We love sharing funny, moving and clever videos around the office at Melbourne. Recent ones that have done the rounds include a 999 call by a women reporting the theft of a snowman and the Cassette Boy remix of Dragons Den (possibly NSFW).

But my favourite one is an old classic from the early days of YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What makes all these videos shareable? Why do I forward them round to my colleagues over email, Twitter or instant messaging?

As Geth from Young said at last night’s Feed, the key to a making someone share a good piece of content is for it to elicit an emotional response. Whether it makes you laugh, cry or – in the case of the Picard video – simply feel bemused at the ultimate cultish geekyness, it has to do that to make someone even think about sharing it with their friends.

And that really is it. “Viral marketing” is not a panacea, nor is it something for which there’s a secret formula. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that they term “viral marketing” is an opportunistic branding of a natural phenomenon. Dan Carrol expands on this in his guest post for The Feed last week.

Content is key, always has been and always will. None of the videos I’ve linked above intrinsically sell a product – but they’re bloody funny. Anyone producing content that they want people to share is going to have to compete with these and more. Take a look at James Webb’s blog post (and inevitable associated infographic!) about the most watched and searched for terms on YouTube. With so much high-quality – and low-humour content – there’s no way that anyone can guarantee that something can “go viral”. However, latching onto the (trends of the day can definitely help users discover and subsequently share your content if it’s any good.

In short, the best way to harness the viral effect is to make something special that gets you thinking and make sure it gets found by users. Anyone that tries to sell you a “viral marketing campaign” is selling you snake oil.

Manchester has the largest number of Twitter users in the UK after London, according to a report from Twittergrader. It also ranks as the third across the whole of Europe.Read more: Manchester is the UK’s second city – on Twitter – Social Media Manchester.

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(OK, perhaps I’m over-egging the wet thing – but check out some of the events below).

Update: there are loads more events going on than just the few I’ve listed here – but these are the ones I hope to get along to, with a bit of commentary. Check the foot of this post for how to find out about other events!

Social Media Cafe Manchester

After the August hiatus, Manchester’s Social Media Cafe returns on 8 September from 6pm and in a slight change to its usual slot, this is the second Tuesday of the month. It’s being held again at the BBC, complete with subsidised bar which no doubt will help swell the already large crowd of regulars. Sign-up to make sure you don’t get left out.

Anyone can offer to present a session, though the talented guys from Cahoona have already snagged one with an exciting presentation on Umbro Industries, “new initiative from Umbro geared towards giving potential Manchester based innovators the financial backing they need” (not anymore) and there are still three slots open.

I blogged my thoughts in July on the use of the BBC as a venue and it was useful to get Julian’s feedback on the challenges surrounding finding a suitable venue. If anyone has any ideas, leave a comment there, on the wiki or tweet @smc_mcr.

Manchester Blog Awards 2009

As a (relative) newbie to Manchester, one of the best ways that I’ve found out about things to do and see is by tapping in to Manchester’s extensive network of bloggers. Their first-hand reviews, advice and tips have been invaluable in helping me settle in and find out where to go and what to do.

So, it’s exciting to see their contribution recognised in the community-led Manchester Blog Awards, to be held on 21 October at the curiously-named Band on the Wall venue. At £4 a pop it’s hardly a stretch, so I hope to go along and meet some of the talented writers on whose blogs I lurk quietly.

While ‘most verbose microblog’ isn’t a category (for which I might in with a chance!), they’ve also got updates on Twitter @mcrblogawards.

BarCampManchester2

BarCampManchester2 is the second BarCamp to be held in Manchester and will happen in November. I’ve not been to one of these events before, though I did attend BarCampUKGovweb09 in January, aimed at public sector digital types.

The atmosphere at these events is great – everyone is keen to learn and get to know others who could help out with projects of mutual interest. Right now, the event is still in planning stages but it’s looking to be an exciting two-day gathering which means late-night geekery and gaming. Ideal for me, who seems to exist in a perpetually nocturnal timezone to the chagrin of my early-rising colleagues.

It’s not exclusively a techie event (which is great for me) so I hope that a wide-range of people will go along. It’s slated to be held at a weekend in November, though not firmed up yet probably on the weekend 7-8 November, at the Contact Theatre on Oxford Road. Keep on eye on organiser Ian’s twitter account (@cubicgarden) and the Twitter tag #bcman2.

Manchester Girl Geek Dinner 4

Quite evidently, I’m not a girl. But I had a great time as Ella‘s date at the previous Manchester Girl Geek Dinner and I’ve signed up to go again. The fourth Girl Geek Dinner is being held from 7pm on 29 October at the ever-accommodating Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter and will celebrate the Manchester Science Festival.

The event has a clear majority of females and guys are only allowed if they have a date who invites them. This gives it a unique atmosphere and the fact that it is a ‘dinner’ is different to the other types of geek networking events I’ve attended (the food was also really good last time).

So if you’re a girl and a geek, go check it out. A fiver gets you a meal and a drink. And if you’re a guy, well, you’ll have to see if a girl geek takes pity on you. You can also follow the event on Twitter @mancggd.

