Tag: twitter

Fair Brum: Using Social Media For Consultation – Have your say about Social Inclusion in Birmingham

Fair Brum Social Inclusion Summit 20th July 2012

For the last few months we’ve supported Birmingham City Council with their Fair Brum social inclusion process. We worked with groups and individuals to show them how they could take conversations they were having with residents of Birmingham about social inclusion over to online places, to try and engage with even more people.

We supported council staff, academics and others interested in using social media to share their stories, experiences and findings of social inclusion in Birmingham. We provided them with the skills that meant they were able to contribute to, or comment on, the process via the FairBrum blog – or on their own sites – and tweet via their own accounts using the #fairbrum tag. We also helped create content and conversation by social reporting from some of their events.

As of 4th September 2012, we found the #fairbrum tag on Twitter has been used 1,600 times and appeared 1,591,590 times. That’s the gross number of times the #fairbrum tag has appeared in Twitter users’ timelines since the start of the process. (Yes, it’s an enormous number – we know not that many pairs of eyes have clocked it!)

Those numbers continued to rise. When we looked at the figures this morning the tag had been used a total of 2,479 times and appeared 2,170,039 times.

All this interaction, along with the findings of offline interactions, has been looked at to see what Birmingham’s needs are. As a result, a green paper was produced with recommendations on how we can work together across the city to address social inclusion.

Recommendations are split into seven groups:

They are all available to view, discuss and comment on, online at fairbrum.podnosh.com.

The consultation has been running for a while now. This weekend is the last chance for you to have your say, as the consultation closes on Monday, 5th November.

Follow the links above to view the groups of recommendations and click through to individual posts to add your thoughts. You can also let them know if you work for an organisation already doing what’s being recommended and add yourself to the map.

 

Why do people attend Social Media Surgeries?

Yesterdays Social media Surgery in Low Hill, Wolverhampton was attended by Jerome Turner, research fellow on the Creative Citizens research team at Birmingham City University. It was Jez’s first time at a surgery and he’d come with lots of questions for his research about why people chose to come along to either give or receive help.

Jez recorded some of the answers and shared them with us via  audioboo and you can listen to these below .

Patient Pat Fullwood came along for assistance setting up a Facebook page for her Neighbourhood Watch group and for support on a page she’d previously set up for the Long Knowle Community Association.

Jaswinder Singh Chagger (aka Handsome) came to look at how he could use Facebook and Twitter to connect with organisations across the city of Wolverhampton.

James Clarke from WV11.co.uk came along as a surgeon again and he said the thing that makes him keep coming back is being able to share his knowledge with others “opening their eyes to a whole new world”

Building civic engagement in Wolverhampton one neighbourhood at a time

Yesterday saw us host the first in a whole series of Social Media Surgeries we’re involved in around Wolverhampton.

It took place in an area of the north east of the city called Low Hill. It was set up and managed like all other social media surgeries except instead of being supported by just one organisation, it’s being supported by a partnership of public sector organisations from across the city that includes council departments and housing  associations.

The thinking behind this means we’re able to support a more diverse mix of people to benefit their communities and improve civic engagement across the city with input from lots of different areas.

Yesterday’s event was really well attended and, with support of “surgeons” from our public sector partners, were able to help:

One attendee on returning back to work even declared it the “best social media surgery ever“. I’m not sure we’re impartial enough to be the judge of that but I’m sure looking forward to the next one in Low Hill and the others due to be arranged across the city.

Wolverhampton LNP, Social reporting and finding their feet on Twitter.

We have recently been doing some work in Wolverhampton with the Local Neighbourhood Partnership (LNP), talking to their neighbourhood wardens about how they can use Twitter to communicate on their patch, the sorts of conversations they could be having and showing them practically how to use it.

As I live in Wolverhampton, sit on the board for my local LNP and use twitter in my neighbourhood with @WV11, one of the examples I used when training them was live tweeting from our meetings.

Bi-monthly in each LNP area Read more