Social capital also crops up a lot in conversations about social policy, and in this sense it flows from the ideas of James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (2000, 2003). Putnam is most commonly associated with a model for measuring social capital that equates membership of clubs and societies to the stock of social capital within a community. His work is positioned as a treatise to social policy makers calling for a renewal in civic society:

“As the twentieth century ended, Americans gradually began to recognize that the sprawling pattern of metropolitan settlement that we had built for ourselves in the preceding five decades imposes heavy personal and economic costs […] So I challenge America’s urban and regional planners, developers and home buyers: Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less time travelling and more time connecting with our neighbors than we do today, that we will live in more integrated and pedestrian-friendly areas, and that the design of our communities and the availability of public space will encourage more casual socialization with friends and neighbors.” (Putnam, 2000, pp.407-8)

It has been pointed out (Fine, 2001) that Putnam and Coleman loom large over academic literature of social capital, and many academic authors build theoretical frameworks around their ideas. So, as academics start to examine social media they are likely to think about social capital, and they are likely to read Putnam’s (2000) Bowling Alone. But Bowling Alone doesn’t talk about social capital in quite the same way that “the Internet” talks about it.

For some studies, Putnam’s work, and the work which follows it, can be incredibly useful. If your questions want to measure networks, and bonding structures then follow the citation trails from Putnam that lead you forward to Burt (2009) and back to Granovetter (1973). But if you’re looking to write about online culture, this framework is limited. You need Bourdieu.

Bourdieu defined social capital as the:

“aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu, 1986, p.248)

Bourdieu’s model of social capital is quite loose and theoretical, and all the more useful for it when attempting to understand social media culture. There are no equations here, as with Putnam, simply an acknowledgement that social capability can confer power upon individuals and groups. To my mind, that is the key issue at the basis of much that is interesting about social media.

At IAMCR 2010 I presented a paper called Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism. The paper explored a crowdsourced investigation, seeking to understand how people worked collectively to affect a positive outcome for the group. A member of the team behind the project told me they were:

“Very happy [with the outcomes of the investigation], but also wondering how easily you can recreate that. It tapped into the right community at the right time… and unearthed a big story.”

For me this is social capital, after Bourdieu, reified: a potential resource existed within a pre-existing community, and it was activated by a set of social media practices, delivering benefit to its collective owners. Without the social capital, the clever social media tools would be useless.

I’m not seeking here to critique those who use other approaches to social capital: they are valid ideas for important questions. What I hope to point out is that “social capital” is a term with different meanings; when we talk about “social capital” we need to be quite clear about what we mean. Also I want to highlight that by going back to Bourdieu, we can reclaim the idea to think through some interesting questions that describe social media as culture, rather than as a network.

This is an expansion of a point made in my paper, presented to the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research – the full paper is on my personal blog. I have also written an extended literature review on the topic of social capital which I would be happy to share.

Bibliography

BOURDIEU, P. 1986. The Forms of Capital. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

BURT, R. S. 2009. Network Duality of Social Capital. In: BARTKUS, V. O. & DAVIS, J. H. (eds.) Social Capital: Reaching Out, Reaching In. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

COLEMAN, J. S. 1988. Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95 – S120.

DOCTOROW, C. 2003. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, New York, Tor Books.

FINE, B. 2001. Social Capital versus Social Theory, London, Routledge.

GRANOVETTER, M. S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360.

PUTNAM, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone, New York, NY, USA, Simon & Schuster.

PUTNAM, R. D., FELDSTEIN, L. M. & COHEN, D. 2003. Better Together: restoring the American community, New York, NY, USA, Simon & Schuster.

Last week, I spoke here about attempts towards a formula for measuring social media engagement about a music artist on Twitter. That was one of the conversations I had with New Music Labs founder Ard Boer, whose Tribemonitor service tracks social media and online metrics for artists and labels.

I’ve been working on a small, IDEA-funded Knowledge Transfer project with New Music Labs to help think through new ideas and approaches for Tribemonitor.

Ard and I spoke at length about the idea of innovative strategies for independent artists in the social media space. At present, a default approach appears to be to do whatever it takes to get followed and increase your audience size.

Artists will encourage their fans to ‘Add me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, Sign up to my email list, Friend me on MySpace, Subscribe to my RSS feed, Go to my blog…’ and so on. The idea behind this strategy is that the artist can then continue to develop their fanbase as a discrete number of people, and communicate with them (broadcast to them) on a regular basis.

