round-up of what’s happening in uk social media scene

My friend Guillaume du Gardier, who is the Director Online Communications for Edelman Europe, recently asked me to contribute a new video project, PR Thoughts Web TV, he’s been planning to get started as soon as he can herd us sheep.

I don’t want to say too much, but Guillaume’s idea is to get some interesting people to contribute short videos where they talk about a specific subject, in this instance “what’s been happening in social media in your country”. Here’s what I’ve come up with from the UK:

The biggest social media story in the UK over the past few weeks has to be the acquisition, for £140m (US$280m), of Last.fm, a London based social media start-up, by American media company CBS. The coolest feature of last.fm, at least for me, is that it keeps track of what I’ve been listening to in my itunes library and on my ipod and uses this data to recommend other tracks I might like and to create a “radio station” all my own. There are also social networking tools that, although I haven’t had time to really explore them, help people build networks of friends around the music they listen to.

The Blogs and Social Media Forum 2, chaired by Euan Semple, took place yesterday at the Grosvenor Square Marriot in London. Many of the usual speakers stood before an audience dominated not by bloggers and social software types, but primarily by people in suits from charities, institutions and corporations that are starting to realise that they too need to get this stuff. The highlights for me were presentations by Ben Edwards (publisher of the Economist) [my video], Lee Bryant (Headshift) [my post]and Simon Phipps [my video] who spoke about blogging at Sun Microsystems.

As we sat in London, another “story” broke from the World Editors Forum in Captown with MediaGuardian was running with the leader “Poke Richard Sambrook on Facebook” – Sambrook being the BBC’s Director of Global News. The story, based on this blog post on The Guardian’s Organ Grinder was, of course, much ado about nothing but caused enough of a stir that Sambrook felt the need to explain on the BBC News Editors Blog.

Which leads us to the final social media story of the UK over the past few weeks – the media, and everyone else, seems to have rather suddenly discovered facebook. It’s perhaps slightly contentious to suggest, but it seems to me that much of the sudden interest can be traced back to the way that news and media organisations used facebook as a source of information and quotes in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre. In the last week I’ve had an almost unmanageable stream of friend requests, discussion threads, and pokes from BBC colleagues – last time I looked there were over 10,500 of us signed up to the BBC Network on Facebook – and other friends and contacts. And yes, one of those is the previously mentioned Richard Sambrook.

I’ll have that video over to you soon Guillaume

Here’s an unedited preview for those who managed to read this far ;-)

Update: Guillaume has now posted the first episode of PR Thoughts Life, which includes my video as well as one from Yann Motte, CEO of WebJam, and Matthew Grossman, Head of Digital Entertainment Practice at Edelman Paris.