Social Media Surgery at Hello Digital

Yesterday was Hello Digital, Birmingham’s digital event run by the city council and various related bodies. The emphasis was on how local businesses could benefit from adopting digital tools and approaches and part of this was a social media surgery sponsored by Business Link and delivered by Nick Booth at Podnosh. Nick’s been doing social media surgeries for charities and voluntary groups for a year now and I’ve been both participating and watching his development of them with interest since I “invented” them in 2008.

The basic principle is similar to a doctors surgery where someone with a problem that doesn’t necessarily require hospital admission can come in for a short period of time to get advice and treatment. At a social media surgery people get a short period of consultancy to get questions answered, ideas developed or problems solved, allowing them to go away with a bit of clarity and knowledge for where to go next, if anywhere. There’s also a practical, hands-on aspect where people who had never considered running their own website are given a WordPress.com blog (or similar) and shown how to use it, enabling them to do pretty much everything they need to without paying for professional help. This latter part is particularly important for charities, etc but also serves as a way to “try before you buy” for the businesses.

Rather that attend the talks at Hello Digital this year which, to be fair, were aimed at people who haven’t been using this stuff for years, I took up the offer to work the surgeries during the day. Since most of the people I’ve helped in surgeries have been third sector or arts/culture based I wasn’t sure what to expect from the range of attendees at Hello Digital which I assumed would be more commercial in their approach. Some certainly were but all had problems I could understand and help with.

Some of the issues that came up were:

• How to use social media to promote a boat hire brokerage website. (Answer – blog about the boats if they have interesting stories, find forums for boating fanatics and proactively hang out there.)
• How to socially rate educational resources on and off the web but rate the people who are reviewing them. (Answer – look at how Amazon and others rate reviewers / contributors. Also, look at Shelfari as an example of people connecting through ownership of objects. Finally, make sure users have a reason to share their data – think of Delicious which has immediate personal use and secondary community value.)
• How to use a print publication web presence interestingly without taking value from publication. (Answer – think about tapping into other services, eg use What’s On listings from All Brum or photos from Flickr. Maybe provide a portal to the local web curated along the editorial lines of the magazine.)
• How to promote someone producing postcards of the city with the aim of finding a business partner. (Answer – Blog. Tell story of how photos came to be. Postcards are only part of the story. Also, connect with other photographers through Twitter, etc so they can spread word for you. (Don’t worry, advice was more subtle than that!))
• How to promote paid web content (specialist dictionary) without giving it away? (Answer – give bits away, maybe in blog form. Take expertise into forums and promote from there by giving help and advice.)
• How does Google work? (Answer – Anatomy of page, showed it with styles turned off to understand how Google sees it, think about how you know how bits of a printed report are related (title, subtitle, subheadings, contents, etc) and apply to your site, think about writing for a searching audience by using relevant terms, remember Google penalises those who try and game it. Oh, and get a blog so you always have new content and run it on your domain.)
• How to bring all my activities together without distracting from the one thing that generates income. (Answer – Think about splitting web presences (as I do with peteashton.com and this site) and developing a different voice. Look at which activities are relevant to the paying one and bring those in where appropriate. But don’t forget what makes you unique is the combination of things you do and are interested in.)

The questions and answers were a bit more indepth and the above just give a flavour of what we talked about. Most of it was a discussion rather than a simple question and answer session and success was leaving them with questions in their heads which were more informed than before. Unless they were being polite everyone I helped said it had been useful, which was great. By the end I was pretty much buzzing, partly from having spent 7 hours thinking and talking but also from the sense of having actually done something useful that day (as opposed to sitting though another “Using Twitter for Business” panel – not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with them but I’ve probably had my fill). It was then that I resolved to do more Doing than Talking in future – it’s much more rewarding. (I know my doing often involves talking but I feel I’ve been talking within a bubble a bit too much this year and it’d be good to get out.)

Nick has made running social media surgeries part of the Podnosh business and after yesterday I suspect he’s looking at ways to broaden the market he offers them to. The Third Sectors ones are usually staffed by volunteers so for a more commercial environment folk would need to get paid (as I did yesterday) but I think we proved the value of giving this level of advice to a large number of people. If you’re interested in offering something like this, get in touch with him.

As for Hello Digital itself, the surgery took place on a different floor to the rest of the event which meant we were a little isolate with no passing traffic. Since a few people missed their appointments (probably clashed with panels) we could have taken ad-hoc patients if they knew what was going on. We might also have gotten volunteer surgeons for short periods of time to complement the full time ones. The surgery could also have been flagged after each panel as somewhere to find out more.

And personally it’s got me thinking about doing my own surgery again. Maybe when Fazeley Studios gets its cafe I’ll set up in there once a week for an hour or two. It’d be good to get that buzz once a week.