However, a reflective discussion with Ard about the realities and psychology at work within the social media space suggest that an alternative strategy can be identified. It’s one that has a potential to use the medium more effectively, and around which an innovative business development can be formed.

And that’s to turn the process inside out.

Following your fans
The degree of success to which an individual or organisation uses social media is not proportionate to the number of people to whom they manage to broadcast. As we touched upon in the social media algorithm experiment, it’s important to consider the degree of engagement, and the ‘interestingness’ of the artist – not simply the broadcast-era formula of ‘reach and frequency’ by which advertising success is measured.

As a result, a two-way, reflective and responsive approach is needed. Collecting people who will sign up to your mailing list, or add your Twitter feed to their ever-expanding stream of social media noise is not sufficient. It’s important to listen more than it is to talk.

As a result of these discussions, we proposed a hypothetical ‘inside out’ artist signup page. When you discover an artist and decide that you like their music, you go to a page where you add your own social media information.

My Twitter name:
My Facebook page:
My MySpace:
My Flickr account:
My YouTube:

and so on.

By volunteering this information, it’s possible for the artist to learn what is of interest, and how to connect directly with the fan.

Of course, with any significant numbers of fans, the role of the entrepreneurial innovator is to aggregate the information and provide meaningful data to the artist or label. For instance:

“A lot of your fans are also interested in motorsports. I know that you’re interested in motorsports. Perhaps this is a topic you could talk about on your own Twitter profile or engage with to strengthen the fan connection…”

“These fans took photos at Glastonbury festival last year. You’re playing at Glastonbury this year. Why not comment on their Flickr stream and ask if they’re coming to see you this time around?”

“This fan has been raving about your music on Facebook to their 500 friends. You should leave them a comment or send them a free track…”

And so on. The opportunity to do textual and content analysis to spot trends and identify shared areas of interest amongst your fans is only possible if you consider the social media environment as a conversational space, rather than as a broadcast medium.

This is not to say that building an ever-larger fanbase is not a helpful strategy for independent music promotion – but that thinking of that only in terms of a numbers game leads to the kind of strategy that automatically adds friends on MySpace whether or not they like (or have even heard) the music.

A smaller number of engaged and interested people is worth far more than a large number of people who are either disinterested in or actively annoyed by your communication.

By listening more than talking, an artist’s social media interaction has the opportunity to be far more engaged and responsive – and in order to facilitate this, there lies the potential for an online service (or what we conceived of as an additional aspect of Tribemonitor) to provide the opt-in signup facility, as well as the data analysis and interpretation that will inform conversational media strategy for the artist.

Obviously, these principles do not simply apply to music fandom, but can be applied equally to businesses and communities of all kinds. It’s possible to extrapolate broader principles and methodologies from this discussion – but my focus was on being helpful to Tribemonitor, whose focus is on music artists and record labels.

I’m grateful to Ard for the permission to discuss here in public what some might consider to be commercially sensitive information (Tribemonitor plan to build such a service, but have not as yet done so). However, Ard is keen to hear open discussion on the ideas around strategy. New Music Labs’ expertise with respect to this service is more in the area of interpretation, analysis – and the consultancy that can come out of this sort of market intelligence.

I’ve just been in Groningen in the Netherlands to brainstorm and research Tribemonitor – an online information service to artists and record labels, created by New Music Labs.

The purpose of Tribemonitor is to measure the popularity of music artists based on social media buzz across a range of platforms, rather than on sales or radio airplay.

Measuring online buzz is not a simple thing to do, however. There are some scrapable and publicly accessible pieces of information such as Last.FM plays or numbers of MySpace friends that are obvious and countable. These simple statistical measures that make a good starting point that can act as a basis for artist consultancy (or reassurance): number of MySpace plays, number of artist followers on Twitter, number of YouTube views, etc.

But these metrics only measure what could be described as fan activity, rather than a useful and measurable social score, which would have more to do with the extent to which that artist is being discussed outside of their own sphere of influence. And this is the reason for this intervention.

Social capital and the popular music artist
Popularity is the basis on which commercial music derives income from recordings and performances. But popularity is not the same as CD sales or gig attendances. Instead, those are mechanisms of commercial activity based on the social capital afforded by popularity. In other words, popularity is the engine of commercial music success, and not simply its measure.

Thus, gauging that social currency allows for commercial approaches that understand and maximise popularity. Being interesting, noteworthy or remarkable is not a business strategy – but it is a platform on which a business strategy can be built. Monitoring and tracking the social capital of popular music artists offers up important market information for analysis and interpretation.

