take aways are:
- location matters
- we need better tools
- weak ties are a good signal for ranking (need to come back to that one)
His presentation is here on Slideshare:
2. Carolyn Watt, Founder and Managing Director of Yabber. She had a very interesting presentation on how brands should approach social media marketing. She also gave a nice picture of a potential future of media addiction (well written). I liked how she pushed next/future practice over best practice. btw – she didn’t want to share here presentation on Slideshare. No problem but no link juice then. 
3. Paul McCrudden – from Imagination & #6weeks fame shared insights and knowledge from how consumers are interacting with brands. Paul was awesome. My take away was don’t see all this information and data leakage as a problem use it to your advantage and to empower a better world both on the consumer (user) and brand side. Thought provoking. I still don’t trust the big players. The social media ‘revolution’ is a bottom up thing – IMHO.
Paul’s PPT is here:
4. Stephen Leighton owner of Has Bean Coffee: http://www.hasbean.co.uk/ – this was a conversation with the up and coming UK and coffee’s answer to Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library and Crushit). Stephen was all money. He is crushing it. No presentation just a talk. We all got some of his coffee. We will do more events with him if he will let us. A true inspiration.
Be sure to watch his session with Gary V (classic):
