A few weeks back, I was the guest speaker at the inaugural launch of Nottingham Girl Geek Dinners, part of a worldwide network of local events bringing together women technologists for chat, networking and – importantly – dinner. As a general rule I don’t like segregation in networks but in the high tech sector there’s definitely a need to provide alternative places and spaces for discussion as invariably there’s usually one one women or two in the room. I found the Nottingham Girl Geek group – a dozen or so working in broad fields including web design, PR, programming, usability, open source and education – to be friendly and overall welcoming – really diverse chats I don’t usually have at networks focused on sharing, learning and even occasionally knitting.

My presentation was about social media for business – a similar theme to some recent speaking gigs for DMEX in the North West but this time with a bit of girl geek and historic slant. Here’s the presentation.

I don’t really see myself as a social media evangelist – I’ve been too long in the web industries for that kind of bandwagon-jumping, back since the first dotcom wave and my days in the music biz when the rage was guerrilla marketing, us record exec minions seeded chatrooms, assuming aliases of teen skateboarders, tweenies and rock dads to sell the latest CD (yes kids, people still bought CDs then).

Rather I see social media as a new name for an old thing – like chat boards, newsgroups or forums – it’s just a newer more technologically sophisticated means of using digital tools to communicate – socially or for business. Online video and audio – as eulogised by @documentally et al – is yet another exciting means of creating many direct one-to-one and one-to-many interactions. Although the technology may not save the world itself, the accelerated serendipity and increase in openness to communication (as much a society as technology phenomena)helps us all to address our own personal, social and business goals. This is perhaps as closely related to the rise in the mobile phone as much as the growth in broadband. This can include political campaigning (like the MPs expenses Facebook campaign), creating your own news radar and bypassing corporation (see the decline in newspapers) and marketing a local micro-brand internationally.

But the interesting dinner discussion we ladies had was about how social media hasn’t so much changed everything as speeded it up. In the old days contacting A meant knowing B. Email made finding out who and where was easy (eliciting a response though, now, harder than ever). Social media means those who choose are open to conversations and ideas more readily and easily than before. Twitter and Facebook create small interaction which are less formal than a direct business contact by phone, letter or email. If you play it right, this small talk can more readily lead to medium talk (then to business). But don’t mistake small-talk for actual business or social networking replacing marketing (or even work).

Creating your own support network is quick and easy; seeking answers to questions, finding a supplier or partner more rapid and robust than ever. Social media shortens and accelerates the gaps between people and links up opportunities. Sometimes it fills the gaps to with meaningless twitter and chat, so we need mechanisms for filter this out (not an information overload but a filter failure) which is the next big challenge.

Girl Geeks dinner nottingham

Thanks to Elsa Bartley (find her on Twitter as @marmaladegirl) for organising it all. Here’s a photo from the night c/o PaintedGhost – see the Nottingham Girl Geeks Dinners website for more photos and details of next event on 3^rd August. See you there!