When we formed Agile Elephant, we had always wanted to start a regular series of monthly meetups around “what works?, what doesn’t?, what next?” in the social business space.

There are plenty of meetups that cover use of social media for marketing and promotion. We wanted something different. Something that covers the use of social tools inside the organisation, between teams and partners and customers to get work done more effectively, as well as for communication and outreach. We want to discuss topics like community building, barriers to adoption, employee engagement, new management structures and the future of the workplace. We’ll discuss social business platforms of course, but we plan to spend more time on behaviour and the culture required to make collaboration really make a difference to the bottom line for an organisation

Will McInnes started a like minded Meetup group in 2012 called Social Business Sessions London where we both have a lot of themes in common. Will has since moved to New York, and we have just taken over running that group on Meetup.com. We plan to run the meetup on the first Wednesday of each month (except for the summer holiday season) and there is a specific reason for that. We also hope to attract the champions of wikis and social software who used to attend London Wiki Wednesdays a few years ago – a group that we used to run. Their core theme is also the same as ours, and so we plan on incorporating that group too. However, we want to combine the best ingredients from each community, and continue the open spirit of all of the groups.

We are also delighted with our new partnership with Kongress Media.  They run the well-known, annual Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris as well as other Social Business events in Europe. They have offered to sponsor the beer, wine and pizza at each event. They will include our group in the promotion of their similar #e20s meetups in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Zurich which connects us directly to an active Europe wide social business network.

Our working title is the Combined Social Business Meetup, but participants at the first session will have the job (fun?) of agreeing a better name.

Here is our initial, proposed format (which will no doubt be modified by group consensus):

• Usually the first Wednesday of each month
• Start time 18:00
• Venue – Yammer’s EMEA HQ at 80 Gt Eastern Street, London (if you’d like to host a meetup please contact us)
• One themed presentation of around 20 minutes – the first one will have Jon Mell of IBM as main speaker
• Any attendee can speak on any social business related project or topic of their choice for up to 5 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questioning from the floor – you book your place on the agenda by adding a post to the Meetup.com page – agenda sequence first come first served after the main speaker
• Sales pitches are allowed, but we’ll make sure there aren’t more than 1 or 2 each week
• An unconference panel of up to 5 volunteers will take questions for 30 mins
• Kongress Media will sponsor the beer, wine and pizza and encourage everyone to promote the event using #e20s

The first event will be on 7th May. You can book your place on Meetup.com.  The main speaker at this first event is Jon Mell, Social Leader of IBM UK, and the venue will be Yammer’s EMEA HQ, 80 Gt Eastern Street, London (opposite Hoxton Hotel).  Contact us if you have suggestions or you want to find out more.

UPDATE:
The Meetup.com page for the event is now live. Go to the event page and RSVP.