The first step is to be countable and comparable – both against competing artists, and longitudinally with respect to one’s own previous performance. By comparing data over time, it’s possible to get a sense of ‘what’s working’ and ‘what’s not’. It’s a blunt tool, but does flag up when and where there are things of interest going on. On that basis, targeted content analysis can be indicated and recommended.

Seeking a simple but practical approach
Leaving aside sentiment analysis (whether the mention is positive or negative, or to what degree), there is challenge enough in simply weighing that media data – let alone analysing it for mood. However, for the sake of simplicity, and on the pretext that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, merely identifying messages and their capturing their echoes through the social media environment provides the basis for a useful indicator of online ‘buzz’.

A good place to start is the area of mentions in social media contexts. While the demographics of different services are quite different (users of Twitter tend to be older and of higher socio-economic standing than users of the popular Dutch social network Hyves, for instance), it’s difficult to take the temperature of social media buzz in closed and largely private systems such as Facebook. A predominantly public and externally measurable system like Twitter gives a good leaping-off point in terms of measuring online social currency, and how that changes over time.

At the very least, it provides a starting point for an exploration of the complexities of this sort of social media data.

Simply measuring mentions of the artist is not sufficient. There is a difference in impact between a mention and a reply – but an algorithm that worked by identifying the artist’s Twitter user name would not necessarily distinguish between the two:

Mention:
I went and saw @thisiskrause perform last night. She was amazing!

Reply:
@thisiskrause I liked your show.

Twitter distinguishes between those two types of directed message – and so as far as ‘buzz’ is concerned (certainly from a promotional culture perspective), a mention is ‘worth more’ than a reply. And a mention may equally be the artist name (‘Krause’) or their Twitter handle (‘@thisiskrause’).

Now, if I tweeted those messages above, all of my followers would see the ‘mention’ – but only those people that followed both me and @thisiskrause (as well as Krause herself) would see the ‘reply’.

Next there are variables to be considered:

1) How many followers do I have?
2) How engaged/interested are those followers?
3) How influential are my followers on average?
4) How many people responded to or retweeted that particular message?

In order to factor those in, it’s necessary to come up with a calculation that accounts for each, and then arrive at a score that can be additive, so that a total figure across all mentions within a particular period can be arrived at. That score can be monitored over time for that one artist, or compared across the board with other artists.

Doing the maths
While the numerical value of ‘social media score’ is essentially an arbitrary figure, as it does not count a specific measurable object, when applied across the board it does provide a meaningful and (most importantly) a comparable index.

The first variable – number of followers (F) – is easy to count. But it’s perhaps not the most important thing. If I have 1000 followers, but they’re not really paying attention to what I have to say, then my tweets will have less impact than someone who has the same number of followers, but whose followers actively engage that person in conversation.

So we came up with a ‘Social Score Multiplier’ (M), which is simply a means by which it is possible to arrive at a weighted figure that is based on the average number of replies that the person receives each day. In other words, the degree to which the tweeter’s followers are ‘engaged’.

After playing around with a number of formulae to come up with a figure that would make what we considered to be a reasonable adjustment with respect to the level of attention and interest that person receives online (E), we decided on an algorithm that would return a figure that started at a multiplier of 1 (zero average replies a day), and increased by 0.1 (to a multiplier of 1.1) for each 1 daily reply, averaged from a year’s worth of data.

So the social score multiplier was 1 + (0.1 x (Replies in the past year ÷ 365))

M = 1 + (0.1 x (E ÷ 365))

Then we factored in the small impact of the overall influence of the followers of the person who has tweeted about the artist, by including the AVERAGE number of followers that the tweeter’s followers have (A), as well as an adjustment for the number of retweets and responses that individual tweet inspired (N).

In so doing, we arrive at a weighted ‘Buzz’ score (B) for each tweet:

B = ((F x M) + ((1+N) x A))) ÷ 100

To explain – the buzz score of a certain tweet is measured by the number of followers, adjusted by the social score multiplier (to account for how engaged that user is), PLUS the number of retweets multiplied by the average number of followers (plus one, to avoid a zero result where the tweet is not retweeted at all), divided by 100 – to give a usable and comparable score.

