Technical Faults » Social Media Cafe

Ning to end free networks

Josh — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:42:38 +0000

Cross-posted from Social Media Manchester

Many of you may have heard the news that Ning, the providers of this community’s social network, is intending to phase out their ‘free’ service, in favour of paid-for options. Jason Rosenthal, their newly appointed Chief Executive, said, in a staff memo:

“We are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity” — i.e being the premium service, not the one supported by advertising. (Guardian)

It is interesting then that at the recent first meetup of digital content creators in Manchester (“There will be blood“) the discussion around paywalls and the end of the ‘free/freemium’ model was debated. Now, we find ourselves very urgently coming to grips with this exact same situation. I’ll blog my personal thoughts on this decision separately.

Why are we using Ning?

As I blogged about in January, the Social Media Manchester network was created on Ning by one of the regular attendees of the Social Media Cafe, Rob Gough, as a way of keeping the conversation going outside of the monthly meetups and to help facilitate the networking that happens at the event. Ning was picked because it was free to set up, easy to maintain and very easy to scale. It is undoubtedly far superior to the wiki pages used when the cafe was in its infancy. And, of course, its success is in no small part due to its adoption as the primary channel for communicating and promoting information about the Social Media Cafe, which remains a large part of its purpose.

However, since then, it has become a platform for a number of spin-off activities that originated from people who met at the cafe, including the Social Media Surgeries and the Manchester Aggregator. With over 500 members (that’s double in three months since January), a number of events, groups and a growing blog network, I think that this site – the community it represents – has become an important part of the digital and creative media scene in Manchester.

What does this mean for our network?

The changes soon to be implemented by Ning will pose some difficult questions for the future. In his most recent blog post, Rosenthal says that we’ll find out more on 4 May. He also recognised the difficulties that this move is going to present for volunteer-run communities like ours:

“We recognize that there are many active Ning Networks for teachers, small non-profits, and individuals and its our goal to have a set of product and pricing options that will make sense for all of them. For Ning Creators using our free service who choose to move to another service, we will offer a migration path and time to make that change.” (Ning)

So the short story is, ‘wait and see’. It may transpire that the new offering from Ning is compelling enough to consider some sort of payment to maintain this network and, if so, we would have to consider how this is achieved.

As mentioned, this community is entirely volunteer-run, as are almost all of the events featured including the extremely popular Social Media Cafe, which regularly draws over scores of people from across the north west, and some big name speakers, but for which there has never been a cover charge or requests for sponsorship.

There is no proposal that this must change any time soon, though this type of change must be driven by the community. Undoubtedly, additional funding for the cafe, and therefore the development of this network, would be beneficial but this would also change the dynamic of the event and – in the case of sponsorship particularly – potentially require a number of strings that we would have to be happy to accept.

What next?

For now, I just wanted to let you know that we were aware of and thinking about how this change might affect the community. As ever, your feedback will help drive any changes and ensure that whatever decision is taken about the future of this Ning network or another solution is the right one.

Thanks to Daniel Bentley for flagging this up to me originally.

Social media cafe roundup – April 2010

Josh — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:27:27 +0000

Cross-posted from the Social Media Manchester network on Ning.

The last social media cafe on the theme of hyperlocal resulted in a couple of interesting blog posts which I thought I’d link to here. If you see anything else, drop us a note in the comments.

Adrian Slatcher wrote for the Mancunian Way:

“In an age when not only the city-wide newspaper, but the district or very local paper is close to extinction, more and more people are looking at the web as way to deliver the kind of area-focused service that many of us still have an interest in.”

Rick Gutteridge wrote for Smoking Gun PR’s blog and concluded:

“With local newspapers shrinking and ITV local news set to be scrapped in its current format by 2013, PR’s better keep abreast of hyperlocal channels if they want to keep their clients connected to local communities.”

Thanks to both for blogging their respective roundups.

Thanks also to our guest speaker, Chris Taggart from Openly Local who amongst other things talked about the Open Election Project. His slides are on Slideshare.

Also, following the event, we’d really appreciate your feedback. We’ve put together a short form, which should take less than 5 minutes to fill out. Have a go and let us know how we can keep improving the event as the community develops.

Finally, as regulars will know, we were asking for donations for the first time, to cover some of the costs of having a guest speaker. I wanted to thank everyone who donated. On this occasion, we raised £32 from a range of donors, with an average donation of over £5 each. Thanks to all who donated; we hope you found the event valuable.

See you next month!

Social Media Cafe Manchester September 2009 – session previews

Josh — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:27:24 +0000

As I wrote earlier today, the September 2009 meeting of Manchester’s Social Media Cafe is tomorrow (Update: is tonight! But it was tomorrow, when I wrote this). Slightly later than planned, I’ve written previews of the upcoming sessions, so if you’re still not sure which of the sessions you’d like to go to, or just want to find out more, then I hope that the below ‘preview’ blog posts are helpful.

I welcome feedback on all of the above. Perhaps I will keep doing this in the future, a bit earlier too depending on when the sessions are filled!

See y’all tomorrow.

Social Media Cafe Manchester session preview – “Digital Games and/as Social Media”

Josh — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:49:55 +0000

Given my background in student activism, I’m always excited to see leaders from higher education attend and present at events like the Social Media Cafe Manchester. Continuing this mini-series of blog posts, I caught up with another presenter who will be at tomorrow’s meeting.

Digital Games and/as Social Media –Professor Ben Light @doggyb

Prof Light (or Ben, if I may!) is Professor of Digital Media at the School of Media, Music and Performance, University of Salford. Which is a pretty cool title. Personally, I’m excited that lecturers (professors, no less) are using social media, let alone lecturing in the subject. In my days at university (not that long ago!), the concept of an electronic presentation was still alien to some of the lecturers who taught me.

Ben will be looking at media convergence: how it happens, why, and some of the implications arising for users and designers. Since March 2006, Ben has been engaged in programme of research that has focused upon how users and designers are making digital games and social media work for them on an everyday basis.

This might sound a tad daunting, but he says, “the session won’t be technical”:

“You don’t need to understand the nuts and bolts – it’s suitable for anyone who has an interest in social media and digital gaming.”

…which sounds like a lot of the people I know who go to SMC. I certainly have been enjoying my Wii of late.

Talking of games consoles, Ben’s bringing an exciting twist to the meeting: SingStar on PS3! He’ll be using it as part of his presentation, which will include a lot of photography and video. I wondered why he was bringing along the popular karaoke game for the PS3:

“SingStar is one of the games I have been studying.”…”I’m bringing it along to demonstrate it and the online community [associated with it] ‘live’.”

I hope the BBC wifi holds out and I have no doubt that we have some secret SingStar fans in the crowd (ahem @realfreshtv!)

I know Ben’s putting his final touches on his session this evening, but I asked him what he hoped participants would get out of the session:

“It’s very much about knowledge: how are people using social media, how it’s linked with games. Who are the developers in social media/gaming environments and who are the users – it’s not as obvious as it sounds.

“What ethical issues arise in such spaces? For example, I could talk about ‘grief play’, identity work and social inclusion/exclusion.”

Intriguing. It sounds like Ben will be covering a new area for the Social Media Cafe meetups and doing it in a novel and engaging way. I, for one, can’t wait to get involved.

Professor Light tweets @doggyb and his personal blog is at benlight.org.

Social Media Cafe and the Cutting Room Experiment

Josh — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:44:18 +0000

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: