Anti-Social Media Cafe too

I decided to create a separate blog entry for another interesting aspect about the Manchester Social Media Cafe which I unearthed while researching this piece here.

It seems their Members group has been infiltrated by a spamming mad person.  But I think the way the members have reacted (or rather not reacted) says a lot about they way they see the group and in at least one instance draws attention to their own naiveté.

This is the Member page of someone calling themselves "Sharon Davids".  You will notice they began entering a website address then stopped and then typed a single letter as their response to the question 'What are you interested in learning about?'  On May 9th they sent the following message to (as far as I could tell) all Members of Manchester's Social Media Cafe:

Hello,
My name is sharon i saw your profile today at and i love it also  became intrested in you,i will also like to know you more,and i want you to send an email directely to my email address so  that i can reply your mail and also give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address(sharondavids52@yahoo.com) i believe we can move from here.my love distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life.i am waiting to recive your
lovely reply soon,

Yours in Love sharon

So far so mad, but surely this would have been reported and the user blocked immediately?  Well, unbelievably this is not the case and incredibly a member whose profile describes themselves as a:

Specialist in the recruitment of Marketing, PR, Advertising, Digital and Social media professionals. Looking to network with like minded people whom I may be able to assist in their next career move.

Responded to the spam like this:

Hi Sharon
Thanks for your comment, I find it a little strange I must admit. But thank you all the same.

...which has now appeared on 'Sharon's comment wall.

This exposes the hypocrisy that permeates so much of Social Media,  because it turns out the Member who responded is simply a recruitment agency cynically using the SMC as a way of touting for clients.  As such, they seem either to have a) wilfully decided to reply to the spam as a joke, or b) not known what on earth they are doing.

As for the failure of the group's organisers to respond to this spamming in any way and the collective apathy shown by the other members - well, as I say, it reflects badly on them all.

Anti-Social Media Cafe

Following on from an earlier blog on Manchester's Social Media Cafe, I thought it might be instructive - not to say constructive - to compare it with the model on which they are based.  London's Tuttle Club ticks all the right boxes for me and I'm going to try to ascertain why that might be, and why the Manchester version seems to have mislaid a key element that makes Tuttle work.

I do not think that missing key element is 'fun', although it's true Tuttle seems like a lot more fun.  I don't think it is necessarily the more professional feel to Tuttle's on-line presence, although it's equally true that they - and, for instance, Birmingham - have had much better quality 'associated media' - like photographs - whereas Manchester has had some truly awful cameraphone pix and video.

No, I think the true missing ingredient might be defined as "that which makes one less pretentious".  Tuttle's founder Lloyd Davies is both witty and eloquent but somehow manages to remain down-to-earth and approachable even when talking or writing about the minutae of some techie chat he's just had.  (Perhaps it's the ukelele).  He also seems a genuinely creative person who knows a lot of other truly creative people.

Here in Manchester there appears to be a dearth of real creative talent attending the SMC meetings, but plenty of mediocre and terribly earnest I.T.-based Marketeers.  Obviously they would turn puce with rage at being called merely 'I.T.-based Marketeers', preferring perhaps 'Social Media Consultants' or 'Creative Digerati' or 'Thought Leaders'.  In fact I'm sure they'd prefer that because these are the terms they use when describing themselves, and it comes across as unbelievably pretentious.

No doubt there would be some who would say that Manchester's SMC is not trying to be like Tuttle.  Not the authors of MancSMC's original homepage though...

And now we've soiled this page with the hideous MancSMC logo in all it's garish luridness, let's take a look at the homeblogs for the two entities.

It's worth noting that - other than the actual blog entries themselves - Tuttle only have two 'true' RSS feeds to their homepage - recent comments & recent photos.  Two generic boxes state simply what Tuttle is and where to find them, and there's a tasteful header pic and simple typographic design solution for their name.  It looks smart and cool.

Now let's take a trip up north to see how (obstensibly) the same sort of people have laid out their homeblog:

MancSMC has feeds for Blogposts (sitting in the top centre and displaying on May 26th 2011 the last blogpost dated April 12th), Forum (seemingly hijacked by job vacancy ads), Facebook, Events, Twitter, Members, Groups, Latest Activity, and even a downloadable big badge saying 'I'M A MEMBER OF SOCIAL MEDIA MANCHESTER'.  Also prominent top-right is the Sign Up box with links to Facebook, Google and Yahoo.  In contrast Tuttle makes a point of stating in their generic description box that "there is no need to sign up".

