With belated but warm wishes of a hopefully peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year, we’re back with a bumper post looking back at 2010, including the last social media cafe in November and a look forward the resumption of CWSMC on Friday 21st January.

November CWSMC – Andy Piper, Stepping out of the online echo chamber

We had a great guest speaker Andy Piper (Twitter) who came to talk about about social media and business.  And they don’t get much bigger than Andy’s employer IBM and he took us through their learning from simple internal blogging to full blown collaboration tools over the last 5 years.  We explored the issues of using tools like Twitter on both sides of the corporate firewall and the role that guidelines play in enabling organisations to help trust employees to use social media at work. A version of his presentation is below.

We also had a chat about it afterwards in this video

2010 review

We had 10 sessions in 2010 in three venues with a wide range of guest speakers to help stimulate the usual conversation.  In April we had Christian Payne (aka Documentally) with a whistlestop tour of gadgets and experiences that have shaped his life in social media.

In June we had the team from Coventry City Council to talk about their Facebook page and their steps in social media and engagement.

With September’s CWSMC came our first birthday and Jennifer Jones’s presentation on the Olympics and social media.

Our penultimate session in October was the space for a discussion on transparency with Sylwia Presley.

A big thanks to all our speakers for their contributions, and to our venues for providing us with space,  coffees and cakes.  Most of all thanks to everyone that has come along and we hope that you have enjoyed the conversations and links that you’ve made over the past year.

CWSMC in 2011

Our first Coventry and Warwickshire Social Media Cafe  of 2011 will be on Friday 21st  January from 10am-12pm – you can sign up using EventBrite.

Our guest speaker will be BBC C&W’s Siobhan Harrison to talk about  Beyond the Blitz – their use of Twitter as if they were a newsroom in 1940, tweeting in real time and sharing news of the day leading up to the Blitz of 14 November 1940.

More information later this week, but for all the latest information follow @cwmsc on Twitter and don’t forget to sign up now on EventBrite