Manchester Twestival 2010

Despite the rather grandiose title, this blog post is a rather short review of last night’s scintillating Manchester Twestival event.

I’d been really looking forward to it as last year I wasn’t able to make the very first MancTwester, despite helping out behind the scenes in the run up to it and providing items for the charity auction because I had to fly out to Nigeria for my gran’s funeral.

I heard great things about MancTwester Twestival 2009 on my return and the funds raised for charity:water, the charity that particular event was in aid of speaks volumes of how successful it was.

Manchester Twestival 2009 raised £3500 on the night, part of the £174,899 ($250,000) raised for charity:water through the 200+ simultaneous fundraising events that took place around the world on February 12, 2009.

Twestival has inspired a number of social media powered fund-raising ideas not least 7 Wonders in 7 Days, the epic round-the-world charity fundraising project I’m involved in that aims to raise £777,000 for 7 charities through a transatlantic dash to see the new 7 wonders of the world in 7 days, with 7 strangers in tow!

I’ll share more on the exciting developments with 7 Wonders in 7 Days in another blog post.  You can follow mine and the 7 charities plans by following the Twitter account or Facebook page.

Back to MancTwester 2010.

This year’s Manchester Twestival set out to be bigger than last year’s.  From current reports, it was, beating the total raised in 2009 by over £500 pounds.

All funds raised go to Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organisation dedicated to reducing suffering and ending extreme poverty

It was a top night.  The MancTwester charity auction, presented by Byron Evans of the sadly missed ‘TV channel for Manchester’ Channel M and featuring an incredible list of items donated by the Manchester community made for much conviviality.

I’m still miffed I missed out on the tickets to the fabulous FuturEverything conference in May.

Here come a couple of short videos from the event.

The first is a short clip of the Paper Aeroplane Flight Off, sponsored by event sponsors bmibaby, Manchester Airport and KMP Digitata.

The other is a short clip of the live music on the night.  Please name the band if you can… Can’t remember what they were called.  Cheers!

Katie Moffat, event organiser tells me that the band were called Rook and Ravens.

Where you there? What did you think?

Excitement is building ahead of next month’s Social Media Surgery.

The theme of the popular monthly informal networking event that attempts to help Manchester businesses embrace the social media revolution in order to grow their company is ‘Is Twitter any good for marketing’.

Taking place on the second Tuesday of every month at Innospace (Manchester Metropolitan University’s business incubator) on Chorlton Street between 5-7.30pm, Manchester Social Media Surgery events offer real life advice and case studies from an experienced panel of digital and social media marketers who discuss social media projects and issues presented by the audience.

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Image Credit: thatsoftwareguy.com

This month sees the launch of Real Fresh TV’s Social Media Events Guide.

In the last week of every month, we will be bringing you a roundup of upcoming events, seminars and conferences focused on social media and the web taking place in the region.

Want to add your event to the list?

Contact us at least one month before your event and we’ll publicise it!  Call it a media partnership in the making… (more…)

Book on the next Social Media Starter Course and get 50% off the Learning Social Media by Doing Course

Image credit: Rob Watling on Flickr

Following on from last week’s successful Introduction to Social Media for Media Professionals course, I’d like to extend an invitation to businesses that need support in using social media to win new customers and achieve business goals.

Read on if you interested in finding out how to use Twitter and Facebook constructively to grow your business network and engage with pre-qualified new clients.

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Social Media Process v 1.0

Yesterday I had the pleasure of running an Introduction to Social Media for Media Professionals training course at One Central Park, Manchester.

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Contact Theatre Manchester's Contacting the World 2010 - A pioneering, international theatre exchange project, supercharged by social media

Just a quick blog post to share a couple of YouTube videos created at Contact Theatre Manchester’s Contacting the World 2010 launch late last month.

I’ve previously written about managing the digital and social media strategy for Contact Theatre on their biennial international theatre exchange festival for young people aged 15-25.

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Friday’s blog post suggesting that social media training should be provided by web design and development companies seems to have struck a nerve on LinkedIn.

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Image Credit: OxfordTechnical

The rather provocative title comes from recent experience on an interesting project with a brilliant new client.

Contact Theatre, Manchester’s home for explosive new theatre run a biennial international theatre exchange programme called Contacting the World.

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Here come my notes from Tuesday’s Social Media Cafe Manchester event at the BBC’s offices on Oxford Road.

I’ve been a big fan of Social Media Cafe Manchester since being invited to be on the ‘panel of bloggers’ at the very first event in November 2008.  Whenever I can I try to blog about each ‘#smc_mcr’ I attend, after the event.

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T-shirt: Mark Wigan creation on sale at NOISE Lab

I really enjoyed last Thursday’s launch of the NOISE Lab, a ‘guerilla arts pop up store’ nestled opposite the Orange Shop and next to Boots the Chemists right on the Great Manchester High Street aka Market Street.

Situated in the former Shelly’s footwear outlet, next to Schuh and in prime shopping centre real estate, this incredibly bold 6 month long ‘experiment’ is born out of the national NOISEFestival.com project, an online community where young creatives in film, music, visual arts and many other creative disciplines develop and showcase their (first, in many cases) online portfolio.

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