Last night I attended the first ever Brighton Social Media Surgery – a rather special if small event that marks an important landmark for a number of reasons.

• For one, it’s the start of an important phase of the We Live Here project which is aiming to usher in a new relationship between the public, voluntary and community sectors in Brighton and Hove.
• It’s also one of the first surgeries to have taken place since the Social Media Surgeries were honoured with a Prime Minister’s Big Society Award.
• And, from a personal perspective, it feels like it rubber-stamps by big-money transfer to Public-i from Podnosh – the firm that through the enormous largesse, industry and general brilliance of its creator, Nick Booth, has made the surgeries the success they are.

OK, so I was slightly lying about ‘big money’ bit, but the rest is absolutely true – and being involved in social media surgeries (which I first blundered into in Fazeley Studios in Birmingham – as it happens without a computer and could only lend a hand moving the desks) has been a source of enormous enjoyment and reward for me. So getting the chance to become involved as a surgeon in my new home town is, frankly, fabulous.

Enough of the gushing… Now for the surgery…

The We Live Here project will be holding surgeries in the three pilot communities it’s running in. Two of these, Hangleton and Knoll and Brunswick and Regency, are geographical; the third, the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities in Brighton is obviously rather harder to define.

For that reason, Susie Latta – the surgery organiser, held the first one in the Black and Minority Ethnic Community Partnership building, which is at 10A Fleet Street. Here’s a map!

We sat in the foyer of the BMECP and, while I was a little late, Anthony Zacharzewski was able to help out three patients with Twitter (that’s Anthony in the picture above) – with this account for for Forward Facing created. Please give ‘em a follow!

When Anthony went, I took over and helped Bert Williams of Brighton and Hove Black History to learn a little more about how he’d be able to use QR codes as part of his work. Bert holds tours of our city that devle into the remarkable role people of different ethnic backgrounds have played in Brighton’s history. As ever, being a surgeon was as much a learning experince as it was an opportunity to impart my own knowledge: I found out from Bert that – much to my surprise – the Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) had visited Brighton while in exile!

For details of surgeries visit the Social Media Surgery website. The next one in Brighton will be on the 27th of February 2012 and there’ll be one in Hangleton and Knoll on the 29th of February.

SHARE THIS POST: (I’ve cross-posted this piece on my own blog and on the Public-i blog. Please re-post it to your own blog if you want to tell people about the surgeries – and modify for your audience, but please link back to the orginal and attribute the post. Thanks!)

Tags:

• BMECP
• Brighton
• Democratic Society
• Podonosh
• Social Media Surgeries
• We Live Here

As part of a series of posts about our Social Media Audits, we’ll be providing examples of how we tackled each project and the benefits it helped to establish for our clients. This first example is from the Cambridgeshire Renewable Infrastructure Framework, and it tells the story of how we used the audit to introduce our then client, Cambridgeshire Horizons, to the online community of people talking about renewable energy in the county.

The challenge
Cambridgeshire Horizons was commissioned in 2010 to identify the future energy needs of the county and how this could be supported by renewable energy delivery. The project, known as Cambridgeshire Renewables Infrastructure Framework (CRIF) would set out how the county should increase its renewable-energy capacity. Horizons asked Public-i to engage residents, business and the public sector in a complex and politically sensitive project that would involve discussing divisive issues, including things like wind-turbine development.

The strategy
We set out to provide what we called a ‘digitally led’ engagement strategy. This would start by finding people online who were already interested in renewable energy, before involving these individuals in developing and informing the project and helping to take the message of the CRIF to communities across the county.

Finding online communities
By working closely with our client to understand Cambridgeshire’s geographical, social and political make-up, Public-i devised a taxonomy to pick out social-web conversations about renewable energy and related subjects. We then qualified and codified these results before looking in detail at the results, which included identifying the individuals behind the groups and offering analysis of the conversations. Finally, we developed an overall strategy for engaging with these groups and individuals.

The audit provided value for the client in several different ways:-

• The community: Public-i provided a detailed breakdown of the people using social media to talk about renewable energy – finding the real individuals behind online groups and personas. We considered the relationships between them, using social network analysis, to identify who were the most well-networked and helpful to the engagement process.
• The numbers: The audit offered a statistical analysis of the activity for Cambridgeshire Horizons to help determine the best ways to communicate and engage with the online audience. In total, the audit found more than 300 websites and social media identities that were relevant to the project.
  • Catherine Howe estimated the reach that we gained as a direct result of using the Social Media Audit as the basis for the communication and engagement strategy.

