I’m delighted to announce that great local band Saskia Says will be playing for us.

Nina De Winter will be co-hosting.

Jonathan

A new phase of the cafe is upon us

Good news café lovers! We have a new team in place to continue the wonderful Cheltenham tradition of social media café-ing(?).

Many of our regulars (and probably many more) will be familiar with the new bosses. Emily and Jonathan, who I still think of as @jonnop, will be officially in charge after tomorrow night. Huge thanks to Emily and Jonathan for taking this on and of course, we wish them luck for the future.

Emily will also be supporting me tomorrow with the ‘meet and greet’ which is lucky because I’m pretty bad at it. My counterpart, the acceptable face of the café Chris, also hopes to be there but has to get back from Manchester. Whether he can make it or not you’re sure to see both of us at future café events and other social media gatherings.

It’s been a privilege to be part of one of the earliest ‘tweet-up’ organisations in Cheltenham, a town that has a thriving and active online population. We’ve made friends and business contacts and we’ve enjoyed a lot of cake and cider along the way.

Cheers folks!

When the social media café began it was – in my view- a bit of a trail blazer. Now there are many Cheltenham-based tweet ups from casual one-offs, to regulars like our café, educational events like Digitalks and even tweet ups based around a common love of cake. Twitter, at least for Cheltonians, has become a giant community pin board as well as fulfilling other, non-geographic functions.

Were you there at the first café event? Do you remember when Andy Thorne and Holly Knowlman got together and came up with Foursquarestival? Or when a journalist came to learn about Cheltenham twestival? Have you received enlightenment in the form of Pepper Crescent cake?Or experienced relief knowing there was somewhere to socialise with good cider, coffee and NO business cards?

Dear café lovers, I know it’s been a while but please bear with us while we attempt to organise another amazing event just for you!

Jonathan has teamed up with local charity Grow, who aim to build community and to help vulnerable children and adults in Cheltenham feel significant, secure and accepted.

From 7.30pm ’til late (about 2am in fact) D’Fly is opening its doors for an evening of 2-4-1 cocktails, casino tables and live music from local talents including Saskia Gregory. Tickets are a bargain at £5 – that’s 6 1/2 hours of incredible entertainment for less money than a typical Cheltenham lunch!

You can buy tickets in advance here http://cheltenham.twestival.com
and all of your donation will go to Grow!

Enjoy a glass of wine with Cheltenham Social Media Cafe

Woohoo! Our next event is in the diary as the lovely folks at Pepper Crescent have confirmed our slot. From 6-8pm on Thursday 3rd March join us for coffee and cake (or maybe a glass of wine or Westons’ Cider) and some social media related chatter.

Guests and new faces are all welcome but remember - this is networking sans business cards. That means leave your sales pitch at the door! The event is free to attend and it’s a great way of putting avatars and twitter handles to real faces. It’s also worth it just for the mocha but we do encourage conversation too!

You can follow the café on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with all our events, pictures and random ramblings. You can also search previous blog entries for our event write-ups which are useful for newcomers to get an idea of how they ‘work’.

But enough about the food and drink! Let me paint you a picture of our evening. Topics of conversation included social media strategy, a social media for financial services event that had taken place that day, holiday plans in Sienna, Yogi bear and mankinis as office wear. Of course that’s not an exhaustive account of what went on but I feel it offers a balanced perspective on the event.

Chris and I are considering the possibility of a Christmas special which may also include tapas. As time is now rather short, you may expect updates on this soon!

See you next time!

PS. Don’t forget these events are for putting the social back into social media – no sales pitches required!

You may have noticed that one half of the SMC team has been getting about a bit lately. @solutionmania was part of the organisation team for Cheltenham’s Super Swarm attempt and he turned up for DigiTalks and Jonathan’s Foursquare Forum. He really is the acceptable and sociable face of our Social Media Café!

For my part, I’ve nothing but excuses and the lack of a smart phone to explain my notable absences. On the plus side, I have been tweeting and blogging in a way which I hope is useful and interesting for #GlosBiz people (i.e. our followers – that’s you that is!) I’ll also be showing my face at ‘The Social Network’ on Monday evening (6pm at Cineworld, Brewery Centre) along with a few other ‘usual suspects’.

Just in case you want even more from us we’ve also set a date for the next café event. Whilst I realise it’s unlikely you’re desperate to talk to us and even less likely you’ll want to actually see us, I thought you might want an excuse to eat cake and drink Weston’s cider. I know, you probably don’t really need an excuse but we’re having the event anyway and you’re welcome to come along.

It’s on the 4th November which is a Thursday from 6-8pm at Pepper Crescent.

So, now you know I expect you’ll want to tell all of your friends by tweeting this URL! Thanks. We’ll see you there.

It’s an upcoming social media platform with lots of potential so if you don’t know much about it now, maybe you should?

Jonathan is holding a taster workshop to teach local business people about the benefits of using Foursquare. The taster session will run from 5.30 to 6pm on the 9^th July 2010 at Pepper Crescent and it’s absolutely free to attend!

This means you can learn a bit about how to gain local recognition and attract new customers before joining the fun at our next café event from 6-8pm!

A follow up workshop called ‘Get more customers with Foursquare’ is planned for the 15^th July between 10am and 12pm at the Exmouth Arms and you can book your tickets here.

We’d appreciate it if café regulars could tweet about the workshops and mention them to anyone you think might be interested.

About Jonathan:

Jonathan advises people on how to get the most out of social media for their business. He regularly runs workshops on a variety of social media topics and often attends networking events like our Social Media Cafe and DigiTalks. You can find him on Twitter @jonnop and @jpfestival or visit his website at www.intranetfuture.com