I woke this morning to a tweet from Joanna Geary suggesting that I “might dispute your first status” – huh? It turns out Desi Velikova is starting an event next month called “London Social Media Cafe” and was tweeting to people: “We’re organising the first London Social Media Cafe and thought you might be interested” – the site refers to the Birmingham and Toronto SMCs as inspiration but makes no direct reference to our work.
Although I was initially riled, once I’d had a coffee and looked through it all again, I saw there was nothing to get hung-up about. As I said, nearly 5 years ago, “I own nothing here”.
Just to set the record straight so no-one has to dig through blogs and wikis or actually talk to someone to find out the answer – the thing that we now call Tuttle or the Tuttle Club started out as the London Social Media Cafe. I wrote about it first on 8th August 2007. In the early days we used a wiki at londonsocialmediacafe.pbworks.com Soon after people found that #tuttle was much less of a mouthful than #LondonSMC and we got on with the important business of talking to each other, building relationships and having a laugh rather than worrying about what we were called.
Good Luck with it, Desi!
Perfect Path 
It also help to appreciate that our networks memory is not the same as other people’s. I go round and round sometimes about the social media surgeries – especially when I see people using the approach but in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Desi though is close to the network – she’ll be delighted if you have a coffee with her.
Hi Nick,
As Lloyd said, no one owns it and I cannot agree more. It’s not clear from this website http://tuttleclub.wordpress.com/ that it’s the same concept, and I didn’t even now it was still running. I did apologies for the word “first”, it wasn’t intentional and I do respect their work. The concept itself is not an innovation, there are similar events in the gambling industry and also in other countries. I’m pretty sure that there were times when we had only one TV channel, 1 tabloid, one web design agency, etc… If it’s such an issue, we can always rename it and the problem will be “solved”. As I said, we’re not competing whatsoever, we simply want to have a nice bunch of social media marketers in London who catch-up once per month.
Hi Lloyd!
Thank you so much for clarifying this. I completely understood your frustration this morning! I honestly didn’t know it was still running and will do my best to make it clear that we don’t “compete” with Tuttle
whatsoever… We’re even thinking of changing the day, if the event is successful and we carry on doing it after the first one. It’s a brilliant concept, that’s why so many people are adopting it.
Thanks and I look forward to meeting you one day 🙂
Also – we’ll amend the website and won’t refer to it as “the first”