    Estimated Potential Reach:-

    • Reachable followers on Twitter: 14,000
    • Members of Facebook groups: 19,300
    • 34 hyperlocal websites – if we estimate reach of 300 people then that’s an audience of 10,200
    • 20 significant individuals who are communicating to many more people
• Providing insight: The audit found positive and negative conversations – offering an understanding of the strength of feeling for and against renewable energy and shedding light on the views these groups had and how they might affect the engagement.
• Helping offline engagment: The audit was able to help us establish people who were able to carry the message of the CRIF to offline as well as online networks and communities.
• Joining the conversation: By carefully coding the results, we could see not just who was talking but could understand more about what they were saying. This enabled the CRIF team to join in existing conversations – and ensure the message was relevant to their audience.

What happened:-

• The results from the Social Media Audit became the backbone for the engagement strategy. The CRIF project team invited those who were found online to a series of engagement events – which the client feels were invaluable in helping to build a relationship between the public and the project.
• Public-i developed a blog and used its Citizenscape platform to collect social media activity from the people that we found to help to continue and bolster the engagement process.
• More events are planned, with the CRIF expected to be delivered in early 2012.

What the client says
Sheryl French was the project leader for the CRIF, working first for Cambridgeshire Horizons and then Cambridgeshire County Council, when the project transferred to the local authority’s control. She says that the audit has proved an invaluable tool for the CRIF team in discovering who the communities they need to engage with are.

She says: “At the start of our project we knew that engaging with our local community online was important, but we only really knew the most prolific and vocal few in our area.

“The social media audit identified the potential for online dialogue in our area and was an invaluable insight into how local residents use social media and what topics they’re actually discussing, and therefore interested in. We are now able to harness this ‘people power’ to help spread our project messages further.

“It has also been good to meet the online enthusiasts face to face. Without the social media audit we would have been blind to these discussions and these important people.”

Now
Our work on the CRIF itself is now at an end: The CRIF report, the culmination of this stage of the project, has been written and handed to decision makers at Cambridgeshire Local Authorities, the Environment Agency and representatives from the Developer and Registered Social Landlords . That report incorporates a huge effort, from all of the people involved in the CRIF – those who were part of the project team, as well as the many people brought into the process from the three pathways – community, business and public sector.

Improvement East, which part funded the CRIF alongside Housing Growth Funds, has since commissioned Public-i to develop a case study so that the strategy we’ve developed for the CRIF becomes a replicable programme for engagement and consultation work elsewhere. We’re looking forward to that case study becoming available soon – and we’ll keep you up to date on what happens here on the blog.

It’s allowed us to look at everything we’ve done on the CRIF – in terms of the engagement and how the SMA helped that process (often in unexpected ways!). While this post makes some of that clear, we’re still learning and I’d love to hear if other people have any thoughts on this kind of process – would you use it? Could the SMA help in other ways?

Tags:

• blogging
• Cambridgehshire
• Cambridgeshire Horizons
• CRIF
• Improvement East
• Local government
• Online Communities
• Renewable Energy
• Social Media Audits

It’s been up for a while on the Wired Sussex site, but I thought it might be worthwhile reminding people that we’re looking for a sales support administrator.

The deadline for applications is the 5th of February, 2012, so you’ll have to hurry if you’re interested.

As the advert makes clear, we’re looking to appoint someone who can help our sales and account management team with their work on Public-i’s range of products.

• Booking client account management meetings and associated travel arrangements
• Tracking and reporting on client renewal dates
• Assistance with conference booking and follow-up administration
• Completion of invoice request forms
• Assisting with sales team expenses
• Assisting the sales team with ensuring the CRM System is accurate and up to date
• Providing general administrative support to the Sales and Account Management Team

We want someone who has good organisational and administrative skills, who’ll be joining a team looking forward to a very exciting year.

Find out all about the role here and, if you’re interested in applying, email Jane Purcell at recruitment@public-i.info.

