The event will be held at the Coach & Horses just a few blocks over towards Oxford St.

1 Great Marlborough Street, Soho, London, W1F 7HG

Sorry for the last minute change!

For those who aren’t in the know, LondonBloggers.net is for bloggers in London who want to meet/hang out/network with other bloggers. They’re fun little social occasions and often attract some great brands as sponsors.

The events were conceived by and run by Andy Bargery AKA Marketing Blagger. You can find out all about him here.

Cheers Andy!

First off it seems that this time around Red Nose Day has it’s own Twitter stream www.twitter.com/rednoseday2009

Secondly we spotted this interesting blog called TwitterTitters which is

A collection of new comedy writing to be published on Lulu to raise money for Comic Relief. Calls for submissions, publicity and planning are all being done on Twitter.

What other social media efforts are out there around this fundraising event?

tv, the web, the papers. smoke in the hills. it all seems so *distant*. until u see ure first burned out car and wonder if the driver made it out alive Source: Twitpic

I wanted to post something in the wake of yesterday’s devastating Australian bushfires now dubbed ‘Black Saturday’ although today the fires are still raging and the death toll rising.

I’ve been amazed again at Social Media’s role around a disaster event. This is not virtual rubbernecking. This is people connecting and sharing information and stories in a way I have found incredibly profound. As always the online community has shown tremendous power to rally round a cause and drive positive action, such as donating to the Red Cross appeal.

I for one wouldn’t have caught up on the situation in the state of Victoria until at least Monday morning when delving back into mainstream media after the weekend. And this unofficial coverage of the event has felt highly personalised – strongly influencing me to donate in a way that, I confess, I may not have otherwise. [The tweets of London based Melbourn-ite @joannajacobs had a big impact on me.]

One woman donation drive

Following usual online protocol, the hashtag #bushfires is being used alongside #VICfires. This enables the collation of comments, images, videos and information across the web; faster and more accurate than any other mainstream media outlet could possibly compete with?

There are a lot of critics of citizen journalism out there but  isn’t there something powerful about how people can talk directly to each other requesting highly specific news?

Meanwhile one TV network’s coverage received the below response:

Traditional Media = serious journalism?

Does anyone else have some interesting stories around the Victoria fires and online coverage?

Sophie Cox

The other week I nosed through the guest list and became curious about new community Worldeka attending. Well, the lovely Sophie Cox got in touch to tell us more. I suggest, if you’re a PR, you track her down at the event and say hi.

I’ve also spotted invite codes on Techcrunch if you’re keen to try it out and give them feedback.

Ed: What is Worldeka?

Ed: Why did you create this platform?

SC: Our mission is to activate. Harnessing progressive online technologies we enable users to create public facing profiles, generate individual media banks and utilize organisational tools to start and manage corporal projects.

We believe the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. The potential for these projects is awesome and integral to Worldeka’s objectives. Information, data and resources can be selectively shared with ease, allowing for fast idea exchange, event organisation and emergency relief. Hundreds of charities working together to alleviate AIDS in Africa or two small organisations putting on a  fundraising concert in London – We feel all would gain from our tools.

Ed: How does it work?

SC: We aspire to inspire with taggable videos, articles and links dugg by our community. All profiles are tagable and searchable by themes and interests allowing you to connect with like-minded people. Furthermore we have created “Collaborate With” buttons, which allow charities to connect across organisational boundaries to work together on shared projects.

Ed: Who can use Worldeka?

SC: For PR agencies working with small charities its a simple way of getting them a dynamic, content driven, easy to use web presence or extension to their existing presence, with video, pictures, discussion boards and RSS feeds etc. 

Furthermore charities can use the project management tools to promote specific messages, donation drives and campaigns plus work on collaborative projects or funding drives with connected charities.

I really feel Worldeka could be a great resource for PR companies to set up for their clients as it can add value to their brand proposition without costing the PR agency any money.

Ed: Sounds awesome. Congratulations and the best of luck!

[www.worldeka.com]

The results

Well you are… and then again half of you aren’t. You may have noticed in the sidebar our first poll asking PRs how confident they felt approaching bloggers. The results were pretty split between those who felt a little nervous and the rest having made some good contacts.

Well, hopefully by the end of the event you’ll have met some lovely bloggers and realised that they’re not so scary after all I’m relieved to see that no one was still scratching their heads unfamiliar with the term “blogger”. Phew!

To see bloggers attending check out the sign-up page.

The philosophy behind social media is ideal for our sector, allowing organisations to create and tap into communities of shared ideas and values.  At Fifth Estate, we’re keen to keep members up to speed on how best to work with it as part of a strategic communications strategy.

Worldeka

Wow!We’ve had a superb response from PRs and bloggers signing up to come to the event. Everyone is being so positive and we’ve even had a few requests from non-locals to make sure we Tweet it. [Darika: Any volunteers? As I'll be speaking for some of it]

Please do keep adding your names to the list if you haven’t already.  The number of spaces are just a guide for now and we want to accommodate as many as we can on the night. Oh, and don’t forget to provide contact details or links to you online.

I’m curious to meet the guys from Worldeka which is currently in Private Beta. Are you going to be handing out invites guys?

It’s always a bit daunting when you see your name go out with “specialist” attached to a topic and even more so if that topic is Web 2.0.

Just the other day I had a problem with this very blog and, after consulting a specialist, it turned out to be operator error, in other words I’d accidentally hit the wrong button and broken it.

Learning all the intricacies of building and running a blog will be a process of years for me and that’s just one part of this whole Web 2.0 world. So stretches a whole new media frontier for PR to explore . We know now that how life will be when we get to the end of that vast territory is not the same as the places we inhabit now.

The idea of this event is not just to tell PRs about the potential riches and dangers they may encounter along the way but to introduce them to some Social Media natives in order to find out how to start speaking their language.

Aside from my regular work, I’ve spent some time in the past year talking with not-for-profits about the enormous potential to maximise usage of Social Media and of course I think it’s an essential channel for any PR to complement their communications strategy.

I’ll be kicking the event off talking about how we can all communicate and work together a little better and also facilitating some discussion on whether the not-for-profit sector should be in the Social Media world [yes, yes, yes] and how exactly that should be approached.

Pretty much everything you need to know about me and my work can be found online:

• Grapevine Consulting
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

There’s now a date, time, and location for the Fifth Sector Blogging & Networking event in February. We’ve been lucky enough to book the Coach and Horses in Soho.

If you’re a blogger who regularly attends Social Media events in London, then the Coach should be a familiar haunt. If you’re a PR new to all this then you may be interested to know that a whole host of groups have met at some stage at this lovely little pub; London Bloggers Meetup and Tuttle to name a few favourites.

Time: 6.30-10.00pm
Venue: The Coach & Horses, 29 Greek St, Soho, London, W1V 5LL

Sign up here