So… if a person with 1000 followers, who has had 1825 replies in the past year (an average of 5 replies per day), tweets about Krause, their social score multiplier is 1.5. If their tweet about Krause is not retweeted, and their followers collectively have an average following of 150, then the sum is as follows:

((1000 x 1.5) + ((1 + 0) x 150))) ÷ 100 = 16.5

The overall social score of that one tweet is measured at 16.5

Alternatively, a tweet from a person with 2000 followers, who had 1200 replies in the past year have a social score multiplier of 1.33 (ie: 1 + (0.1 x (1200 ÷ 365))). Let’s assume that their followers also have an average following of 150, but that they were retweeted once. The social score of their similar tweet will be as follows:

((2000 x 1.33) + ((1 + 1) x 150))) ÷ 100 = 29.58

And finally, that one person who retweeted our last example has the following impact, given that nobody retweets them, they have fewer followers (say, 100), their followers are less engaged with them (20 replies in the past year) and their followers have, on average, fewer followers themselves (60).

((100 x 1.01) + ((1 + 0) x 60))) ÷ 100 = 2.21

Now, in order to arrive at an overall social score for Krause for this week (day, month…), we simply add up the scores of all of the mentions in that period.

16.5 + 29.58 + 2.21 = 53.3

Now we have a number that we can compare to previous periods, and to other artists.

This is not a “value”
It’s important to bear in mind that there are plenty of other variables that could potentially influence this social score, if they were factored into the calculations. For instance, if a person who tweets a link to a YouTube video is then retweeted by two other people, there are some very simple calculations that would follow above. However, those calculations do not factor in the extent to which an audience overlaps. If I have 1000 followers, and I send out a message – and two people each with 1000 people retweet that message, we come to a conclusion as if there is no overlap between those three audiences of 1000 different people. However, it is conceivable that they are the SAME 1000 people (or at least, significantly overlapping), so that rather than reach 3000 people, you have reached 1000 people three times.

And there are plenty of other variables besides.

However, the social score is not a measurement as much as it is an indicative figure. It would be possible to complicate the algorithm with this, and any number of other variables, but there would be diminishing returns in terms of factoring those variables in – and counteracting factors such as the principle of reinforcement. Arguably, a message heard three times has more than three times the psychological influence than that message heard once – so what may appear on the surface to be a diminished impact may be more influential through repetition.

Without getting too deeply into cognitive science (and, for that matter, deep maths), it is possible to arrive at a figure that while neither pinpoint accurate nor comprehensive in terms of what it represents, can still be a meaningful and useful figure. While a broad and necessarily imprecise statistic, the social score can provide a consistent and comparable guide that factors in some of the main influencing factors within a social media framework.

This is not a “cause”
However, I’d caution further that it’s not possible to ascribe causal factors to that data.

For instance, while it is meaningful to assert that an artist with a score of 100 is more “interesting” in the online social sphere than an artist with a score of 10, one cannot draw correlations between those scores and sales of records or attendances at performances. An artist who has not released an album for ten years, but has recently died may draw more ‘buzz’ online, but will not attract any more concertgoers as a result.

And while it’s possible that the interest in this newly-deceased artist may result in an increase in sales, that would only be true if their record is in the store available in shops or online.

In other words, the social score gives an indication ONLY of how “interesting” the artist is at a given point. But that level of interest provides useful market information to artists and labels that might indicate where opportunities may exist.

It is neither the role of Twitter nor its effect to cause consumers to act in a particular way – nor is it connected with the extent to which businesses are supplying a market. The social score is a broad marker of discussion – and not a reason that one artist may be more successful than another in financial terms. Some moderately successful artists are entirely invisible in the online sphere, and some lesser known acts are very active with large and engaged fan communities online.

This is an instructive and indicative data set
There are three main ways in which this data can be used:

A snapshot figure – a single score looked at in a moment in time. Useful as a comparison amongst other, similar artists. (“How interesting am I, comparatively speaking?”

Over time – whether or not that number increases or decreases from week to week. (“Am I doing better or worse online? Did my publicity stunt draw more people?”)

Rate of change – the acceleration (or deceleration) of buzz. If the score goes from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1000 week by week, that is an exponential rate of change – as opposed to a score that goes from 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 – which has a linear growth. (“Is there something interesting going on with this artist that we can capitalise on?”)

Providing commercial clients with these statistics, which would be difficult to collect, analyse and interpret themselves, provides an opportunity to discuss ways in which the social media environment could be captalised on and changes in interest can be used as an occasion for marketing.

Moreover, it would be possible to identify and engage with key online influencers – in order to incentivise and reward those fans and opinion leaders who contribute the most to this social media process.

We don’t think the formula is correct
While the algorithm we’ve arrived at is simply a tool to arrive at a comparable and trackable social score, we think it will be very possible to improve upon its methods and become more sophisticated with time.

