I’m sitting here talking to Zainab and Dalal from the Yemeni Women and Children’s Society at the Balsall Heath Social Media Surgery. I’m just showing them how quickly you can publish something to the web, including a link and a picture.
We’re heading towards our next Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, which will be on Tuesday May 11, 2010 at the studio, 7 Cannon Street, which is just off New Street in central Birmingham.
If you belong to a Birmingham-based community or neighbourhood group or charity please come and join us. You can drop in any time between 5.30pm and 7pm. All local charities and voluntary organisations are invited.
At the last SMS in April we launched the beta version of the new Social Media Surgery website, which is where you can sign up for this event and learn more about other social media surgeries that we’re organising, here.
The surgeries are organised by volunteer members of the Birmingham Bloggers group. Surgeons work as friendly advisors giving informal one-to-one help to show you how to make the best of social media. If you’ve never been to a surgery before then it might be a good idea to look here. And, if you’re interested in finding out a little bit more about what the surgeries are and their history have a look here.
I really enjoyed this report from Chris Heath for Staffslive about the first social media surgery in Stoke on Trent. Chris, a journalism student at Staffs Uni, includes some cracking formal and traditional media techniques – like the walking piece to camera plus suit and tie – to explain a remorsely informal newish media process. His report though does show just the sort of people who benefit from the surgeries and why they find them valuable.
It includes contributions from surgeons Carl Plant and the great Mike Rawlins.
Stoke on Trent have also begun using www.socialmediasurgery.com our beta site for organising surgeries – which made me smile a great deal. The site is designed to make it very easy to organise surgeries – including automatically generate flyers, record outcome, keep track of who came and what they did.
Meanwhile Luke Beamont made this wonderful audio slideshow of what one person got out of attending the social media surgery in Leeds.
Given the choice I think I prefer the second treatment – although I’m also a big fan of using an audio interview with a simple still photo to cover events.
Luke is also a student – find all his stuff here: www.lukebeaumont.co.uk.
Last night was a really interesting surgery at thestudio – not least because it saw the first introduction of the Social Media Surgery Plus website.
We were blessed, quite surprisingly, with a large number of people happy to help others, which was great to see. Nick Booth helped the Civic Centre Residents’ group with their efforts to use Scribd with their residents’ blog, which they set up a few surgeries ago.
Karen Caine was helped by Andy Mabbett and learned about using data sets in conjunction with her long-established site, BrumCityCentre.com, for Birmingham City Centre Neighbourhood Forum.
John Newson was helped with his blog by Danny Smith.
Heidi Blanton very kindly came down to help as a surgeon for the first time and helped Nancy Langfeldt with the blog for the South Birmingham Food Cooperative, which she had set up at a previous surgery. Jon Law of the Balsall Heath Housing Co-operative was helped by James Robertson with his site.
As I indicated earlier a great number of other people came along. And we had more people ready to help than those needing help, including Mary Horesh of Birmingham Friends of the Earth.