The Future of Voice @ Tuttle

Last week’s Tuttle actually felt a little bit like work for me and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s hard to consider anything work when you’re sat in a pub at 10am. But it’s certainly become a place where people now turn up to find me - rather than mess around with a meeting or a tedious number of emails we just grab a coffee, nip out onto the balcony if we need privacy… and plot.

By the time 1pm rolled along and we were shifting tables ready for the Future of Voice session I’d already got quite a bit of work under my belt. Which was a good thing as it turned out because the Spinvox hosted event pushed whatever I had planned for the rest of the day right out of my head.

You can check out Spinvox here, but that isn’t quite the point and the chaps themselves were gracious enough to remind us that the subject matter went far beyond individual companies. But what Spinvox do very well, I think, is make voice visible again. And it was a riveting round table session that followed as we tried to nail down exactly what this meant and where we are heading.

Like the previous QR code lunch that we bolted onto the Tuttle a few months ago we had quite a range of people sticking around for this. Judging from the conversations that followed on Twitter there’s quite a demand for more of this sort of thing and indeed a follow up session on this particular subject.

If you have an idea of a topic that would make for an interesting early afternoon session then please let us know. We’re not a focus group, but we do enjoy talking a lot and we’re pretty good at the listening part too…

Gaining influence

The lovely Matthew Yeomans popped down to the café on Friday and seemed to enjoy himself. So much so that he’s made a generous offer for Tuttle Club members of reduced price tickets to Social Media Influence in London on 4th June (the conference that in previous years has been Blogging4Business ) This year’s conference blog is here.

So if you’d like to go along for just £195+VAT (a significant reduction on the headline delegate rate) let me know and I’ll vouch for you and point you in the right direction.

First Tuttle Breakfast

We gathered at OneAlfredPlace this morning for coffee, tea, juice and pastries and lots and lots of conversation. Thanks very much to Steve Moore for making the introduction and to Rob Shreeve for making us so welcome. If anyone’s interested in joining OneAlfredPlace, please let me know and I’ll pass on the details - as it’s been hinted to me that we might secure a small discount if people sign as a result of today. sorry, completely my misunderstanding and misperception - that’s not on the cards after all, but don’t let that stop you signing up

My regret with it was that I didn’t actually get to take part in any of the larger conversations, though I was grateful to meet a bunch of new people face to face too. I’d love it if people could say something either on the wiki or their own blogs about what they talked about, if only for me to find out

Thanks very much to Dan and Rob for doing last-minute impromptu provocations and I’m sorry (though secretly glad) that I didn’t let them know how exposing that role was going to be beforehand.

From memory I think we had conversations about:
Building a list of interesting folk to talk to BERR (Jane O’Loughlin)
Combining relentless creativity with social media (Steve Lawson)
Turning your passion into something that makes money (Pippa Crawford & Dan McQuillan)
Finding new clients online (Rebecca Caroe)
Business podcasting (Mike O’Hara)
Organisation Lite (David Wilcox & Jemima Gibbons)

but there were lots of little seedling conversations in between and I’m glad to say, a reasonable amount of use of the “law of two feet”.

Just the first - not bad at all, by my “first post always sucks” benchmark

Getting out of first gear

The Friday morning meetups are proving our concept beautifully - at our busiest we had a turnover of around 50 people through the morning - there is a solid core of regulars emerging, those who can’t make it every week are still up for helping however they can and there are *still* new people coming in through the doors and going “Oh, this is really good!”

We’ve had some great sponsors - thank you to Qype, Sleepydog and Adify so far. If you want to help support this gang of brilliant funsters , let me know.

I’d like to move things forward towards the bigger vision of having a permanent place where we can socialise, work and learn. I think we have a great opportunity here to walk the talk of “organising without organisations” and so in order to make sure that the thinking and working goes on outside of just my head and the handful of people I’m able to have one-to-one conversations with, I’ve seeded a few pages on the wiki under the heading of

THINGS TO DO

What’s there is very rough but it’s a start - feel free to add, amend, or completely disagree with anything you find there. If you don’t feel comfortable *editing* stuff in the wiki or you want to ask
questions, or discuss something without changing the wiki then the mailgroup is for that too or you can leave comments or tweet about it or do something in Facebook or upload a presentation to slideshare or whatever you want to do….

It would be great though if you at least take a look though and invite others in to help too.

One Picture = Two Words

As snapped by Christian on Good Friday morning.

I find that all the Tuttle Clubbers I chat to over coffee and toast do interesting things with their time, but please take a few minutes to check out what Christian was up to in Jordan recently.

