In September 2009, I decided to combine an interest in social media and business with the goal of creating and developing an online community of people interested in utilising social tools within their business and providing local events where this community can meet up.

The key focus of the community was to share knowledge and meet one another. Kukutana means “to meet one another” in swahili, so it seemed appropriate to name the new community kukutana.

As the key focus of the community was the use of and sharing knowledge about social tools, I set my self the task of creating a new online brand to support the community using ONLY online social communication channels:

• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Kukutana community website, blog and discussion forums and used NING to host this
• Email to launch and provide updates

The primary goal was not to use any offline communication tools to create and grow the community.

 

The sessions were initially held in Twickenham on a Friday morning, after a couple of months these were moved to monthly and the format of the sessions were:

• Coffee and networking for15-20 mins
• Introduction to the topic of the day and guest speaker
• Guest speaker gives a 30 minute presentation
• Group discussion for 30-60 mins
• Coffee and networking

Following requests to run sessions in central London, JWT, allowed us to run our central london sessions in their offices in April and June 2010.  Both sessions were well attended, with 55 and 40 attendees respectively.

Kukutana was a great experience and I believe a successful and fun experiment, however keping it going was taking up a lot of my time and I had to choose between client commitments and developing kukutana further, my clients won.