Have you got 38 minutes?

Are you based in Scotland or Northern Ireland?

Would you like to be friends with Channel 4 (ip) and 2000 other people?

18 months or so ago Ewan McIntosh, the then commissioning editor of Channel 4ip (hope I’ve got that title right) set up a social network for your community – the site has evolved but originally was set up to encourage businesses to create products or forge partnerships that would be worthy of investment or mentoring by Channel 4ip and or one of its partners (Scottish Enterprise +).

It now has a number of groups on the site that helps agencies and businesses promote, facilitate, discuss, rant… about issues that effect them. But more importantly allows your community to find each other and give each other work. Stuart Cosgrove at Channel 4 gave me this quote:

“..up to 2000 members mostly working in Scottish digital media, the ‘Wanted’ section has acted as an informal recruitment center for designer/devlopers, many of Scotland’s major indies have their own groups, rasied debate about the industry in a constructive way, acted as a ‘hothouse’ for digital media strategy, connected hundreds of people previously in silos in Scotland, allowed the ’spread’ of the coffee morning’ girl geek’ sub-cultures to morph and grow”.

More and more partnerships and collaborations are being created in part due to current economic conditions but also due to online social activity where businesses are learning their own strengths and weaknesses and finding connections that could make a big difference to wining new work.

Join the Community to debate, promote your business, find new staff, say hello: http://www.38minutes.co.uk

I should also point out that The Drum, Marketing Industry Network, Recommended Agency Register and any other associated sites are equally good – this just happens to be another!