Author: Steph Clarke

Museums, Heritage, Archives and Social Media

Today we are in Shrewsbury delivering a workshop for an array of people that work in museums, heritage and tourism from across Shropshire and the West Midlands.  We’re running a session talking about the importance of building social capital and working hyperlocally. The day will be roughly structured as follows:

  • Building Social Capital and making use of it – including time to reflect on how this relates to what you are trying to achieve.
  • Working Hyperlocally, What does this mean and what does this look like? Your examples – are you already doing this? – Show us.
  • Lunch/Social Media Surgery and Networked learning. A practical session with support from Podnosh and learning between yourselves – time to start exploring the tools and concepts we discussed this morning.
  • Where next for you. Group discussion, based on the thing you’ve learnt in this mornings session and started to put together in this afternoons surgery, What is next for you?
These are the notes from the discussions that took place after our presentations

 

Building Social Capital

Nick Booth talked about Social capital – your social capital is the group of people, or the community you build around your cause or organisation.  These are the people you have invested time in and in return they are prepared to invest time in you to get things done/ make a difference / help you out.

Q. But is this bigger than our individual organisations? Social capital can work on a large scale – but also for individuals, and individual groups. Sharing information, being social and useful helps build your social capital and helps you make things better.

Q. But what about the groups what have already – if they are reluctant to use use the internet? It usually only take s one or two people to come on board for others to start seeing the benefits,

To make the best use of your social capital and to see it really work you have to build it in the first place – it’s just like any other relationships – the more effort you put into it, the more you’ll eventually get back out of it.  

Working Hyperlocally 

Hyperlocal is a really messy word to imply something niche and local – this could be a street, a neighbourhood or somewhere larger like a City. WV11.co.uk is a hyperlocal website that covers Wednesfield a neighbourhood in Wolverhampton,  yet Connect Cannock is also a hyperlocal website that covers the entire town and the surrounding areas in Cannock, Staffordshire.

Museums, Tourism and Heritage organisations  are also Hyperlocal – serving areas both big and small, but that are local and niche.

Hyperlocal Blogging

Steph Clarke talked about her Wednesfield Blog =  one of the questions that was asked was around competition – if there are lots of people in an area all talking about that area isn’t that overkill? In short the answer was no. NO because the useful website will outshine the useless ones and on the other hand the more people talking about an issue/cause/place online the more varied and vibrant the conversation about that place will be.

Another question was asked about community and conversation, how long does it take to moderate and how is the community built? Going back to the points that were made about building social capital – in the beginning it took more time as we were building the trust and building the community, Now, on a day to day basis we can keep the facebook page up to date and moderated in around 20 mins a day because we don’t have to moderate conversation – the community help us by managing themselves. Posts to the main website can be scheduled.

Tools

A brief look at some of the tools discussed.

  • Facebook: Pages vs Groups – one is more public than than the other.
  • Twitter: start conversations, join in conversations, look for “local” hashtags ie #oswestry or #shropshirehour
  • Tripadvisor – What are people saying about your venue or attraction?
  • Foursquare – what tips are being left, gamify visits prizes for the mayor?
  • Blogs – talk about what you are doing. Invite others to write for you

Links

Here is a list of links and resources that were mentioned by attendees or discussed in sessions that would be useful to look at and share experience.

 

West Midlands Police Working With Hyperlocal Bloggers through Podnosh

Lol_Thurstan_Stu_Davis_B26Community
Lol being shown around the new West Midlands Police website by Digital Service Manager Stuart Davis

Working with the Community Safety Partnerships in Birmingham has allowed us to help partners start great conversations across the city.

In North Birmingham a whole host of police officers are now tweeting and community groups are starting to organise themselves online. In South Birmingham a whole spectrum of people from the Community Safety Partnership now blog & tweet to help inform their community of the things that matter to them.  In East Brum?  Well in East Brum we have Lol .

We’ve written about him before, but Lol Turstan is a  resident who loves where he lives so much he hasn’t waited for any of the local partners to get online, he ran with it himself and created B26 Community – A hyperlocal website for the community of Sheldon, where Lol can help spread the message from his Neighbourhood Watch group.

Lol has been working to forge partnerships locally to make the most of his site for the local residents, including strong links with his local police team.

I caught up with Sgt Hanif of Sheldon’s Neighbourhood Police team to find out what they thought of Lol and working with the B26 Community Blog;

“Lol is a very active, influential, member of Sheldon’s community, and already has vested interest in our area, so when we saw the opportunity for our team to attend the social media surgeries he was an obvious choice for us to take along. When it was first suggested to him he couldn’t dream of being involved – he was scared his age would be a barrier to understanding the technology.

But he went along with some of our officers and a few weeks later when I saw him next I was just, well WOW!  He’d set up a website and was doing everything he could to make it as useful as possible.

Every time we have a community meeting he brings handouts to promote the site and is always asking others to get involved. We’ve worked with Lol to share our messages and make other things happen in the area – but some credit has to go to our PCSO  Steve McGrath too.  He’s worked especially close to Lol to get things on the site.

Together they’ve coordinated local schemes like installing locks on residents sheds after a spate of break ins and and recruiting for the street and neighbourhood watch groups.

We forward everything to him not just police stuff but anything that’s relevant.  It gets it out there and it works because people tell me they’ve seen it on the site – and this level of communication was especially important to us after a murder in a local public house.”

Reassurance

“The day after the murder took place, because of the nature of the incident, we had to get a reassurance message to the effected communities as soon as possible, and while technically it happened in our neighbouring ward residents don’t recognise those boundaries we had to act fast.

