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Dim Sum, Social Media and History in the Making

The first of a series of #Media140 mini-events kicked off last Wednesday on the 13th of January at Ping Pong Dim Sum in the Square Mile to a warm welcome from a London crowd.

These mini-events will focus on journalism, brands, advertising, media, technology, politics, the third sector and education. They are aimed at getting individuals from diverse backgrounds together to share their experiences over good food and drink, meet industry professionals and learn from case studies.

Our man Glenn Le Santo took a look at what stood out at the first Media140 London meetup and managed to bag a couple of excellent interviews with some of the attendees.

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To an outsider, it may have seemed just like another event where cyber-types talk about cyber-stuff, just face-to-face rather than screen-to-screen.

To me, it felt like something more. I couldn’t help thinking that I was witnessing history in the making.

Speaking to Mark Jennings and Richard Baker, I couldn’t help but compare the scene to the early days of personal computing, when Apple’s famed duo of Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) and Microsoft’s ‘founding father’ Bill Gates were screwing together the first desktop computers in their garages.

Back in the mid-1970s, the home-brew computer whizzkids shared information and knowledge with arguably reckless openness at meets, conferences and exhibitions.

They were a mix of inventive and visionary minds with – fortunately for them – a few folks handy at turning ideas into profit amongst them.

When the realisation dawned on those entrepreneurial types that a PC could fathomably adorn every desk in the business world, everything changed. The game became serious and a number of garage enthusiasts got extremely rich, extremely quickly.

Social media has until now also been an enthusiast-driven phenomenon. Even large organisations have maintained a somewhat hobbyist approach to it.

However, 2010 has dawned and with it the widespread realisation that social media is a large part of both our personal and business lives, and will just keep growing.

According to Sysomos, London has more registered tweeters than any other city worldwide, putting it at the hub of the Twitter revolution.

Media140’s meeting in the Square Mile was attended by some of social media’s top minds, personalities that may one day turn out to be the Jobs, Wozniaks or Gates of this brand new industry’s future.

After a chat with speaker Guy Stephens which you can hear thanks to audioBoo below, I persuaded Paul Squires and Paul Harrison to break away from the lively networking session and give up a few words for the Media140 microphone.

All three use, and advise others how to use, social media in business. And they’re perfect examples of the calibre of brain power consistently present at social media meets, much like in the old Jobs-Wozniak-Gates days.

To hear what they had to say, press play below.

Glenn Le Santo talks to the two Pauls: Squires and Harrison

Glenn meets Guy Stephens

Speakers at the #Media140 London event

Richard Baker, former General Manager of Virgin Trains and a veteran of customer service strategy, with over 15 years experience working with two of the world’s most recognisable brands. Richard writes for his own blog at http://rich-baker.com/

Guy Stephens, a self confessed ’social media junkie’ with a particular interest in customer service. He founded the Linked in Group ‘where social media meets online customer service’ and is the Customer Knowledge Manager at a well known high street Telecommunications Provider. Guy writes for his own blog at http://beingguy1067.wordpress.com/

Charlie Osmond is the co-founder of FreshMinds in 2000 and graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Engineering, Economics and Management. He has been named London Entrepreneur of the Year and more recently as UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year by Esquire Magazine. Charlie blogs at Freshnetworks

Images from #Media140 London courtesy of Iain Weir