Despite large parts of the UK trying to blow away with the attendant travel chaos that staggers those from less civilized climes, we had more than 25 hardy souls braving the elements from as far away as Bonn (yes, as in Germany) and Cardiff (yes, as in Wales), for free beer, wine and nibbles (Thanks, Fleishmann Hillard!) and some incidental chat about social media.

There is quite a churn in these meetings so far, though some suckers keep coming back for more, so we started with round-the-room introductions. There was a wide variety – media consultants, media creators, bloggers, photographers, marketers, entrepreneurs, geeks, visual-thinkers and many more.

We then broke into smaller self-forming discussion groups for the bulk of the time we had together. Broadly summarised there were people talking about:

• Living life completely online vs offline, the problems associated with life-cacheing mixed in with speculation about the shelf-life of YouTube videos and timeliness of social media generally.
• Visualisation as a global language – ask Dave Gray for a picture of this one 😉
• The variety of perspectives and channels in using social media for marketing (pictured above), the problems of measurement and the difficulty of matching ‘channels’ and ‘audiences’ ( not to mention the difficulty of using those words or finding others to use…)
• Where does trust come from? Knowing the source? From the content itself?
• Global perspectives – diverse and complex developments in other parts of the world and the predominance of the mobile phone rather than the desktop as social media tool.

I plugged membership, pointed people to the London wiki and the mailing list as tools to keep in touch and encouraged people to come up with suggestions for topics and activities. I’d very much like us to *do* stuff at these sessions as much as *talk* about doing stuff. We’re going to go with the Third Thursday of the month as a regular slot, though we may shift venue around Central London – 15th February will include a post-Valentine speed-datingnetworking spot 😮

cross-posted from the Social Media Club blog