This will be the second year that Birmingham City Council have sponsored the Online Campaign award which will be decided by public vote again this year. This award recognises an “individual or group that has used social media tools to make a difference” and with that description I figure that we ought to have a whole heap of hopefuls vying for the prize.
Another successful event organised by Digital Birmingham saw 50 local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) explore how using social media and web 2.0 could help them stimulate demand.
I will be spending much of the coming year or so working with companies across Birmingham on social media and web-based projects. The project, which I am delivering on behalf of Digital Birmingham, is a small part of a much larger programme utilising Working Neighbourhood funds managed by Birmingham City Council. The project will work with sixteen organisations between now and March 2011, and will also lead to a number of events; I will of course also be looking for opportunities to develop some academic outputs from the project.
What I will be doing
The project builds on our experiences in our recent project, the AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship in New Strategies for Radio and Music Organisations. I will be demonstrating simple uses of technologies that could make a difference to companies. We will prototype new ideas for our partners, using simple and accessible technologies that could help to make life easier, open up new opportunities, or speak to different audiences. The prototypes will be informed by our research and teaching activities within Birmingham School of Media.
In Birmingham we are currently trying to find ways of measuring our usage of Social Media tools. Suggestions we have are based very much around measuring the number of times an organisation Tweets, how many followers it has, how many comments are on its blog, what the analytics are, etc.
Now, my level of interest in such things hovers somewhere around zero, to be honest. But the discussion did make me think about another way in which we could categorise our use of social networking tools, particularly in relation to other means of communication.
For instance, if we look at how widespread the adoption of a communications tool might be, we see quite a range. Most organisations right now have individual enthusiasts who have set up their own social networking presence, often without the knowledge of the wider organisation. We can compare that with a communications tool such as the telephone which is available to anybody who has contact with the public. And in between these two ends of the range, there’s another which is typified by one or more employees within each section or department being given the responsibility of using that particular tool. More - Social Media and Councils: A Fragmented Adhocracy?
It’s probably time you had an update on where Digital Birmingham has got to with the Timely Information for Citizens project we announced back in April. As it happens I gave a presentation on the subject to a room full of representatives from other city councils yesterday. There’s a post over at the Improvement and Development Agency website which I was impressed to see had gone up within a couple of hours of me finishing my talk. The video below gives you some idea where we’re at with the project:
Simon Whitehouse, Dave Harte and John Heaven, all from Digital Birmingham, joined Nick Booth and Paul Henderson from Podnosh and Raj Rattu from Community Consultancy to deliver Lozells’ first social media surgery on Tuesday evening.
Local residents of varying abilities came along to find out about social media tools from Wordpress.com to Flickr via YouTube. Some blogs were set up on the spot — lozells.wordpress.com, boathousecafe.wordpress.com, and http://jenniferbent.wordpress.com — so we’ll be keeping an eye on those to see whether they become regulars on the Handsworth & Lozells social media scene!
The Lozells social media surgery followed on the success of social media surgeries in the city centre. BeVocal is part of the Open City project, managed by Digital Birmingham’s Dave Harte following a successful bid for funding under the Department of Communities and Local Government’s Timely Information programme. BeVocal aims to promote the use of social media for civic good and to gather ideas for the tools that the Open City project should create from datasets released by public bodies.
We intend to continue with further social media surgeries in Lozells so that people who attended on Tuesday can come back and refresh or depend their skills and new people can come and satisfy their curiosity. Details will be on the Life in Lozells blog and BeVocal.
I have recently returned from the USA, after visiting New York City for a week. We, obviously, didn’t watch television much during the holiday as we were too busy visiting as many tourist attractions as possible in the 168 hours that we had. But when we caught up with the headlines via CNN (UK news channels did not seem to be available) it was interesting to notice that every anchor, newsreader and journalist displayed their Twitter usernames, while reporting the daily news, ensuring the public could follow them to find out more.
I know Twitter is huge in the UK, but it is still up and coming i.e. a lot of people who use social networks like Facebook and MySpace are yet to make the move onto Twitter. However, across the Atlantic it is definitely second nature.
Yesterday Donna and I delivered a session on ‘marketing your organisation’ for third sector groups on behalf of B.Strong, the stronger communities partnership. You may remember that I blogged about it a while ago, desperately asking for sources of support that I could recommend to groups when they are left to their own devices. More - Marketing session at B.Strong
I was writing an email to B.Strong today about how digital media can be used to help voluntary organisations market themselves and generally do whatever they do more effectively.
B.Strong (part of the Council) provides organisational development support and capacity building training to voluntary organisations and community groups and is putting on a series of workshops for voluntary organisations that support excluded communities, especially BME, Migrant, Refugee and New
Communities. Donna, my colleague, and I offered to help them include some training in using online tools for marketing in their programme following a meeting last week.
Facebook, Twitter and blogs are now more popular than email says a report which was highlighted in the Telegraph this week. This is more evidence of the current growth in usage of social media tools.
Simon Whitehouse, Dave Harte and John Heaven, all from Digital Birmingham, joined Nick Booth and Paul Henderson from 
