What does Manchester’s Social Media Cafe have in common with the Molly Fish?  They both have a gestation period of about a month!  Yes, after a surprisingly short amount of time in the making the event affectionately known as #smc_mcr was born last night.  For more about how it came together take a look at my previous posts here and here.

While the Google Group for the Cafe now has over 150 members, we were honestly only expecting about 30-40 people to bother to turn up on a cold and windy November evening.  How wrong we were!  At its busiest point there were about 80 people there.  Attendees came from varying backgrounds – PR, journalism and tech startups seemed to be the main ones but there quite a few “just interested” types too so it was a good mix.

The “main event” for the first meeting was a panel discussion around that “Is Blogging Dead” meme from a couple of weeks back.  Craig McGinty, Chi-chi Ekweozor and I, chaired by Sarah Hartley of the Manchester Evening News debated the current state of blogging and there were some great questions from the crowd, bringing up subjects as diverse as best practice for corporate blogging to the apparent shunning of Livejournal by the blogosphere.

To be honest, it all went by in a bit of a blur for me and so I can’t really offer an objective view on the debate but there were a variety of responses from the crowd via Twitter using the hashtag #smc_mcr .  Michael Cooper and Simon Wheatley in particular offered some great live commentary of the debate as it happened.  There will be a big screen displaying hashtagged tweets at the next event to allow for a more interactive event.

The best bit of the night for me was the networking.  Events like this are a great opportunity to informally chat with all sorts of interesting people.  I had conversations about topics as diverse as creative ways to arrange screenings of classic films, the pro-TIF PR blitz in Manchester to the psychology behind voting methods in TV cookery programmes!

I did some live video streaming to Qik last night which is available here, here, here, here and here.  Sarah live streamed some of the debate on Bambuser here and here.  If you live in the Manchester area in the North West of England why not come along to the next event?  Join the Google Group for more information as it’s announced.