The second part of this research is to invite people to suggest alterations to the formula, integrate other factors you think may be important, and correct the ways in which the design of the formula calculates and communicates what we are trying to capture and present.

While Tribemonitor is a commercial service, which includes further analysis and interpretation of the data, we believe the means by which some of the data is arrived at would benefit from an open source approach. Mathematicians, statisticians, psychologists, social scientists – as well as musicians – will have opinions as to how this algorithm could be developed further.

As a piece of research, we are very keen to hear what effects could be incorporated to represent important social impacts; and ways in which the numbers could be more meaningful.

For instance, we were interested in ways in which the social score multiplier (M) could be expressed as a ratio of the number of followers (F). Having 1 reply per day, on average, could be considered not very engaged for a Twitter user with thousands of followers – but very engaged indeed for a Twitter user with only ten followers.

Likewise, adjustments could conceivably be made to allow for differences between occasional tweeters and verbose Twitter users. It’s certainly possible that a single tweet could be buried under an avalanche of tweets if the person is a heavy twitter user. To what extent is this significant, and how could this be represented in the formula?

We look forward to hearing (and sharing) your thoughts.

Sam Coley and Oliver Carter presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010.

Radio documentary, fandom and new participatory cultures from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Katrina Sluis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts, Media and English at London South Bank University where she leads the BA (Hons) Digital Media Arts. Her scholarly interests include critical theories of photography, digital memory and contemporary fine art practice. As a visual artist, she works with photography and digital media to explore materiality, archiving and transmission in relation to the digital image.

Her paper was entitled ‘Digital Material Archives: Web 2.0 and algorithmic memory’.

In her paper she drew attention to the materiality of the databases and algorithmic calculations that lie behind the ever-expanding domain of the internet and the huge variety of material it supports and allows us to archive. The nature of how information is managed and monitored, of how it determines what we find as much as aids us in our determinations in online activity raised a number of important cultural and political issues. What constitutes the digital archive, its scope, value and meaning were at the core of her talk which was a model of interdisciplinary research, covering cultural memory as much as the mathematics of databases and the ecology of Google servers.

If you are interested in attending our research events, or contributing a paper, please contact: paul.long@bcu.ac.uk.

Firstly an apology: as an academic I can’t take a title at face value. I find I need to hand wring and worry about the terms of a debate before I can do anything at all. And then once I have problematised the issue, I find that the title is wrong and I start using different words.

As a media and cultural studies academic who has been criticised by the Daily Mail for wasting tax payers money running courses on social media, this condition is particularly acute. I need to be seen to have thought too much about things to justify myself. So that being the case, I struggled to get into this topic and felt I had to change it. I hope you don’t all rush to get your money back, but stay with me for a moment. The new title is:

Social Media & Glocalisation

Social media seems to lend itself more to the idea of “glocalisation”, and this is perhaps a more interesting way of thinking about what social media means to Birmingham. Glocalisation isn’t an awful neologism that I’ve just made up – it’s a term that has some currency within academia, and it’s a strand of thought that you might want to follow up. I will briefly outline globalisation, how technology is associated with it, and then use this to a frame some ideas about social media and glocalisation.

Globalisation

Globalisation is a big idea (excuse the pun), or rather a big set of ideas and discourses. It can be seen positively as a system of changes that improves life chances for all, or it can be seen negatively as a force that offers greater liberty to some (conventionally Westerners) at the expense of others (the developing world). It’s a process of integrating global economies, societies and cultures.

We often find it manifest in scenes such as this which offer a cultural mash up of signs:

(image CC geographyalltheway_photos)

this image essentially relies on us reading the building as indexical of the “developing” world” while the three brightly coloured branded boards affixed to the building are understood as “western”. The contrast between these signs, the tension we feel between the developed and the developing, is the space where we find “globalisation”. This sort of image is actually a visual cliché: search for images of globalisation and images that rely upon this contrast of developed and developing signs are very common.

Communications technology is generally considered to play a big part in the modern era of globalisation, facilitating it at a number of levels: the computer networks that allow world markets to coordinate quickly and allow money to move from place to place; the phone networks and email systems that link branches of multi-national organisations and allow information to flow readily; the distribution technologies that allow news and coverage of events to arrive in our homes within seconds or cultural artefacts such as TV and film to be replicated and distributed to us. Techno-utopians often take up Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” as a metaphor which describes the process of globalisation: the suggestion here is that technology removes physical barriers and allows us to work at far remove from our colleagues. Thomas Friedman, in “The World is Flat” extends upon this idea to describe ten “flatteners” – forces of change that drive globalisation – that are heavily reliant upon computers and the Internet.

