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How do you convert a piece of social media-driven awareness raising to a real-life, bodies on the ground, event? The answer is this: with a certain amount of difficulty.  

But given that was the challenge Manchester-based web company, Cahoona, teamed up with events agency, Ear to the Ground, to put Cutting Room Square - a redeveloped part of city district, Ancoats - on the map.

As they described at last night’s Social Media Cafe Manchester meeting at the BBC, (#smc_mcr) with no budget for big names or attractions to stimulate interest in the place, the plan hatched was to create a user-generated event - The Cutting Room Experiment - in which the public became the curators, participants and audience for it.

Using social media channels including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others, the public was encouraged to take ownership of the ideas while promoting them to their online social connections. Using the campaign website as a destination, the activity generated more than 100 ideas and attracted 10,000 unique visitors in 10 weeks. The Facebook group amassed more than 500 members - not bad for a highly niche area of interest.

And the ideas themselves culminated in a live event, involving activites such as the “world’s smallest festival” (comprising three girls, a busker and a tent), a clothes swapping event and Space Hopper race.

Cutting Room Experiment: Space Hopper Race from Ben Holden on Vimeo.

The team hit its various targets for online engagement and turnout on the day - as well as generating £100k in media coverage. But, as David Norris of Ear to the Ground said: “It’s hard to turn a devoted online audience into vibrant offline one”.

Though some questioned the validity of using global social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote a highly localised event, the results suggest that global can be local too, especially as people in the same geographical area are often already talking to each other across the same social media platforms.

And how can you argue with a Space Hopper race - as long as the Health and Safety Executive isn’t watching.

As a - primarily - “social media for business” resource, PR Media Blog was transported to a parallel universe at last night’s Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr).

The brave new online worlds of artistic endeavour shared by Heather Corcoran, curator of Liverpool’s media arts centre, FACT, seemed a heady mix of Heath Robinson and the crazy cartoon inventor, Clunk, in “Dastardly and Mutley”.

The collection of “innovation communities” included artists’ collective, Dorkbot describing itself, worryingly, as ”people doing strange things with electricity”,  while Node London - an “independent net art collective, exploring new creative territories that straddle between the virtual and the real” was an experiment in open working where nobody was in charge and the result was, according to Corcoran (pictured below), a “crazy nightmare that happened only once”.

But behind the art-for-art’s-sake lunacy was an interesting concept of loosely associated groups of people working together - and blending online and offline activity - to share knowledge and create something new. An example of this is the School of Everything where those wanting to learn and those wanting to teach can find one another.

So, an interesting and unexpected tangent for the #smc_mcr. But does this mean that it’s now “sexy to be a geek”, as somebody mused? Think “Bill Gates” before you answer that one.