I've been involved in starting the Huddersfield Social group, which we define as "a group of local volunteers who are committed to using all forms of media technology to connect people so that they can get things done for themselves in their neighbourhoods."
We ran our first social media surgery on Monday evening (based on an excellent idea originally from Birmingham), and I had the honour of talking to the first person who came in looking for advice, who was Yakub, who worked for a mental health patients advocacy group.
Remembering my "social media advisor" training I asked Yakub to tell me a little bit about the organisation, about anything they already did on the web, about what they wanted to do (the effects and benefits they were looking for, rather than the names of sites), who in the organisation was going to be looking after it, and whether he used the web at all himself.
He was already pretty comfortable doing practical jobs such as online banking and ebay (and so was at least as technically savvy as me), so our discussion was much more about what the organisation hoped to achieve by having a self -published presence, which was to record and archive the things that they did, and how the organisation could carefully, manageably and sustainably get into the rhythm of having that presence and creating a meaningful archive.
Which in plain terms means if you start a blog, somebody has to write something, so who in the organisation feels comfortable doing that and what will they write about?
We looked at some random blogs suggested by Blogger as examples, and I ended up doing the same thing when talking to an artist later on. Despite blogging being a bit old-fashioned these days, it felt to me a better way for small groups to get started than the other obvious contender of the moment, Twitter. Only having to write 140 characters sounds like it might be easier, but being on the "real time web" means you've got to be there all the time, the momentum of it leaves less time for consideration, and it's a much shorter time before it's obvious when you are not there.
Yakub decided to have a go at blogging, see how it went, and come back to the next session to talk about exchanging information and experiences within the patients advocacy group and have a look at Ning. Being able to tell people there would be another session in the future was very helpful I thought, because it didn't feel like people were being pushed out of the door into the cold Huddersfield night with a cheery "right you are on your own now." Most of this stuff is about confidence and organisational resources (the off-the-shelf tools like Blogger lower the technical resources needed, if not the time and confidence resources), and oddly, I think it might turn out that the more widely used the phrase "social media" is, the less helpful it will be, because it makes people worry that there is more to it than there is.
Having gone first, I felt that gave me licence to skive, and I spent most of the rest of the evening ambling around avoiding work while everyone else got on with it. Altogether 14 different organisations came down for a chat, including a credit union, a tenants federation, campaigners, an arts group, a local event, a local councillor, and a writer.
There were two reasons why people came along and why the evening had such a warm feel I think. The first was that it was organised by people who had experience of how much work, and what, needs to be done to get the word out about real world events to the organisations we wanted to benefit. If we had left it to "social media marketing" I don't think there would have been anyone there!
The second was that we talked before and after about why we were doing it and this was reflected in the feel of the event. None of us are much interested in social media literacy as an end in itself, for us the things that fall under the term social media are just neighbourhood empowerment tools like a whole range of others from printed paper to internet radio (I wanted to call our activities civic media rather than social media, but was roundly outvoted by the collective!). Even someone with as shallow and noob a knowledge of internet history as me recognises that this sort of thing has been around a lot longer than web 2.0, and in fact has a parallel history that has nothing to do with the internet.
What is interesting about the moment we are at now is less the social media than it is the activity. It's a common sense conclusion based on the last 18 months and the next 100 years that what is important is going to be localism, resilience, self-reliance, anti-centreism, anti-elitism, participation, fun and sustainability. There is a kind of commitment coming together that, while it isn't born of the internet, and isn't evangelical about it, is informed by it. This commitment is a mutualist, communitarian (I may have made one of those two words up and be misusing the other) opposition to self-serving shrink-the-state, “welfare for the rich, taxes for the poor”, anti-public service policies. In a nutshell, dismantle the state by all means, but not before you dismantle big business.
When we met to discuss Huddersfield Social for the first time, I asked everyone why we were doing it. Not because it's my place to vet anyone's motives - anyone who is prepared to put in the time to help counts as far as I'm concerned, no matter why they are doing it - but because I was interested to know what our reasons were, mine included. Everyone round the table thought about it for a bit and then came up with a really positive answer in a sentence, which made me think we'd do OK.
And I forgot to write any of them down.
All I wrote was "neighbourhoods/connections/ relationships/people + power/technology".
After the event on Monday we decided to make the best of a bad job and turn that into an equation.
This is the Huddersfield Social Equation v2, a mathematical formula for working out why you would do a social media surgery.
It is version 2 because it is best devised and understood after 2 pints (Black Goose mild in my case) or 2 gin and tonics:
people+connections+relationships+(all sorts of technology) = neighbourhood empowerment
[Big thank yous to The Media Centre, and especially Clare Danek, for giving us the room, tea, coffee and biscuits and wifi]
Great post Andrew. I can remember my reason for wanting to organise the surgery quite clearly as it is one I've carried with me for a long time: To give "little people" a voice.
Posted by: StevenTuck | November 20, 2009 at 00:02