There is an inter­est­ing debate hap­pen­ing around the face-to-face activ­ity that sur­rounds on-line social media tools and net­work­ing. On one side are the busi­ness types with their talk about mar­ket­ing and profit. The other side prefer get­ting together for a chat to see what can be shared and learnt. Recently, I’ve read Sarah Hartley’s post con­trast­ing her exper­i­ence at #1pound40 with the Leeds Social Media Sur­gery and Scott Gould’s post on #1pound40 that takes off in a dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion. Carl Hag­gerty just pub­lished an excel­lent post inspired by the Twit­ter dis­cus­sion (expan­ded in the com­ments of that post) fol­low­ing the recent Exeter #tags meet-up:

…for me it is about man­aging expect­a­tions and in a more socially con­nec­ted world we can share our expect­a­tions and we can also report when some­thing fails us or doesn’t deliver what it prom­ised. I also think that the fact that these kinds of meet­ings have evolved out of these con­nec­tions is some­thing that needs to be main­tained and if new oppor­tun­it­ies for con­nec­tions are iden­ti­fied then we need to be clear about what the focus is and what is expec­ted of the people attending.

Photo From Jill Clardy

Over the past few months I have been to two con­trast­ing events, the Like­Minds con­fer­ence in Exeter and a Devon Social Media Cafe meet­ing in Ply­mouth. While I found Like­Minds a use­ful after­noon, a couple of hours of informal dis­cus­sion at DSMC was much more enjoy­able and absorbing.

It seems clear that whatever type of events we cre­ate around social media, they must be open to all, there must be space for par­ti­cipants to talk, share exper­i­ences and social media stories.