Yesterday morning I popped along to a meeting of the Edinburgh Local Practitioner Forum to hear about the latest guidance for social work staff using social media.
The gathering of over 40 practitioners heard from Ann Moffat and Amanda Waugh from the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC), who last year published guidelines for social service workers and their employers on the appropriate use of social media.
We've come a long way already
How far we’ve come. Not that long ago, many of us felt like we faced an insurmountable brick wall. Social media remained a black art in so many organisations – misunderstood and distrusted.
Since then, we’ve seen huge advances in the awareness of the true power of social media, with global events like the Arab Spring making it impossible to ignore. Uptake continues to boom, with my own organisation seeing award-winning campaigns go from strength to strength; national tweetathons attracting lots of attention; and a huge internal effort to develop a strategic way forward.
We’ve done much “talking and planning”. We’ve even seen plenty of “doing and learning”. I’d say that we’re now in a strong position to take it to the next level – to start “refining and perfecting”.
However, as the floodgates open, we need to be careful that unbridled enthusiasm doesn’t lead to sloppy delivery. And experience tells me that one platform in particular will continue to cause headaches for those of us charged with maintaining some order in this chaotic online frontier.
I’m talking, of course, about Facebook.
Read more about getting Facebook right
Plans have been announced for a national gathering of public sector folk involved with using social media in their organisations.
The Tartan TweetMeet will take place on Wednesday 22 February at a number of venues across Scotland, and will allow like-minded individuals to meet and share ideas. There will also be a chance for members of the public to get involved by tweeting questions and suggestions, hopefully leading to some valuable new opportunities for engagement.
Explaining the concept on the event’s website, organiser Carolyne Mitchell (@Cal444) lists the rules for the day:
- They have to be free.
- No business cards allowed.
- There must be a hashtag.
- Come with an open mind and be prepared to share ideas.
- Most of all have fun and make connections
Anyone interested in the event is invited to register to allow organisers to get an idea of numbers. We’re currently exploring suitable venues here in Edinburgh and welcome any suggestions.
You can follow the event at #tartanTM. I look forward to meeting some of you there!
Last year we won a number of accolades for our use of social media to promote the 2009 Scottish Youth Parliament elections. I blogged at the time that we would be ramping up our efforts for the 2011 elections campaign, and I’m delighted to say we’ve won further recognition for that work.
The campaign has scooped the award for “best use of social media by a public sector organisation”, as well as being shortlisted for “best use of social media by a non profit/charity organisation”, at the Some Comms Awards 2011 in Manchester last week. It also bagged the “Grand Prix” award, singling it out as the “best of the best” of all the entries.
Last night I finally managed to get along to one of the Edinbuzz Social Media Surgeries, this time at Leith’s McDonald Road Library. The event was buzzing, with around 8 ‘surgeons’ and easily as many ‘patients’.
Although this was my first such surgery, I’ve done various similar things in the past, from running drop-in computing workshops in public libraries to full-on adult education courses, so I was prepared for the challenges that the evening might have presented.
As it turned out, the event ran very smoothly, ably orchestrated by organiser @tomallan.
I spent the bulk of the session with Kerry, a PR person who was hoping to start blogging for a local arts initiative. We chatted about the various factors – including issues of budget and technical ability – before settling on WordPress as a good place to start. With that, we headed over to wordpress.com and within a few minutes, Kerry was blogging.
Once that was conquered, we just had enough time to pop over to Twitter, where Kerry had already set up an account and started to follow people. The main problem was that she didn’t really see ‘the point’, and on inspection of her account I could see why – she had never actually tweeted. Again, within a few minutes we’d posted a mention and a retweet, and my advice was for her to go away and feed her account as much as possible. Only by doing that, I said, would other people actually have reason to follow her back – and that would be when the conversations could start.
I hope Kerry went away with a lot more confidence than she arrived with. She was undoubtably keen and, I suspect, just needed someone to tell her she was doing the right things, pressing the right buttons, and that, crucially, she wasn’t going to break anything. Hopefully she will also take this all back to her own volunteer work, to help them maximise their use of these channels.
I found the session personally very rewarding – being a wonderful chance to extol the virtues of these wonderful tools and rave about how I (in all truth) have found the likes of Twitter to be life-changing. I was delighted to see such enthusiasm from all who attended, and I hope the surgeries will continue, in one form or another, for a long time to come.
Our highly successful social media campaign to promote the Scottish Youth Parliament elections in 2009 has won a final accolade – this time, at our internal achievement awards ceremony, where we were highly commended for our contribution to “opportunities for all”.
Having already scooped national awards, including in the “Hard to Reach Communcations” category at the CIPR Local Public Services Awards and the “Government to Citizen” category at the Good Communications Awards, I’m proud to see the campaign get local recognition.
Me and my colleagues receiving the award
Find out more about the campaign, which saw us use Facebook, Bebo and YouTube to increase nominations and voter turn-out in the 2009 Youth Parliament elections.
The next elections will take place in March 2011, and we’re already cranking up our campaign to again include Facebook and a dedicated YouTube channel.
If you’re using social media to target “hard to reach” audiences, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch or leave a comment below…