Tag: Birmingham

Hyperlocal folks in South Birmingham – a few notes from the first social media surgery in Kings Norton.

Lynn Horsnett, Steph Jennings and Sas Taylor

This picture shows three hyperlocal bloggers all come together through yesterday’s first Three Estates Kings Norton social media surgery.

On the left is  Lynn Horsnett of the Friends of Kings Norton Park.  She came along for some tips – having started a blog.  We helped her make it more blog like – activating comments and looking at trackback (the way in which when one blog links to a post of another blog it appears in the comments section) and writing google friendly titles for posts. We also helped her change her twitter account and improved the prfile a little.   She is though in her own right a hyperlocal blogger – but he local is a park in south Birmingham.

Lynn’s feedback was that the surgery..

helped Friends of Kings Norton Park to open its blogspot up for conversation and helped set up a twitter account, hopefully meaning we can now hear from the important people, the wider community. Love the ideas of interlinking community groups and widening networks. Social media workshops are really positive experiences.

In the middle is our own Steph Jennings – a hugely experienced hyperlocal blogger around to offer tips about her work on www.wv11.co.uk.

Beside Steph is the amazing Sas Taylor – listen here to why she and her husband Marty run the B31voices local blog.  Sas was sharing her expertise with a range of people at the surgery, including Kizzy Bent of Birminghsm City Council’s Environmental Health team.

Kizzy Bent and Sas Taylor

Kizzy commented after the surgery:

Sas showed me how Environmental Health can promote the work we do in Northfield District on her blog and twitter sites to ENGAGE with the residents. I was amazed and will definitely be sending regular updates to the site. The Podnosh meetings have boosted my confidence using technology and highlighted social media is the way to go to connect with a wider section of the community. Thanks I will be encouraging my colleagues to do the same.

Austin Rodriguez – of the Birmingham South Community Safety Partnerships –  is working with us to run surgeries in south Bimringham, blogs in his own right on the site

http://bhamsouthcommunitysafety.com/

which brings together a lot of social media activity in South Birmingham plus news of their work.  Austin helped his colleague Lewis O’Rourk.

Austin Rodriguez and Lewis O-Rourke

Lewis said after the surgery

I was initially a little bit wary of social media. The session has provided me with a decent insight into the simplicity of using this mode of communication. It is easy to use, a fantastic way of engaging with people and cost effective. I will certainly be using social media in future for various projects and media campaigns.

The best thing though by miles was bringing these people together in one place – one place where they could start to share not just skills but ideas and work together. Social media surgeries are about much more than technical skills – they are about confidence and relationships and building trust to make things better.

 

 

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.

 

Video: what does it mean to be a Brummie?

Birmingham Leadership Foundation hosted a debate asking “what does it mean to be a Brummie?” at their third Monday Masterclass at the end of August in Handsworth. I shared my notes from the debate last month. This video by Punk Zebra gives you a great flavour of the debate and the passion that young people have for the city.

The masterclasses are a mix of inspiring talks from young leaders and entrepreneurs, together with a social media surgery run by Podnosh.

The debate was part of the MyBrum consultation, led by Councillor Waseem Zaffar  for Birmingham City Council’s new social cohesion and community safety scrutiny committee.