Other than the horrible aesthetic mess all these streams make, and the fact that they are vulnerable to the ebb and flow of user content (more ebb than actual flow it seems), they suggest an unappealing desperation.  "Please join us. Oh, please join us. Go on. Look how popular we are. Do you want a badge? Go on, have a badge..."

You may also have noticed that instead of Tuttle's cool photograph of people chatting we get a dull, low contrast city nightscape.  And the title reads 'Social Media Manchester'.  What happened to the cafe?  And where's the logo gone?  Perhaps they've changed their name?  Not so, because if you click on the Facebook link you arrive here:

And there's the old #smc logo but the page is called Social Media Manchester.  It's not an actual Facebook Group page you understand, but the app page.  Under each heading we read: "No content could be found for this item."  Well, ain't that the truth.

Clicking through the 'Find Out More' on 'About Us' takes you to this:

So we're back to calling it the Social Media Cafe again now and the dull description makes it sound like some sort of Community Support Group.  But for me the highlight has to be the photograph.  Was this really the best one available?  Two empty chairs and lot of people's backs?

In conclusion I think the net result of all this shoddy pretentiousness is that MancSMC continually fails to attract creatives into their midst.  And unless something changes, they never will.  And if they never will, then the group will remain small-minded, unimaginative, mediocre and dull.

Outside the M60

Self-proclaimed 'hyperlocal' news blog 'Inside The M60' seems determined to continue to court controversy.

It all started so well...  As early as March 2010 freelance journalist Nigel Barlow announced a manifesto for a hyper-local news website for Manchester on his own blog here:

Fellow freelance journalist Louise Bolotin in more publicity for the project stated:

"What we're looking to create is a hyperlocal news service that keeps itself at a grass roots level - filling the gaps that have been left by retreating local papers."

The site launched a couple of months later to general indifference and shortly afterward inexplicably began to be accused by press journalists as amounting to not much more than unedited press releases with little original content.  Or at least that is what the 'Inside The M60's founders read into David Ottewell's blog at the Manchester Evening News where he had made some general criticisms of hyper-local news sites.  Even though he had not explicitly identified 'Inside The M60' as one of his targets, Ottewell eventually found he had to spell out his position:

Louise,
I’m certainly not criticising you, or your website, or the principle of hyperlocal journalism.

The day after this Barlow pursued Ottewell onto another on-line journalists blog to demand:

September saw the introduction of a rather strange Tweet-fuelled animal known as the 'Inside The M60 Daily'. Stories posted here by numerous 'contributors' (read Twitter-ers) are unadulterated, unedited pieces that often appear on many other news sites, under general headings such as Politics, Entertainment etc., the only visual difference being the CSS template the posting arrives dressed up in.

By October 2010 Barlow was disagreeing with journalists who described 'Inside The M60' as "hyperlocal".  One could not really blame them - they were getting the description from the website itself - but he went to great pains in this audio interview to explain that he no longer wanted the term 'hyperlocal' to be applied to 'Inside The M60'.  In addition to this, first Barlow and then Bolotin posted separately in the comments underneath the interview defending their use of press releases:

By December Bolotin and Barlow were again sparring with blogger The Marple Leaf because he had dared to suggest that tweets Barlow was sending from a protest march direct to the 'Inside The M60' twitter account seemed to imply he was enjoying the frisson of impending violence.  A site called 'How Do' was amongst those that reported this spat, and sure enough Bolotin was first in the comments to say:

So much for accurate reporting - do you not call first to get your facts straight?

On April 11th  this year, the website stretched the definition of 'local' beyond breaking point when it attempted to include a trip to the International Journalism Festival in Italy as content fit for their audience, solely on the basis that Barlow would be speaking there:

By early May Louise Bolotin had "resigned" from 'Inside The M60' citing "professional differences" with Barlow, although she gave Barlow her blessing to continue the site..

So it seems that whatever the original ambiguous ambitions the two co-founders of 'Inside The M60' set out to achieve, it has all been for naught.  All that can really be said for the name is that it is - thanks to its links and RSS feeds - something of a 'brand' now, but a somewhat schizophrenic one.