How useful has social media been today?

(Pic via Pete Ashton)

This isn’t yet another post banging on about how great socia media is, ok? It’s a glorified links round-up. Sure, I might want to prove a point, but it’s mainly a round-up of useful scraps of info.

Just wanted to make that clear.

For a bit of background, the Birmingham Post printed a piece by John Lamb, Birmingham Chamber of Commerce’s Press & PR Manager, today in which he castigated social media – seemingly Facebook updates in particular (although Twitter and MySpace got a mention too). Dave Harte and Jason Hall have pretty much covered my thoughts on the matter.

Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with giving social media a kicking if it’s done right, but John Lamb’s attempt was so clumsy and unbalanced that I’ve been moved to provide some redress.

So, as John cherry-picked the most banal things he heard via social networks (mainly Facebook, I think) over the past week, so I’ve picked out the most useful things I’ve discovered via Twitter in the past 24 hours.

Let the banality begin:

• More Canals Than Venice is a new blog about art and culture in Birmingham (via @bounder)
• Fusions is a space for organisations or individuals to explore new, potential projects, forge partnerships and share funding opportunities (via @wesharestuff)
• The Birmingham Bead Shop is setting up at the Custard Factory (just down the road from my office) and blogging about it (via @getgood)
• In other Custard Factory news, Rooty’s is being refitted and there’s been mention of ‘fine dining’ (via @stevegerrard)
• I could, if I wanted, watch a live stream of today’s AmbITion event in Bristol (via @hadleypaul)
• Karl Binder is developing a website for enabling collaborative writing projects. The working title is Screenbound (via @karlbinder)
• The RSC have a photography-related event with Ellie Kurttz at their open day on Sunday 19 July (via @amyclarke_uk)
• Birmingham Royal Ballet’s press officer now has a Twitter profile (via @tmstvns)
• I saw a frankly hilarious video of Sepp Blatter falling over (via @lovelychaos)
• There’s a bloggers/tweeters/whateverers meet-up in Birmingham on Monday. Birmingam Chamber folk welcome, I’m sure (via @peteashton)
• Following a visit to Birmingham the other week, Citilab Barcelona are arranging their first social media clinic for Sept/Oct (via @cataspanglish)
• The Art of With asks and answers the question – “what do the advent of the web, collaborative practice and open source ways of working mean for the arts and art organisations?” (via @clarered)
• I got some nice responses to my message that I’m off teaching in Guyana this summer
• Tonight’s episode of The Home Show features a guy who looks a bit like me. Only chunkier (via @editorialgirl)

Actually, I’ve only gone back five hours but I reckon that’s plenty.

Of course, I’m not saying everything in that list would be of interest to everyone, just me – but then I follow people who interest me. Seeing as how all social media does is help people to communicate, perhaps John Lamb’s real problem is his network.

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Problems with Facebook revisited

Back in November I wrote a post saying that, on its own, Facebook is no good for promoting events. Irritatingly I have an example of one of the problems I mentioned.

The next Birmingham Social Media Cafe event is tomorrow, Friday 27 February. There’s a BSMC Facebook group and now would be a good time to send out a reminder of the event to its members. However, if you try to go to that group you see:

We’ve no idea why this has happened, how long it will be unavailabe or whether it’ll come back at all. There certainly hasn’t been any breach of any terms of usage. If the group is deleted permanently there’s really nothing we can do except start over again.

As I said before, Facebook’s a great tool for organising events and spreading info but (and this goes for all 3rd party website apps/services) if you’re in for the long haul then it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. In the case of the BSMC there’s a (new!) mailing list and the website to help get information about the event out.

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Facebook is no good for promoting events on its own

At the conference for Student Union Events Officers the other day I was asked if it’s a bad idea to promote an event solely via Facebook. I said yes, and gave a few reasons but I think it’s worth being a little more comprehensive.

As I see it, the problems are:

• You limit yourself to people with Facebook accounts – not everyone has signed up
• Some workplaces ban access to Facebook
• Your info won’t be found by a Google search
• URLs for items in Facebook are long, ugly number-stuffed things – not the sort of thing you’d want on a poster or flyer
• You have no control over your content and can’t back it up easily. What if your profile is deleted?
• Your group/event/page looks just like everyone elses – not excitingly creative is it?
• Facebook isn’t futureproof. Chances are you didn’t use it a couple of years ago – chances are you won’t be using it in a couple of years time

A couple of provisos:

• Of course I’d encourage people to use Facebook to promote their events – there are several great features to use there and, after all, you should go where the people are
• One size doesn’t fit all – it might be perfectly sensible to promote your event solely through Facebook

However, in most cases I’d definitely advise against using it excusively. The problems listed above can all be avoided by getting your own website (blogs work well for this and have the added bonus of being free).

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