Sow an Idea and Watch It Bloom at Social Media Cafe Manchester

Yesterday’s Social Media Cafe Manchester event was another reminder of how awesome Manchester is at nurturing ideas.

I presented a follow up session on 7 Wonders in 7 Days, partly to share knowledge about the social media workflow I’m developing for the project and also to chat to people about progress so far.

I must add that I also presented again because I felt I let myself and a lot of folk down by not arriving on time for the start of last month’s event.  I hope I’ve redressed that!

Back at the Northern after last month’s decamp to the Contact Theatre for the Futuresonic festival, it really felt like coming home.  The wifi in the Northern seems to have sped up since I was last in!

Considering how fraught the sessions at Futuresonic were, with hindsight, it was a relief to be back on familiar territory.

I was blown away by all the great ideas that came out of that 40 minute session.  And the ones that seemed to bubble out of folk around the bar(!).

It was awesome.

After my talk, I listened to Ian Forrester aka @cubicgarden from BBC Backstage talk about Social Calendaring and reckon he came away with a similar impression.  The people that come along to Social Media Cafe Manchester events are a curious and questioning bunch, stridently vocal at times but they really do give from the heart.

My slides are up on Slideshare and embedded right here:

I’m going to be documenting as many suggestions as I can from each event I present 7 Wonders in 7 Days at.  I’ll try and post them as soon as I can after each event, work and other commitments permitting.

As before, I tried to write things down as soon as I could after they were said to me but probably forgot something.  If you mentioned something I acknowledged at the time but omitted here, please shout out in the comments!

Here they come:

Getting Celebrity Twitterers involved

Ed Horwich @edhorwich suggested this and a couple of others agreed.   I’ve considered reaching out to national (t)wits, raconteurs and broadcasters @stephenfry and @wossy on Twitter but have always been intimidated by their uber following (between the two of them, they’ve got over 800,000 followers)!

It’s now something I’m going to do albeit rather differently to what may spring to mind;  this down to another excellent suggestion from last night.  More on this shortly.

Approach Thomas Cook for Sponsorship

David Taylor @linkmonkey suggested this and backed it up by sharing how it could provide them with some really clever publicity.

He also shared that he has a personal contact at Thomas Cook (his Dad is director of Engineering!) and our chat after the session clarified why it’s good for them to get involved.

I talk a little bit about these in this short video interview with Ricky Chotai @ricky_chotai.

Approach local radio stations and offer exclusive trip interviews

Ricky suggested that I approach local radio stations and offer them exclusive telephone interviews during the trip.  His 3 minute video interview is worth watching as he is a radio man himself!

I filmed it (rather badly admittedly) using my new Flip Mino HD camera but the video quality isn’t as good as the first video I made for the trip.

I re-uploaded to make sure it wasn’t corrupted in some way during the upload to YouTube via the Flip camera but that made no difference.  Will inspect the settings…

**Update**: I think I was being a bit impatient.  Video quality back to gorgeous.  Think that YouTube was busy crunching at the time I was previewing it.

Other Suggestions by@linkmonkey

Run a fundraising campaign in Second Life as they have a currency that exchanges for real dollars.

David also had some interesting information on how cutthroat the world of charity fundraising is that still has me thinking!

Make each time you arrive at one of the Wonders an event

Arrange a tweet up at each venue if you can.

Use Doppler for the trip

Connect with other travellers on the travel community site Dopplr and add the Dopplr badge to the trip website.  In essence, join the Dopplr community and involve them in the trip.

Create a PR Pack for the Campaign including pictures and a badge for bloggers

Provide PR people and journalists an easy way to link to the website.

Approach Celebrity Twitterers by going through Conventional Channels

Approach people like Stephen Fry who may well be interested in 7 Wonders in 7 Days by going through conventional channels i.e. through his manager!

The idea is that this may well be more effective than just spraying @replies his way and hoping he notices.

All those ideas were suggested by the wonderfully named @hereinthehive aka Dan Donald.  He also sent me an email with the idea he couldn’t remember during our chat yesterday:

Thought about extending the project beyond the trip.  How about doing a few things at once?  The eco side made me think – flying round the world creates how much CO2?  Perhaps other people could do events (physical things or planting trees for example) to raise money and try and offset the pollution from the project?

There might be separate bodies that would be interested in that angle too.

I have also thought about the environmental impact of the trip and would personally get lots of satisfaction from offsetting the carbon dioxide I’m adding to the planet before, during and after the trip.

I’m definitely going to pursue that one and just need to work out a way of creating a ‘sponsorable activity’ around it.

Use a Spotify playlist instead of a DJ at the Charity Tweetup and Auction planned for 25th June

This was suggested by @Kate_Butler via Twitter:

hi chi-chi, instead of a DJ how about a themed spotify playlist at the living room? would provide another platform for promotion. kate x

Great idea and one I’m certainly thinking of doing.

I see that there have already been calls for a DJ on Twitter though. Thank you Josh!  Josh is @technicalfault

We’ll have to combine both with the original idea of a last.fm playlist created by the 7 Wonders in 7 Days group on last.fm.

Give people that sponsor you an additional benefit

Create an incentive for each donation.  Think Million Dollar Homepage.

Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage inspired me to be brave enough to start a business back in 2005 and this idea, suggested by Caleb Storkey of innovative social media powered directory Freedoma, reminded me of the value of giving people some online promotion for their money.

This is a really neat idea and I’m thinking hard about how to implement it.  Caleb’s suggestions included keeping all my tickets, cutting them up when I returned and creating limited edition framed pictures featuring bits of tickets.  These could then be sold.

Interesting…

Use YouTube Captions to advertise things

This started as discussion about using YouTube to link to items of interest, in this way using each video to raise funds.

I don’t think you can link to anything other than other YouTube videos via YouTube links at present but there’s a familiar TV-like experience to be explored here.  Will certainly think about.

Find most prolific Twitterer in each country and collaborate with him/her to arrange a Tweetup

Caleb also suggested something along the lines of Dan’s suggestion of making each arrival an event.

His suggestion of filming a running tweetup was hilarious!  He called it a ‘Forrest Gump tweetup’!

The idea is to arrange to meet with people in each country for a run that is filmed and shared on YouTube.  He said he chose running because it is a visual thing that has never been done before.

I think it is particularly appropriate as it’s likely I’ll have little time to spend at each country before running to the next!

I’m going to stop now, this is already quite a long post.   I’m going to blog my notes from Ian Forrester’s talk over on my company blog at realfresh.tv and I’ll link to it here when I do.

So… what do you think?

I’m planning on working on the Press Pack and sponsorship approach suggestions over the next week but am keenly aware I need to decide what I do carefully as there’s only so much I can cram into 24 hours.

I still have a ‘proper’ job to do.

If you’d like to help please shout out in the comments!

And yes, share your thoughts about all the wonderful ideas.  Thank you.

Image Credit: Cup of Coffee Networkers

Related posts:

1. We have Social Media Buttons!
2. And so 7 Wonders In 7 Days #90909 launches at Futuresonic 2009
3. 7 Wonders in 7 Days Social Media News Release
4. People Would Rather Meet Than Compete

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