Social Media

Social media is a broad term which you can more or less interchange with Web 2.0 – it describes a set of technologies and services that make self-publishing online very easy, and which often allow the consumers of such media to interact, most commonly through comments of some sort. I tend to use the term very broadly to encompass blogs and social networks and within that I would include services you may know such as: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, MySpace etc. These services all sit on top of the networks which I have described and are often seen as a step towards democratising access to media production and publishing.

The reach of these tools is global, but not usage is not universal. Access is restricted by the availability and viability of communications infrastructure, personal devices – i.e. phones and computers, skills and of course the inclination to actually take part in social media activity. Furthermore, from country to country, participation in certain networks and activities follows a different profile, as this infographic attempts to show. This is further complicated by regulation, for example it is well documented that China blocks access to a number of international services such as Facebook. Nonetheless, the structure of the connections between people and the interlinking of platforms affords us a meta-level network of networks with a global reach.

So far I have described a global network which offers the opportunity for citizens from across the world to speak to one another, to share stories, across Friedman’s flat world, as if they were neighbours in McLuhan’s global village. And what do we do with this opportunity for global communication?

Very often we talk about ourselves, our friends, our city, what we are doing, where we are going. This tweet is actually fairly typical. It’s ordinary, but it’s very real. Undoubtedly social media does operate globally and can involve people from over here with events over there. For example, social media was widely reported as being an important channel in delivering information to mainstream media during the Iran election protests. Similarly news of natural disasters, plane crashes, and other extraordinary events are often broken via social media. I’m not going to deny this process but I am going to suggest that these are exceptions. Mostly, to borrow from Raymond Williams, in social media “culture is ordinary”.

Glocalisation

It is tempting when we consider social media to suggest that, because the networks they create are not bounded by space, they are bringing about ever more urgent globalisation. Yet to do so seems to me to be overly deterministic. Technology doesn’t determine its own outcomes, these are negotiated. For most of us our use of social media is very local, either to a place or a known community. We are turning the structures of globalisation back upon themselves, and using them in ways that serve local needs primarily. This is not globalisation but glocalisation.

Examples:

• Hyperlocal blogs e.g. digbeth.org. Here the potential for global reach is turned inward – telling a story to the local community. Sometimes the stories become national or international as happened at the Bournville blog;
• Localised versions of global internet memes e.g. lolitics;
• Meet ups that are organised through social networks, e.g. Birmingham Social Media Café, and Likemind – which is actually governed globally but run locally (hat tip to Pete Ashton for comparing Likemind to other networks such as Freecycle which have global governance);
• Co-working spaces such as Moseley Exchange which rely on email and social networks to organise activity between physical meetings (see Hampton & Wellman for more on this).

‘Local Engagement: Sharing Practical Approaches’ was aimed at local authority officers and those working in the various organisations that make up the National Empowerment Partnership. The panel I was presenting at included Hannah Peaker from the London Civic Forum (who interestingly had spent time on the Obama campaign in 2008) and Stephen Frost from izwe.com. I was there courtesy of the work the role I’ve had with Digital Birmingham over the past year.

It’s worth noting that engaging, and hopefully empowering, communities isn’t just something that local authorities feel they have to do just because it’s the right thing to do; it’s actually an indicator by which authorities and local strategic partnerships (LSPs) are measured by government. If your LSP has chosen to be measured by National Indicator 4 (‘% of people who feel they can influence decisions in their locality’) then they may well be thinking about how social media can help them achieve their targets for that measure. And if the amount of people crammed into our panel is anything to go by then quite a few are thinking just that.

My presentation (below) was little more than a quick guide to interesting social media things happening in Birmingham that the audience might find useful. Those things are by and large being developed from the bottom up by those active users of social media tools who are attuned to the needs of active citizens. But in our discussion that followed two key questions emerged which I think highlights the issues that won’t go away unless we start giving answers based on research rather than anecdote.

“Where will I find the time?” is the first of those questions, asked because public sector workers are already feeling under pressure and over-worked and the last thing they need is another engagement method to get to grips with. I don’t have a good answer to this. I do give an answer of sorts, but it’s an answer tainted by the fact that messing about with social media and the internet is part of my job. And public sector workers see through that straight away – they know that how I work is a world away from how they work. Research studies that offer clear evidence that social media creates efficiencies wouldn’t necessarily be helpful here. ‘Efficiency’ is the discourse of management and workers everywhere know that in its enactment it results in a reliance on technology rather than people. But it is clear than in order to answer “where will I find the time” an evidence base of some sort is what’s needed and what’s lacking.