There had been a shooting, and a possible case of mistaken identity and we wanted to help allay any rumours. I was informed at 11am and within 2 hours we’d got key members of the community  together at the station and gave them what information we could for them to share.. We had a time sensitive message to get across.   We wanted community we had gathered together  was to share that message with other people.

Lol used his website and the contacts he’s made there to circulate this for us. We know his distribution is vast so for us it’s a short cut to the community. An officer on the beat or any other member of the community by word of mouth may have only reached out to 20 people they bumped into – with Lol and B26 Communty we reached potentially hundreds in a short space of time.

Moving forwards, as his contact list builds we would like to work with Lol to use his website to spread other key messages – we can reach a much wider audience than before and as a result we have a better informed community – which means they can make safer choices for themselves.”

Direct Link to Local People

Hannah Fitzgerald, West Midlands Police East Birmingham Communications Officer had this to say about the usefulness of communicating through community websites;

“Having someone like Lol running a site like B26Community is really useful  for Sheldon and East Birmingham as a whole. There is no really localised press coverage in that area so he’s a direct link to the people there.

He’s hosted our live webchats for us on his site.  The last one we broadcast was around Anti Social Behaviour and as Sheldon Park has suffered from episodes of Anti Social Behaviour in the past it was good to be able to communicate directly with the community there.”

Richard Eccelstone, West Midlands Police Social Media Champion added;

“We used to promote our webchats on our Twitter and Facebook pages – but that would attract comments from the whole of the West Midlands even when we wanted to focus on a  specific area –  that would really dilute the conversation but by connecting to  local blogs we were able to use their audience to focus the talk and make it more relevant. This is true of B26 and other hyperlocal websites across the midlands.

We are looking to focus more of our communications on a local level and working with hyperlocal blogs such as B26Community is a fantastic way of doing this”

What’s great about the approach the police are taking to local communication is how effective it is. Our work with all the community safety partnerships has proven that talking with local people using the tools they understand improves communication right across the neighbourhood and in turn improves the perceptions of safety in those areas and helps make things happen. The video below is of Safer Places Office Austin Rodriguez, he’s talking about how using digital tools to communicate locally has benefited his area – evidence that partners working with the community – talking to them at a local level, works.

 

When it comes to Social Media think “Quality not Quantity”

Wolverhampton Federation of Tenants Associations

I was at the Wolverhampton Social Media Surgery this week when a patient came for some help, who highlighted to me in a practical way somethings I’ve known and we’ve taught for a long time….

When it comes to Social Media it’s quality over quantity is what you’re looking for and being useful is what matters most.

Lorraine had come for some advice with the Wolverhampton Federation of Tenants Associations (WFTA) facebook page. I’d helped her set it up at a previous surgery  and now she’d come along asking for help getting more “fans”, as at that point the page only had 44 “likes”.

The WFTA promotes the interests of social sector tenants within Wolverhampton and aims to ensure tenants and prospective tenants are able to have a say over services and are able to influence them so they are relevant to their needs. The WFTA facebook page is used to share information about the service the WFTA offers, engage with tenants and to advertise events they have coming up, most recently around welfare reform and regeneration. Lorraine wanted more fans so she could reach a wider audience, for more people to see the content  for the benefit of the community but also as evidence to her boss, and the project funders that their social media was working.

Not only 44

She was fixated on that number 44, “only” 44 people were engaged with her page –  “only” 44 people had clicked like – “only” 44 people are seeing my posts And on she went asking should I pay for advertising?  How can I get MORE people to like the page –  So I suggested that before she rushed out to pay for promoted content (something she had asked about) we look at the insights for her page….

We looked at the the reach of the page and the reach of individual posts. One update alone had reached 358 people. Some had more, some had less but that’s the one we focused on, so lets work that out in percentages, ((358-44)/44)*100= 713.63,  rounded up  that’s a 714% increase in the actual amount of people that were seeing the post  to what she had thought were seeing it as evidenced by the number of people that like her page.

So where were the views coming from – how was she reaching so many people when she only had 44 likes?

The Right Content

Lorraine was being useful to her target audience and so in turn her content was being shared.

She could have only had 244 fans and still ended with a a total reach of 358 or maybe even less for that post if 200 of those people were the WRONG people to be talking to and the content was irrelevant.

Those 44 people were the right people for her to be engaged with. They thought the message she was sharing was useful and they in turn were sharing across to their own profiles and pages ultimately it IS the quality of the engagement that matters more than the number of people you think you’re engaging with.

 

New Facebook Stats for Page Admins

Facebook have rolled out another update to pages. But unlike the last one that I feel may have  hindered engagement this one seems to have been given a little more thought and actually, to page owners, could prove quite useful. It’s to their page insights, the analytics panel available to all admins running pages with over 30 “likes”.

The WV11 page I run has had the new insights made available to us today, and on first appearances I’m like what I’m seeing, It’s obviously geared up to encouraging you to “boost” or promote posts (pay for more people to see them) BUT in saying that it’s not too intrusive. The data it offers you is quite insightful and I can see it being really helpful to brands or organisations trying to maximize their reach – It has really good comparison graphs for trends and long range interactions and individual break down of stats for each post.

Here’s a grab of the currents stats from a photo album we created Saturday of images from the Summer Fun Day – You can click on it to open it large to see what I mean.

Fun Day Stats

Clear and concise figures easy to read at a glance and all still exportable – although I haven’t yet tried to see how clear they are in CSV format – but I’m hoping they can’t be any harder to decipher than with the last insights update!

I need to play more to see what else it has to offer but on first glance it looks good!!