The Long Good Friday Café

The Good Friday meeting of the Tuttle Club is formally over, but as usual it’s also carrying on. Except that normally it carries on in twitter and seesmic but today it’s happening in some bars and restaurants. Mike said to me at the end that it was his favourite one so far, just before disappearing with assorted folk to have lunch together. Last week, I wasn’t sure whether it was even going to happen, it being a state and church sanctioned holiday. But as usual, the opposite of what I expected actually happened and loads of people came who haven’t been able to come before because they are at work. Welcome to the new people (to the Coach & Horses anyway) Christian, Simon, Jenny, Dominic, Alan, Jo and Emma.

I just tweeted that tuttle had killed twitter today. Exaggeration to make a point and draw attention to myself as usual. But there is something in this - it’s an open, social gathering where loads of interesting conversations go on, but people don’t twitter about it while it’s going on in the same way that they do at just about every other huddling occasion for social media folk. There is no backchannel even though it’s packed with the sort of people who, when they attend other events, are itching to be heard. Interesting…. very interesting.

Brought to you in association with…

This week’s lovely sponsors are Sleepydog Ltd who as well as creating Buzz! - “a BAFTA® Award-winning video game that brought the TV quiz show to the PlayStation” are headed up by Toby Moores (he’s @sleepydog on twitter).

I first met Toby at his Creative Coffee Club in London and we’re hoping to do some cross-fertilisation between us, the CCC and the community of MobileMondays.

So be specially nice to Toby tomorrow while you’re munching and slurping.

Creeping towards incorporation

Sorry I’ve gone a bit quiet on this one, but I wanted to let those people who dug deep for our incorporation fund know what’s happened with the cash and where we are with it all.

Firstly it’s becoming more and more important that we have a separate legal entity to deal with the simple stuff of collecting money and distributing it - we have more companies seeing the value in what we’re doing and asking about sponsorship opportunities and other ways that they can help - I’d also like to establish us as a club with members, rather than a vague bunch of people who come and have coffee with me every Friday.

On to the numbers - we collected £95.98 in cash on 7th March. Since then, another £125 has come in through paypal donations. So with over £200 we should be easily able to cover the costs of incorporating and I will deal with that once the Bank Holiday hoo-hah is over.

Tomorrow we’re looking like about 20 people which is great for a holiday weekend.

If you still haven’t been yet, it would be lovely to see you soon.

Competition time

The Tuttle Club is as much about what you can do for other people as it is about what you can get out of it yourself (My JFK impersonation always comes out more like Mayor Quimby so I won’t bother).

So it’s time to give a hand to those who’ve helped us out. Our first sponsor, Qype, is running a competition for those who’ve been along to a Social Media Cafe to write a review on their site of our hosts Norman’s Coach & Horses. All you have to do is sign-in on Qype (what d’you mean you haven’t got an account already???) and write an honest review of the pub from your point of view. The best one will win Dinner for 4 at the esteemed hostelry itself and £50 behind the bar for you and your mates but you have to get something in by the end of this month, so sharpen your pencils and get going.

In praise of Harry

Although Lloyd explains why we call ourselves The Tuttle Club here, I thought it was worth highlighting this part:

Harry’s spirit is summed up when the hero, Sam Lowry asks Harry about his broken-down, over-engineered, bodged together heating system. Sam says “Can you fix it?” “No,” says Harry, “but I can *bypass* it”. And that’s what I see again and again among this band of misfit, oddball geniuses who I bump into around the web and it’s physical outcroppings, many of whom I now call “friend” and not just in a FaceBook kind of way.

Although we’re not all freedom fighting freelance heating engineers we are good at bypassing the occasional bodge. Harry is nice role model to have in this respect and even Pauline Kael, who wasn’t won over by Gilliam’s Brazil as a whole, was impressed by his qualities:

De Niro’s role is even smaller - no more than a cameo - but, all revved up and chomping on a cigar, he’s a prankster daredevil, a comic strip hero, high-spirited and the life of the party. He even has a healthy color. Tuttle repairs heating systems illicitly (he doesn’t have a license)and when he’s in danger of being caught he slides down a rope as if her were jet-propelled, dropping from the top of an astoundingly tall skyscraper to street level in the blink of an eye. (Tuttle must be the first kinetic Underground Man in movies.)

I love that she picks up on his ability to move between levels so quickly. It’s pure eye candy in the movie, but also represents that zip-line to clarity that so many of us are trying to get a hold of.

He also appeals to those of us that quite fancy wearing balaclavas and corsets from time to time too…