Are you coming along to any of the above? Perhaps I’ll see you there – leave a comment below or tweet me @technicalfault.

Updated: other geek events

A couple of people kindly tweeted me to draw my attention to a few other events. There a whole series of GeekUp events, which come to Manchester on a monthly basis. And if you want an extra dose of BarCamp goodness, check out BarCampBlackpoool on 17 October.

Dominic “The Hodge” Hodgson has setup a really useful calendar of these events, called Where’s the Geeks? which aims to cover geek events UK-wide. This is probably a good starting point for all the other events in Manchester and beyond. There’s also the North West Digital Communities email list, which is quite helpful for keeping tabs on nearby geeky goings-on.

Thanks to Tim and Gill for their useful feedback. Their thoughts were that the BBC offered a great opportunity to properly set up sessions in different parts of the space, with presentation facilities and much, much better sound.

I completely agree – this is a big benefit of a space like the BBC, and the advantage is that we can access it without necessarily paying the rates of renting office/conference space in Manchester, which at this stage would make the meetup unviable.

Poll results

However, in a totally unscientific poll on this blog (which received a paltry 17 votes) 82% (14) suggested we reserve the BBC for ‘special events’. 3 votes were cast to try and remain at the Beeb where possible. No-one disliked the BBC as a venue.

I think this is telling. The BBC is obviously a great place to hold events, but perhaps some regular attendees – including myself – may feel that it may not be suited to having regular meetings there. This was the thrust of what I wrote last time.

It certainly has benefits over the slightly awkward layout of The Northern (and bar prices are thankfully cheaper). But, I’d like to see different venues explored – coffee shops or other pubs with function room spaces. Perhaps suggestions can be noted in the comments?

It’s also worth noting that not everyone can access a space that serves alcohol or one that doesn’t have disabled access. Not something we always think about but something we should try and consider, even in informal meetups.

August meetup?

Finally, there’s no planned meetup in August. So how about an informal meetup? I’ve started a discussion thread on the Social Media Manchester Ning network, which complements the wiki. Sign-up to comment and keep networking through the summer, either online or offline.

It’s very easy to drown under a weight of emails with different requests, of varying priority and ability to fix. I needed a quick way of letting people input their issues into a central store, without needing to login or navigate anything that looked remotely scary. It had to replace sending an email to me.

Here comes the Twitter bit…

I put out a call for a free bug tracker on Twitter and got a number of useful suggestions (Trac, Uservoice, Getsatisfaction) but none of them quite fit what I wanted to do. I also ran a Google search and got a couple of solutions, that required a bit of sign-up and configuration. Thinking further, I realised that a Google product that I had almost never used was actually the answer.

Creating the issue tracker

Google Spreadsheets is a free online spreadsheet system that is designed for collaboration from the ground-up. Using your inevitable Google Account, you can quickly create and publish spreadsheets to either an invite-only audience or to everyone who has the link.

Within minutes, and with Dave Mee‘s advice, I’d set up a basic spreadsheet that covered off all the key things you’d want to know if you were tracking bugs. Using the ‘Share’ button, I can create a link like the one above and let anyone look at it, or even edit it, without signing-in. For the purposes of demo, you won’t be able to edit the sample tracker, but please click ‘File / Create a Copy’ for your own version.

Keeping it simple (stupid)

Unfortunately, sending users to a spreadsheet isn’t the most friendly interface to provide them with. Remember, I needed this to replace email so that means users need a simple, easy-to-understand method to put data in there, without logging in.

Well, the great thing about Google Spreadsheets is that it can act as a basic data-collection platform. This is key, because you don’t need to share the spreadsheet and all the data stored in it in order to get data into it, nor do you need users to login to yet another system.

From the spreadsheet above, the obvious ‘Form’ menu option, I was able to quickly create a simple form that automatically updated fields relevant to the end user. For example, I wanted users to tell me the problem (Issue detail…) but I would be setting the priority level and assigning it to the right people for resolution. During the creation of the form I was easily able to edit how all the fields are displayed and whether they’re required – and delete the fields that users don’t need to see.

That form can now be emailed around to anyone relevant or embedded within another webpage, say a feedback form on a beta/testing site or even on an organisation’s intranet. It’s trivial to further configure the spreadsheet options to email you whenever anyone then adds an entry to it via the form.

Love and spreadsheets are free

Total cost of this endeavour? Zero, apart from my time which was approximately 30-45 minutes, allowing for my fiddling around. Now that all requests for fixes are routed through one place, they can be managed much more easily and transparently, saving time and with users being able (if you wish) to monitor the fix status of any issue!

Found this useful? Am I missing out on a better way to capture these issues? Leave a comment below…

BBC Manchester, Oxford Road

This month’s social media cafe was another triumph for the community and came with the extra special glow of being held at the BBC in Manchester, complete with Tardis in the foyer. Thanks Ian!

I’ll refer you to Tim’s roundup of the sessions at the cafe (they were good) as he had the opportunity to flit around. I settled in to watch the chaps from Cahoona and events management agency Ear to the Ground discuss the Cutting Room Experiment, a project described in classic hyperbole as the ‘biggest user generated event in the world’.

