Tag: blogging

Internet in a church – the first Yardley Social Media Surgery

Yardley social media surgery

We’ve just ticked off another historic landmark in the development of social media surgeries, with our first Be Birmingham-funded Yardley social media surgery, which I’m pretty sure is the first to be held in a church – St Michael and All Angels.

After a few tricky moments with Wifi (something I’m reluctantly becoming something of an expert in) we were able to impart some help to the church itself, which through Anne Maddox and Mark Hayward is now running its own blog. As you can see from from the post that was put up on the day of the surgery, there are already a lot of interesting things going on with the blog!

Mark has been in charge of the existing church website and is now, thanks to some help from Nick Booth, equipped to use the blog, add pictures and start to explore the benefits this new approach can bring to the community work the church is involved in.

Yardley social media surgery

Mark wasn’t the only person getting help, though. Dan Davies also helped Louise Darwood, who lives in Yardley, with help in setting up a blog and using Twitter.

In the video Louise – who is involved with the Riverside Church in Moseley – explains that she is very interested in becoming more involved in campaigns in her local area and hopes the blogging and using Twitter may allow her to develop her interests further.

This is just the first of our Be Birmingham-funded surgeries in Yardley. There’ll be two more – on June 23 and on July 28 – to look forward to, if you’re interested. And, if you want to find out more about what happened at the surgery, you can read my Surgery Manager’s report on the Social Media Surgery Plus website, here.

Looking forward to June’s Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery

May's Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery in thestudio

We’re now looking forward to the next Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, which will be at the Studio in Central Birmingham on Tuesday June 8 between 5.30pm and 7pm. The address is 7 Cannon Street, Birmingham, West Midlands B2 5EP.

If you’re from a Birmingham-based voluntary or community group and would like to receive some friendly advice on using social media, then you can sign up for the surgery by following this link to the Social Media Surgery Plus site.

There’ll be another surgery in July and then we’re likely to take a break in August, before being back in September. I’ll give you a dates as soon as possible.

If you’re new to the Central Birmingham surgeries then you can find out a bit more about them by looking at this link. And, if you’ve never been to a social media surgery before, it might be worth reading this blog post, which attempts to explain what there all about.

It’s worth reiterating our earlier thanks to the folk at thestudio for allowing us to use their restaurant area for free. The staff have been brilliant – always very helpful and quite patient with our sometimes slightly tardy departures from the building. Hopefully the weather will be good on the 8th and we’ll be able to enjoy the terrace, too.

Although our last surgery was pretty quiet, there were some really interesting outcomes. In particular, it was heartening to see Emma Neil and Hannah Severn, who are both volunteers at the Birmingham Conservation Trust. I’ve written a little about the last surgery, which also includes a video interview with Emma and Hannah where they talk about their experiences.

It was also great to see a number of our brilliant surgeons down, including Gavin Wray, Mary Horesh of Friends of the Earth, Simon Gray, and Heidi Blanton. The surgeries wouldn’t be able to work if it wasn’t for members of the Birmingham Bloggers group, like the people I’ve mentioned above. They volunteer their time absolutely for free and have helped dozens of people.

Looking back at the first Balsall Heath Social Media Surgery

It’s been manic recently, so I’ve not had the time I really need to talk about our first social media surgery at Balsall Heath. But, now I’ve confirmed that the next surgery – again at the Balsall Heath Forum – will be on June 2 , I thought it was a good time to look at what was a fascinating and quite exciting first outing for the newest Podnosh-run event.

Quite a few Balsall Heathers (or should that be Balsall Heathans?) have been down in one capacity or another to the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgeries in the past, so it was good to see a few familiar faces coming to the Balsall Heath surgery.

Simon Whitehouse was in attendance, helping Nisha Virdi. And John Newson was also down, getting some assistance with his blog for Balsall Heath Is Our Planet from Dan Davies (who, as it happens, also lives very nearby – even if he thinks he’s in Moseley!)

But there were also many new faces who managed to make it down, including – of course – those working at the forum themselves. I spent some time helping Abdullah Rehman and Nowrah Abdul to set up a blog for the forum, which it’s nice to see they’ve been using in the week or so since the event.

Nick Booth was able to help Zainab and Dalal from the Yemeni Women and Children’s Society – and even set up this quick blog post with them on the day. And it was particularly exciting to see Zulfiqar Ali, of the Pakistani Youth Council. Zulfiqar is really good at using online tools already, but he got some help with using RSS feeds and Yahoo Pipes, which hopefully will be very helpful with some of the interesting things he’s doing.

So, all in all, lots of interesting things happened and I’m really looking forward to the next event. Hope you can make it!

To sign up to the next event, on June 2, please visit the Social Media Surgery Plus site.

What happened at the May Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery

May Social Media Surgery

After some very busy surgeries recently, May’s was small, but perfectly formed. Emma Neil and Hannah Severn from The Birmingham Conservation Trust got help from Gavin Wray and Nick Booth with their blogging work for the trust. Both Emma and Hannah are volunteering for the Trust and have been doing some really interesting stuff since coming to the Central Birmingham surgery a couple of months ago.

They’ve both been blogging assiduously for a while now, on a variety of different subjects for the Trust, as you can see here and here. They also write reviews of local history books, which allows the trust to raise small aounts of money through the Amazon affiliate system.

This time they learned, in particular, about Google Analytics because they’d been worried that too few people were commenting on their posts on the site, as this video interview with Hannah (left) and Emma (right) explains.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32uCoQvtxDs]

Emma and Hannha weren’t the only people to come down – even if we happened to pick the moment the UK got its first coalition government in 70 years. Anna Watson, from Localise West Midlands, was down for her first surgery – and seemed to really enjoy it. Heidi Blanton, who was down to help as a surgeon for the second time,  helped Anna to learn about Twitter, WordPress and other forms of social media.

We also had a visit from Dr Monika Metykova – who is a media and communications research associate at Goldsmith’s. Monika is conducting some really interesting research into changes in media consumption and production – and was down to learn about what we’re doing at the Social Media Surgery. She also got a little bit of help from Simon Gray on setting up a Twitter account. Monika said she was particularly surprised how quickly it is possible to make some really significant, useful steps towards understanding social media at a surgery.

In the video she explains a little bit about the context of her research and how her visit to the Social Media Surgery fits into that.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8RxuVrkv8]