I have been working with a variety of third sector orgs to review the role that social media can play in their work. This includes representatives of various local support and development organisations from across the south east who meet quarterly.
last quarter I ran a 90 minute introduction to social media. Last week I added a few details based on questions that had arisen since and led a really interesting discussion about what they may or may not do to adopt social media in their own work.
Since the last meeting five of the 12 people present had done something to get started with social media eg google alerts, signed up to Twitter, etc,
100428 Notes from ChangeUp South East Meeting, April 2010
ICT Champion Update on Social Media Follow Up
1. ICT Champion Update Social Media Follow Up South East ChangeUp Consortium Meeting London, 15 July 2010 Mark Walker, SCIP Regional ICT Champion for the South East
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8. Social Media Follow up to workshop in May 2010 Mark Walker, SCIP Regional ICT Champion for the South East
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Editor's Notes
How to Choose a Database Mark Walker, SCIP, 01273 234049
How to Choose a Database Mark Walker, SCIP, 01273 234049 This session follows up a 1-hour workshop I ran with the same group in May. Goal is to remind you of a few key points and give you chance to ask questions
A reminder that the existence and growing use of social media doesn’t change your role but it may alter how you do it. The core goals of any activity still need to focus on more effective communications, better services and support for your clients or community and the need to continually look for new ways of generating funding and other income. Social media offers new ways to achieve these goals.
People asked about Ning = online community networking tool ; Yammer = instant messenger for internal networks eg within orgs; slideshare = presentations you can search and share
You can start by using social media to Listen to what’s going on a round you, to dip into news, opinions and other information that is being shared on the internet. You can select what you want to hear and when you want to hear it. With a little practise you can adjust and tweak the free tools available to tune out the background noise. Once you know what you are able to do you can start refining what you use it for, by thinking of specific goals, such as keeping track of specialist topics, identifying influential people or being informed about specific subjects. For example topics such as Big Society are more widely discussed and reported online than in mainstream media. By monitoring and reviewing what you achieve you can identify what works and adapt your activities to get the best results. So you may find that following specific people on twitter produces lots of incoming messages, but that over time you never use the information you find. As you identify shortcomings you can decide whether to follow someone else or stop using Twitter…
There are many different people you can listen to and many different things you can listen out for
Google Alerts is free and is an easy way of dipping your toe in the waters of listening via the internet. Visit www.google.com/alerts and input a term that you want to track eg ‘funding’ or ‘Big Society’ Google will then send an email each time it finds new information about that topic being added to the internet. Tweetdeck is a free piece of software that makes it easy to listen to news and discussions on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It takes a bit more effort to get Tweetdeck working but it delivers lots more control and instant searching for news and knowledge. Remember this is a learning process as social media covers a huge range of topics and tools and is constantly changing. I can delver training workshops for free to LIOs and frontline orgs. I also suggest reading up on social emdia andkeeping an eye out for examples that may help you work out how it could help you.