This Sunday I had the day off nursing a persistent cough. For the last few weeks I have been burying my head in the snow pretending that it is not Christmas. Realising I needed an attitude shift, I decided to watch ‘White Christmas’, the old Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye film from the 50’s to put me in the holiday spirit. A long standing phobia to musicals, based on a brief but terrifying pre-teen experience at my local theatre in Stevenage means I always fast forward through the musical numbers to focus on the story. As I watched Rosemary Clooney tap dance at high speed across the stage waving a feathered fan, my mind wandered..
For those of you who have forgotten the story. Bing and Danny decide to, in five days, to put on a show, in an ailing ski lodge to improve its takings after a snow drought. In order to make it happen, find the artists, get an audience, they used their networks, TV, phones, the resources of their time to put on a show of a life time.
Strangely, the UK has had more snow than the wilderness of Connecticut, we have weeks rather than days and I am certainly no crooner. The reviews of my debut performance in ‘It happened on the way to a barn’, the alternative nativity play, will back that up. However there are some similarities. We share the same aim, we both have a challenge and as a bonus, Sam’s natural comedy timing is on a par with Danny Kaye’s.
Putting on over 50 free events, building sponsorship, partners, finding venues, PR and promotion, is not easy in such a short space or time. Trying to create something meaningful that has an impact is another common thing we share. Bing is trying to save the livelihood of his old General, the inn’s owner and we would like businesses to see how they can use social media to enable them to contribute, collaborate and create and grow from strength to strength.
Something that is different is that we have social media itself. This will enable us to collaborate with more people at every stage of creating the week long series of events.
Working collaboratively is the way we work, it is in our DNA. The reality of creating something at high speed and in a short time constraint, some things we will do well and some things we won’ t but we have put in place a series of passionate experts in their field to work with us to create the best Social Media Week possible.
We hope we have a Hollywood happy ending; the reality is our ending will not be so neat. With so many strands and individual events fuelled with knowledge hopefully, people will apply it to their work and lives,which means the ending will just be the beginning.
With that in mind, the journey is just as important as what happens before the end credits. So we would like you to see behind the scenes at SMW through a series of blog posts and tweets so you can see the wonderful, raw chaotic nature of working collaboratively.
THE END THE BEGINNING…
Photo (cc) Wisconsin Historical Images
