Tag: Facebook

How to make the £50 million Facebook Application?

The photo of Katie Derham swaddled in bank notes is from the flickr part of the promotional package for the People’s £50 million. In the next two weeks the whole nation will be invited to vote on which of 4 communal projects should win £50 million from the Big Lottery fund.
I want the Black Country Urban Park to win cos the Black Country is an astonishing collection of industrial villages which have a future as a remarkable place to live and work. Also I’m a Brummie and what’s good for our neighbours is good for us.

But I’ve got a tiny stake in this now. After a very recent casual conversation with a couple of people from the Black Country, Jon Bounds and I put together a very most Facebook app/button to help the cause along – (in exchange for similarly modest number of notes and no – nothing like the ones Katie is wearing).

It links to the place where you have to register and vote and also helps you declare allegiance to the cause. Donato Esposito has already set up a facebook group to suport the campaign.

There’s two weeks of online voting culminating in a telephone vote extravaganza. Clearly a much broader online campaign needs to evolve – but how do you reckon we should improve the application as we head towards the end of the vote?

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Social Networking Tips… Beth Kanters Question. My answer

Beth used Facebook to ask for our time saving tips for professional and organisational social networking. She asked specifically about tools etc to help work across mutliple sites (something which I can’t answer) but I can offer some basics, and getting the basics right will save wasted time:

1 Guiding principle number one is to make sure your work and what you do on the network are compatible. Don’t go chasing audience for the sake of numbers if that takes you away from your core purpose. Doing so will just increase the number of people you might bore or irritate and waste effort.

2 Guiding principle number 2 is that social networks are fundamentally about people relating to people – not people to organisations. So be yourself. If you are bad tempered, arrogant, rude and ignorant, then please ask someone else to do your online social networking- and don’t give me that look either.

3 Don’t play the games or the just for fun stuff – cos it eats your life, clutters up your profile and gives a mixed impression. (This does not apply to scrabulous, or ……)

4 Use pictures where ever possible. Include people’s faces, names and link to them.

5 Groups or fan groups on Facebook are good because they allow your network to bring new names and faces into your orbit. Before you set them up have a plan of action for communications or invitations to act over, say, 3 months. Don’t make the demands too onerous or frequent – make them entirely relevant. Between invitations to act add links etc to keep the group ticking over.

6 Add links to other people’s work. You just need to to make a brief comment. It is quick and shows your breadth of interests. It is also generous – and generosity oils social networks. Indeed, generous networkers will hat-tip facebook notes etc.

7 One thing I don’t do – but think I should – is have a monthly stock take of online profiles etc. I should set aside half a day when I do my accounts, order stationery, update profiles and clean out apps and groups I don’t use any more. So plan an online-offline house keeping session.

8 If someone called Beth Kanter invites you to collaborate online – do it.

Interestingly Beth cites Amy Graham who talks about how she uses her feedreader to keep track of herself on online social networks. I’m already finding myself slipping behind – which is not the point. Better respond to David next re netsquaredUK.

Governor 2.0, Tanya Byron and the Digital Media Literacy Summit

Thursday morning and the phone goes. My kids’ secondary school. “Gawd”, I think, “I need to catch a train to London”. Don’t panic. No accident, no expulsions. It turns out I’ve been elected one of four parent governors.

I can be slow at times – because I spent the rest of the day at the Digital Media Literacy Summit before it dawned on me that perhaps one of the most useful things I could do as a school governor is encourage the school to exploit the social web. With this in mind I ask around at the conference for some advice:

Tanya Byron gave me a couple of tips which you can hear in the podcast below. She’s currently running a government review (consultation ends on the 30th November) on the balance between safety and opportunity for young people both online and in the gaming world. Adam Fahey, himself a school governor, was hugely encouraging including advice on tactics – such as getting on the best committees and finding advocates within schools.

The Age of Tactics.

Tactics stuck out for me at the summit. Chanel 4 Commissioning Editor for education and new media, Matt Locke told us that social web evangelists need to think of this as as much a time for tactics as strategy. This absolutely chimes with my experience where I know organisations can benefit from new ideas and connections generated on the social web – the real issues is how to get them deep enough into the experience to understand the potential.

He also helped us picture the geography of social networking – the combination of Secret Spaces, Group Spaces, Publishing Spaces, Performing Spaces, Participation Spaces and Watching Spaces.

Jon Gisby – the Former MD of Yahoo in the UK – gave one obvious tactical solution – access to the right people. He correctly argues that equipment is not so important, the key for improving digital media literacy is to ensure that there are enough people who understand in the right places. So can we seed places with evangelists, unleash the passions of those already there.

Ewan McIntosh was downright inspiring. He warned of the problem of education being run by 21st century illiterates and said so much more which requires some digestion.

Tim Davies brought us back to a fundamental issue of strategy.

It continues to surprise me how often different standards are uncritically applied to young people and to adults. The justification for the difference is assumed, but never articulated.

As a governor my aim must be to help educate young people to understand and negotiate risk and opportunity. My experience teaching social media (with both adults and children) is that you can only really understand/learn by doing. So, in theory, the more young people do the more literate and hence safer they should become.

For an overview of the point of the summit please watch Peter Packer.  Also there Daniel Snell,  Gareth Morlais, Nick Reynolds, Kevin Anderson and Hilary Perkins.