Tags:

• Brighton
• Job Ad
• Jobs
• Local Governement
• Public-i Products

Over the last year at Public-i, we’ve worked hard to develop a new product, the Social Media Audit – which we’re now ready to start talking about a bit more on the blog. That’ll take the form of a few case studies – and we’ll share them as they arrive. But for the moment I thought it might be helpful to take you through what the audit is, by way of an introduction.

What is a Social Media Audit?

For the uninitiated, the Social Media Audit is really a piece of consultancy research in which we carry out a detailed search of a client’s social media communities, providing them with a picture of these communities and advice on how best to engage with them. The ‘development’ I make reference to is really the work we’ve put in to creating a number of things:-

• A methodology, which we’re pretty sure is unique. It takes information about our clients and applies it through search terms to social media and then qualifies this data.
• A Social Media Audit tool, which we use to undertake the searches for us.
• A refined project management process that ensures a swift delivery of the audit, but also allows our clients to play an active part in the audit and see a clear route at the end to developing a relationship with the public that really responds to the opportunities social media provides.

It’s unique, but why?

Well, there are three reasons…

1. It’s dedicated to our market (public-sector, governmental clients).
2. It’s focused on civic content and civic content creators (i.e. the folk who are most important in creating civic content).
3. Its chief aim is a co-productive relationship where social media is a tool to helping the public and public sector solve problems together.

So… while there are lots of people out there claiming to find the valuable conversations that involve you online, they’re not necessarily going to help you make decisions – not on their own. We take the view that what’s important for our clients is understanding how the connections between your organisation and the public can be enhanced by social media and how that’s really a learning process.

It’s about understanding how the rules have changed and the implications those rule changes have in terms of resourcing, best practice and strategy. And it’s about the people. Because social media is just a means to make contact and share information with people, it needs an approach that concentrates on those people – and we think that’s about identifying the key individuals who are now operating online and how you can build a new kind of co-productive relationship with them.

Telling you about the audits

We’ve carried out audits in quite a few places, so over the next few months we’ll be introducing some of the stories behind those audits – what we’ve acheived, what has happened as a result of the work and how and why they were undertaken. We have a growing list of clients, which includes:-

• Cambridgeshire Renewables Infrastructure Framework – as part of delivering the engagement work package for Cambridgeshire Horizons
• East Sussex and Sussex Police
• Wolverhampton City Council and West Midlands Police
• Cumbria County Council and Police
• South Cambridgeshire

I hope to give you the stories behind each of these client’s audit in the next few months – so we can help people to better understand their value and what they can lead to.

Find out more

We’re always keen to talk to people about the audit (that’s while we’ll be writing about them – and as much as anything it’s about learning more), then please leave a comment or get in touch with us.

Tags:

• Civic Creators
• co-production
• CRIF
• Cumbria
• East Sussex
• Local Governement
• Online Communities
• Social Media Audits
• social web
• Solace Summit 2011
• South Cambridgeshire
• Sussex Police
• Transparency
• West Midlands Police
• Wolverhampton

We’re looking to take on some freelance developers to help us with specific projects that will start from mid-February onwards. We’ve just put an advertisement out for these positions and I’ve copy-and-pasted the details below just in case you’re interested, or want to pass on the information to someone who might be!

The ad starts: Public-i has worked with government at a local level for the last 10 years in order to create innovative and practical projects that deliver democratic and social value. We’re not an agency – we build software products that really connect with the way in which our market thinks and what it needs.

By involving our clients at each stage of our service development and delivery we hope to achieve our vision of delivering innovative solutions combined with excellent client service that exceed our clients’ expectations – and you can help us achieve our vision.

We are looking for three freelance developers to help us with specific projects, which will commence mid February 2012 and be finished by the end of June 2012.

Specifically we are looking for:-

• One Windows C# Developer
• One front-end PHP Web Developer
• One back-end PHP Web Developer

You should be enthusiastic and hard working and be available to commit to working within the Public-i offices for the duration of the contract. Payment will be between £120 to £180 per day depending on previous experience, knowledge and the project assignment. Please email your CV and a covering letter along with any relevant additional information to Jane Purcell at recruitment@public-i.info

Tags:

• Brighton
• C#
• Developer
• Freelance
• Job Ad
• Jobs
• PHP
• Windows