“How do I manage the expectations of those I connect to via social media?.” Or to put it another way: people are going to get upset when I fail to respond to their twitter message at 10 o’clock in the evening. Hannah Peaker gave the helpful suggestion that if you establish a pattern of usage then people will respect that. But I confessed that I haven’t managed to do that. That I’ve let social media be a social part of my life and therefore I get asked work-related questions at all times of the day and evening and that creates a subtle pressure. Here were workers who could do without any more pressure than they’re already under – again, there’s little evidence that social media relieves rather than creates pressure.

Events such as this one tend always to have a ‘social media is great/interesting/sexy’ panel. But if we are going to see social media as a potential solution to community engagement – that is, a solution that actually produces measurable improvement – perhaps we need to take a step back and consider the research we need to do in order to address the real issues that public sector workers cite every time I get the chance to speak to them.

The Ikon Gallery, in Birmingham City Centre – Image CC by ell-r-brown

I recently had an informal meeting with Ikon, Birmingham’s contemporary arts gallery, where we discussed how they can use social media effectively. Many galleries, museums, and other attractions have profiles in a number of social networks and Ikon is no exception. The main social media activity from Ikon is on Facebook and Twitter where they have developed a fairly active following. The Twitter account is particularly interesting when used to live blog from a series of talks. Encouraged by this initial success (which has come relatively easily), Ikon are keen to push forward and develop a more comprehensive social media strategy. I asked Ikon three key questions, and discussed a number of solutions for them. Ikon are keen for you to add more in the comments below.

Who talks for Ikon through social media channels?

One of the most difficult things to get right when tweeting as an organisation is voice: should Ikon tweet as Ikon, or tweet through individual members of staff? If the latter, then should these staff run a personal and work Twitter, or change their user names to include “Ikon” e.g. @JonHickmanIkon? Here are some options:

1. One organisational Twitter account:
   • This is Ikon’s current approach and is working fairly well, but we were concerned that the Tweets might end up lacking personality and become broadcast in nature.
   • One option on the table is to sign Tweets by the appropriate member of staff, to add a sense of personality to them.
   • Another idea was for the Ikon account to be run by one person as their main account, something similar to the excellent organisational tweeting from OverheardAtMoo.
   • We also discussed being playful with the identity of @IkonGallery: can followers guess who is tweeting at any given time?
2. Tweeting as individuals:
   • This can be problematic because staff are mixing their professional life and personal life.
   • This format also means that should someone leave the organisation, followers travel with them.
3. Personal + Work Twitter:
   • This split personality approach gets over the objection to mixing private and personal thoughts, however it is is difficult to maintain when personal interest and work overlap: which account do you tweet from?
   • This solution doesn’t prevent followers moving with the member of staff, who can change their name (as timesjoanna did when she moved from the Birmingham Post and ceased to be postjoanna). Any social capital generated here is to the individual not the organisation.
   • There was an interesting discussion about mixing private & personal twitter accounts at West by West Midlands (hear the audio, led by Kasper Sorenson)

If you have any thoughts on these approaches please, do add a comment below.

How can Ikon’s social media be more engaging?

At the time of writing, Ikon has generated a Twitter following of 447 and a Facebook fan base of 766. It’s dipping its toe into being conversational with these communities. Answering the question of voice will certainly help to make Ikon more conversational. Current Ikon social media activity merely supports its traditional activity through trnasmission of marketing messages and by live blogging events. I suggested to Ikon that if its social media is to be more engaging it needs to move beyond reporting what is happening, and become the thing that is happening. Essentially this would mean 360° social media arts commissions; a project that would allow public collaboration and participation with the artist. A simple example of this would be for an artist to set a theme for a photographic project, with images collected from the public via Flickr and curated into a physical exhibition by a the resident artist. It is easy to see how this idea can be developed within a number of media, and into something much more in depth.

How would you use social media for collaborative arts? Please do add any thoughts to the comments.

What audiences could Ikon serve through social media?

As the social media audience is still a niche audience, Ikon wanted to know how much effort it should put into this activity. This is especially important if we are to consider a social media arts project as outlined above. I turned this on its head slightly, considering the different groups that Ikon serves or hopes to serve and how they feel about social media:

Members of the public who fall into Group 2 are an easy win: they will be interested in artistic projects and social media projects, and would perceive a lot of benefit from a social media arts project. The objective of a social media arts project might be considered to be to move as many of the potential audience into the Group 2 quadrant. Those in Group 3 are difficult to engage in social media or arts: they have no interest in either aspect. Groups 1 & 4 are potentially the most interesting for Ikon and other arts organisations: they have an interest in one of the two aspects, and this may be enough to get them engaged with a social media arts project. The hope is that then they will reappraise their engagement with arts or social media and continue to explore the newer interest.

