Brrism – a Social Media Café

I am just back from another social media cafe, brrism, in Bristol, on the whole a very good evening.

It started with a short talk by Michael Corbett outlining the possibilities of structures in the group – we are still in the infant stage and a clear structure without too much leadership has yet to be found.

As a short interlude, meant to lighten the atmosphere and get us talking to each other an icebreaker in the form of introducing our demons (the sort you find in The Golden Compass) to each other was fun if a bit silly, but got us talking for a while. We then split into three groups to talk about twitter, brrism and something else I did not catch. I went into the twitter group, planning on changing to the brrism group after 10 minutes. That didn’t happen; I stayed with the group, partly out of politeness.

To finish we had a discussion about the direction a branding of brrism should go.

I like the brrism evenings and will continue taking part for now, but I have a few points I wish to make. The talk was fine as was the demonic game. The group I joined afterwards was interesting, although not new and not really going anywhere. We talked a bit about the new RT function on twitter, it’s pros and cons, voiced our individual opinion – but that was all and had been done on twitter itself before. One of the criticisms about the corporative and money angle of twitter I found a bit hypocritical as most of the people at the cafe are using social media to try and earn money.

It felt impossible to change to other groups – we had been told it is ok to move, but I think it would have been better if somebody would have just said: “Everybody move now!” I know that a leader as such is not wanted, but humans do like some sort of direction. I would have liked to talk about brrism itself.

The branding – if brrism is a social media cafe for Bristol, for people of the area to meet and talk about all things social media – why does it need to be branded? There is no money involved (hopefully), we don’t want to grow to include the whole of the West – so why?

I felt the need for more talk and answers to my questions when the time was up and there was the possibility of continuing in the watershed over a drink. So off we all went, found some room, got our beers and sat down to – what? Certainly no talk about social media where I sat and the only questions I got was about cooking. Utterly bored and disappointed I left for home, where the discussion was much more interesting.

I hope all that will in time change as the group grows and learns – even though all of the above might sound a touch negative it was a good evening and I did enjoy most of it greatly. I might give the pub afterwards a miss though, that was definitely a waste of time.

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~ by heikemargot on November 19, 2009.