Last night, I gave a short presentation to a CIDS meeting in Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK, on social media management. As an experiment, I asked the audience of 50 smaller businesses and advisors to stand up and, as I called out various social media platforms and they confirmed that they had registered an account, they were invited to sit down.
50% of the audience sat down after I mentioned Facebook, 10% more after MySpace and finally there were five hardliners left standing who avoided any online social or business contact. However, by the end of the evening, I had quite a few enquiries about the various social media brands and how they could help a small business to market themselves.
CIDS is Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service, a publicly-funded organisation to help the ‘original modern city’ — Manchester — further develop a thriving creative hub. The BBC is in the process of moving many of its operations to Salford Quays, dubbed ‘Media City’.
The event was held in Broadstone Mill, a giant Victorian mill, which, with two other neighbouring monoliths, is being turned into a creative services incubator and a knowledge village with funding from UMIC, the University of Manchester Incubator Company. The village consists of a number of attractive small business studios and centralised services to help development.
Other speakers covered video production, photography and producing artwork for printing from Microsoft’s Publisher.
Although Juice is concentrating on delivering email marketing and helping medium-to-large organisations manage and publish blogs integrated into their websites, I gave the audience a glimpse of Ackura PressRoom, an automated way of creating Social Media Press Releases and delivering them not only to social media but also to news aggregators, journalists and stakeholders.
Just nine months after the opening of the Broadstone Knowledge Mill incubator programme, one of its innovative tenants has already caught the attention of international superstar George Michael. I-Pix, a pioneering LED lighting technology business, had its Satellite lighting technology selected for the UK leg of George’s recent tour and the technology has also been used by other bands including Keane and The Beautiful South as well as the BBC.