The educative possibility of driving people from Group 1 to Group 2 is especially worthy of note. Digital inclusion is high on the government agenda, with several initiatives and policies driving towards the aim of increased online participation. Organisations such as Ikon have an education and community development remit. Driving users towards social media through participatory arts would be a valuable contribution to both organisational aims and the wider agenda of digital participation. This could be delivered through teaming up with social media practitioners and enthusiasts, using the popular surgery format pioneered in Birmingham.

How do you think Ikon could develop audiences and contribute to digital participation? The comments are yours…

A key feature of the learning experience on the MA Social Media is a research blog. I started this blog off with a few entries (some of which run parallel to but provide a different take on posts made to this blog) but our first intake of postgraduate students have now started contributing to the blog. The first two student contributions were made yesterday, and there will be plenty more to follow so do add the blog to your RSS reader. So, Ladies & Gentleman so say hello to Leland Strott and Jigar Patel.

Last month I spent two days in the company of South African social media academic Marlon Parker. Regular readers will remember Marlon from his guest post several months ago. The purpose of the visit was to share thoughts and ideas in the field of social media, and to discuss social media education. We were fortunate that the visit coincided with a number of social media events in Birmingham, which meant I could give Marlon a real flavour of what we do in the West Midlands and I could introduce him to as many contacts as possible in a few short days. So what does an academic and social entrepreneur from Cape Town make of the social media activity in Birmingham? And what could we learn from him? The answer is: “a lot”.

Social Media for Social Good

Marlon’s work is centred around the concept of social media for social good. He works with communities in Cape Town, using social media to tackle difficult social problems in Cape Town. Sceptics might wonder how blogging can help find away through problems such as gang violence and drug dependencies. For Marlon the answer is simple: social media works when there is a community bonded by a common set of circumstances. He works with people who are coping with or trying to escape certain circumstances. There is a tension in this society, but that tension is a bond. Where you have a bond, a set of shared circumstances, you have a community. Where you have a community, social media can be effective. In the video below Marlon outlines his work and his philosophy to Nick Booth of Podnosh / Be Vocal:

Social media used for social good is a common aim of media workers and thinkers in Birmingham, but Marlon’s projects are operating at a level of engagement that we are currently only aiming for. Marlon’s work demonstrates that we can make effective social interventions through technology, and could provide useful evidence when we make this case to policy makers and government agencies.

Social Media in Education

Another area that is something of a Birmingham specialism is social media education. From social media surgeries to my own school’s MA Social Media, we seem to be at the vanguard of this area. Marlon’s own university has aspirations to provide qualifications within this area so a lot of our discussions revolved around social media education.

To this end, I introduced Marlon to Jon Bounds, Stuart Parker and Michael Grimes. They are core members of social enterprise We Share Stuff (I am also a member of the team). A key We Share Stuff project involves using social media to engage young offenders with technology, leading to credit towards formal qualifications through the Open College Network. Marlon was very impressed with this innovation, and is considering introducing it into some of his projects in South Africa by contacting his equivalent of the Open College Network. As a group we also discussed the spectrum of training and qualifications, from Level 1 through to masters degrees, that could come under the social media subject area. We sketched out how these might be applied to real world skills and jobs. While we were not able to come up with any key action points to take this part of the conversation it is something worthy of further consideration.

The Social Media Scene

In addition to meeting with Nick Booth, and The We Share Stuff team, Marlon managed to meet a number of local bloggers and social media workers. Birmingham and the Black Country have a well developed network of regular meetings where the social media community or the wider creative industries community meet up. We were lucky that Marlon’s trip coincided with Brum Bloggers, an evening pub based meeting, and Black Country Social Media Café, a more formal daytime meeting (which happened to be the furthest North Marlon had ever been).

So what did Marlon make of us? Here’s what he has to say over on his blog:

Overall I am very impressed by the level of creative industries involvement in the space of Social Media and It also showed me that here in Birmingham there is a breed of social media people who have such a vast amount of experiences to share and could be useful for others out there to make the trip or connection with any of these amazing individuals who will add value to your social media experience.

I hope we’ll see Marlon again soon, and I’ll be sure to keep up to date with his blogs and his formal publications on social media for social good.