My thoughts on the Cutting Room Experiment

I have to admit, when I first saw the press release from Manchester City Council, my heart sank. The press release, regrettably, reads a bit like the classic ‘public sector tries to do social media, misses the point’ with a smattering of buzz words: ‘flash mobs’; ‘user generated’; ‘unique event’, complete with manufactured quote from a director. It’s unfortunate that this was the first piece of publicity I saw.

What I saw next, thankfully, was a pretty darn nice website, complete with integrated social media PR campaign that picked up some great coverage online. This was followed up by a ‘blog launch‘ at the Bay Horse, suitably bribing people with the offer of a free pint in exchange for a short (and painless) presentation from the team.

I think this quickly shattered my misconceptions. Though not my misgivings.

In the end, Cutting Room Experiment turned out to be just that, a bold experiment, blessed by the usually control-hungry public bodies that sponsored it and one that achieved its key successes – 400 people there, extensive media coverage, and awareness raised of the location (though these GPS co-ords are not the square).

However, while I’ve already alluded to degree of hyperbole that did surround some of the marketing (‘biggest’ user generated event? ‘world first’?) the presentation was refreshingly honest when it reflected some of the highs and lows of the exercise. In particular, David (Ear to the Ground) pointed out that “It’s hard to turn a devoted online audience into a vibrant offline one”.

And this is a key problem for any online social marketeer. It’s easy to make people sign-up to an event and click through, but will they actually turn up? I ‘counted myself in’ to a couple of events, even posted my own (slightly tongue-in-cheek) event – but I didn’t go. My main aim was to see the alka seltzer rockets, provided by the Manchester Science Festival team but unfortunately I missed the slot.

From my own personal experience, I imagine that a risk of this sort of ‘user generated’ process is that some people just won’t go unless they’ve got one killer event and that might be the event that they themselves organised, or for which they had some personal buy-in (e.g. employee/volunteer). Perhaps the truth is that an online community where ‘buy-in’ is limited to ‘agreeing to the possibility that you might attend’ is a difficult one to convert.

Cutting Room Experiment though, had the benefit of a local community and they did tap in to this with flyers; the killer piece of info that was perhaps missing from the presentation was being able to know how the attendees (who weren’t staff or volunteers) had heard of the event – online, or offline. I suspect it was the former, whereas arguably you needed more of the latter, particularly those who lived locally.

To conclude, it’s hard to criticise something into which a whole lot of people put a lot of hard work, and which produced some stunning results. However, I have to wonder whether this experiment, conducted largely online, needs to have much more of an offline aspect in order to make sure that the numbers for the ‘real world’ event does materialise.

The venue – keeping it social

Finally, the BBC was a great one-off venue and I, like many young (ish) meeja whores, am naturally excited by anything taking place there because of the weight that the BBC as a brand can lend to it. However, the Social Media Cafe, despite being less than a year old, has definitely established itself as a key hub of digital networking and knowledge sharing. Stopping in at the Beeb every so often would be great, but I think the social aspect of the cafe would be better served by sticking with a venue where turning up late without being signed-up (for example) won’t cause any organisational stress for those who’ve worked hard to secure those spaces.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment or vote in this non-scientific poll:

By now, I’m sure you all know about Chi-chi Ekweozor and her epic journey to travel to all 7 wonders of the world, in just 7 days.

Tonight, she’ll be hosting the 7 wonders in 7 days charity auction and tweetup at Manchester’s swanky Living Room, on Deansgate. The event will feature a ‘fun charity auction to live music from award winning cellist and pioneer of contemporary music, Peter Gregson’.

And this was definitely a ‘crowd-sourced event’. Chi-chi sourced the venue, after it was host to the successful Twestival in Manchester. The DJ was found through Twitter and Chi-chi has assembled a group of locals willing to help out by forming ‘Team 7 Wonders‘.

Chi-chi kindly asked me to join the team and, having successfully run a number of webcasts on Ustream.tv, I’m helping out by broadcasting some of the proceedings from tonight’s tweetup.

Tonight, I’ll be joined by friend, colleague and camera operator extraordinaire, Bob Hopley who will handle the videography while I’ll be there with my trusty MacBook Pro (still missing an ‘N’ key!) squirting the data out over the Wifi. I have a dodgy backup ’3′ dongle too!

We’ll be focusing on broadcasting cellist Peter Gregson. According to the bio, ‘Gregson fuses contemporary and classical music with contemporary digital culture, in March he performed at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco.  He also performed at Twestival.  More recently, in April he performed at the Classic FM Live concert at a sold out Royal Albert Hall’. — sounds great!

If we won’t be seeing you later, you can watch below or (hopefully!) 7 wonder in 7 days website! We’d love to hear your tweets as you watch – remember to tag them #90909.

I’ve also turned on Ustream’s ‘social stream’ feature where you can login using your Twitter credentials and tweet as you watch! To use this, you’ll have to visit the show page on Ustream but otherwise, keep your Twitter browser open at the same time.

See you later!

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