This time we have recorded our session on Google+, so you can watch it yourself. It’s an experiment so please disregard the video quality as currently Google+ does not allow direct upload to YouTube. Our friends, Michael Tucker has to live-stream it, download it and upload it to YouTube. Michael, thank you for doing it for us! It’s great to have a recording of the event and maybe encourage others to use the medium too? Enjoy and join us on the 17th of February for the next event!

Our Christmas Google+ hangout was great! We had amazing guest who educated us on the best practices of “hanging out” and we ended up educating BBC Arabic on this new tool. As always, our virtual event was full of happy surprises and inspired some of us to use the hangouts even more often.

We will be hosting our next event on the 13th of January so join us then, but before you do, read our suggested Rules of Google+ Hangout:

1st Rule: You join, contribute to and talk about Google+ Hangout.

2nd Rule: You do not talk badly about Google+.

3rd Rule: If others are talking when you are joining in you do not disturb, you introduce yourself in the chat window.

4th Rule: Only short hallo or goodbye

5th Rule: One topic at a time. Other topics, questions and urls in the chat window.

6th Rule: No background noise (mute yourself), no muting of people who are talking.

7th Rule: Google+ Hangouts go on as long as they want to – join in or leave any time.

8th Rule: If this is your first time at a Google+ Hangout you have to have audio and video to show who you are.

by Sylwia Presley as parodied from The Rules of Fight Club.

It was a very interesting experience to move our Voice Social Media Breakfasts from Tangler (chat service) to Google+ Hangout. I will try to write up my impressions on this new format and I hope that other participants with join me in sharing their feedback too.

First of all I am extremely grateful to all participants for their commitment to making this event happen! It is not easy to find two hours of your time, the technology is really new and we did not know what to expect, some of us were ill, some joined in from offices or public locations! Yet we made it happen and I personally think it was a great new experience, inspiration to some of us!

We have talked about 17th Birthday of UKFundraising and learned few insights about the website itself. We have shared tips on celebrating Birthday of a website. We talked about blogger engagement from many angles. We have shared few case studies of particular blogger engagement based digital campaigns. We had bloggers talking about their experiences in paid and free engagement rewarded with unique experiences. I believe that our general conclusion was that this area is yet to be clarified on policy level (what is transparent blogger engagement and how does it differ from region to region?). There are many types of blogger engagement programmes but in any case brand or organisation planning it has to prepare really well for it! And because it might be a bit time consuming we need to find the ways to justify the effort internally. We need to share good and bad case studies to be able to tap into this area of digital work. We do have some great speakers (@AJLeon for example) who advocate blogger engagement for us, and we need more of them! We also need to try smaller campaigns, even internally, to test the effort and the results.

Next step for #VSMB is going to be to embrace this new format and see how we can develop it into even better virtual event. So here is what I think was…

Good:

• Positive attitude of attendees: interest in new technology, willingness to experiment and embrace innovation, determination to connect with others and share ideas – it is exactly what the Voice Social Media Breakfast is about! Staying positive, open to the new, sharing time, ideas and individual experiences in order to learn from each other, to inspire each other. Please do not think we are fooling around though! Each of our attendees has great potential to inspire others for specific solutions or creative ideas. The very experience of Google+ Hangout has got us thinking about using it for our daily work or personal projects;
• Chat as back channel of communication – this has organically worked on Tangler and now too proved a great tool for those who could not speak up in a particular time of the event, had more questions to previous speakers or simply wanted to add their thoughts. It’s also a brilliant channel for moderators to manage the event, welcome new comers, provide technical support if needed etc. I think that one person can handle this type of moderation but having two people (myself and Nick) made a huge difference!
• Openness leading to variety of attendees – we had our core, invited speakers and usual friends of #VSMB, but we were also happy to see newcomers! I guess moderators of similar events will always have to measure what is more important – flow of the event as opposed to openness. For us it is crucial to open communication between nonprofits, brands and individuals so are glad to see people joining in, even if they just want to listen.
• Video as opposed to textual content – I do not think I need to explain this, yet it’s always worth mentioning that video chat is much more effective than textual conversations. It might be more difficult to moderate, yes, but the value of face-to-face human interactions is unmeasurable! I think as we move forward we will learn to host this event more effectively and our attendees too will get used to the format, but I personally like the idea of seeing our speakers in their own environment (even if it’s a coffee shop;)). I think it will always be a question of balance between the core conversation, the value of shared insights and human relationships and the element of the unexpected, unpredicted, funny and human. Maybe those unplanned situations are slightly distracting, but they are memorable and that is exactly what makes them genuine.

Still to work on:

• Technical issues – we have tested Google+ hangout with few attendees here at Voice few times, yet it is really hard to predict how this technology will perform with larger group, so we might have to learn as we go. there are few things we can prepare: ensure each participant has a good, stable connection; prepare small G+ Hangout etiquette (muting your speakers, moving additional questions to chat window, managing interruptions or accidental viewers, tips for moderators), explain the nature of the event in advance to all participants.
• Format – We managed to touch upon all planned points of our agenda and still leave a lot of space for introductions, technical issues, additional points and good links. Now I would like to know how to make the core discussion easier to manage. We had a suggestion of 30min-1hr-30min format to allow 1 hrs for only few speakers to lead the conversations. We will try it out in December, but I would like to know what others think of it.
• Integration in other channels – we would like to make it easier for you to share the event, record it or look at embedding it in your sites if you wish to do so.
• Maintaining relationships – we already have a LinkedIn group and now a new Google+ Circle (you can simply grab it and drag it to your circles from here). We also have the joint event website over at www.voicetweetup.com to give us all a chance to meet off-line.

If there is anything else, please let us know!

With all this in mind we would like to invite you to the next Voice Social Media Breakfast planned for 14th of December with the following agenda: