The traditional perception with Birmingham is that we do plenty of creative and cultural things but we don’t like to shout about it. Cllr Martin Mullaney has pointed out several times during this City Of Culture bid that as a city we have very low levels of cultural engagement per head of population. I was determined in my role as Social Media Manager to increase engagement and prove that, given the right platform, we would shout about it.

My first day on the job involved working on the 24hour Blog run by Jon Bounds. We received a phenomenal amount of contribution to the Posterous site in a 24 hour period. Since then our engagement was spread across Facebook, Twitter and the main website.

When monitoring other shortlisted cities social media activities it was interesting to discover their bids were mainly limited to Facebook. We on the other hand had a much larger amount of Twitter followers. Today it passed the 1000 mark.

Only eight people were allowed to present the Birmingham’s case to the judging panel in Liverpool, we wanted to increase our presence. Birmingham had plans to take a Battle Bus which would stage cultural flashmobs around Liverpool on the day.

Public Relations Manager Geoff Coleman mentioned doing something similar to 24hour blog and I pitched the idea of using Cover It Live as a scrolling commentary which could be displayed ‘in the room’. It was important to gather all the different threads across multiple platforms. I also thought it was an ideal opportunity to make a virtual event out of our final submission. I passionately stated at the time,

“Can I just say that Birmingham’s strength as a digital city is one of our greatest assets and it would be doing ourselves a great disservice not to do something really innovative.”

I’m pleased to say that it was a success, there were around 900 messages of support over the period, and the Council Site where Cover It Live was embedded reported a spike of over 1000 unique users.

@Katchoo has blogged about what it was like to be involved in the event. A point well made was that it wasn’t just the usual people mentioning the same things. The real success of the event came from the variety of comments, the amount of people involved and the many cultural things Birmingham offers. We’re a culturally rich city that deserves recognition. And for once we really shouted about it.

Following a meeting with Auro and Clément at the beginning of April, I managed to sort some dates to come down and cover activities at Village Underground. Before I came down it was important to have some social media networks more sorted.

Village Underground now has a Twitter Account, a YouTube channel, and a Flickr site. I’ve also been overhauling their Facebook and Myspace presence. At the simplest level this has meant using all the logos and backgrounds so branding is carried across all elements. It also means effectively pulling content from elsewhere and thinking about re-distribution.

Raw Material
You may have noticed from my last post on Posterous that I had more plans for extra platforms. However, after I met with Raw Material I decided that this isn’t the best solution.

Raw Material will be responsible for adding content across these sites after I’ve finished and they weren’t interested in unnecessarily complicating the brand. Because I was pulling all the current channels over a hectic weekend prior to my VU residency, I did perhaps hastily name some of these sites. For example Village Underground’s Twitter identity may get changed due to ‘VillUnderLondon’ not showing up in search results. The small following built purely through re-enlivening Facebook and following Twitter mentions was also balked at and doubtless audience figures will rapidly increase in the professional hands of Raw Material. I hope it will be better than this Insight screen grab of previous Facebook Group activity.

They also particularly questioned the need to have a real presence on audio sharing platforms such as Audioboo or even Sound Cloud. Auro wanted to put mixes of club nights online but Firgas from Raw Material mentioned PRS “would be all over it.” Firgas also doubted there would be much interest in detailed musical playlists or podcasts as VU’s music doesn’t have a particular sound. Instead of creating Spotify or Last FM playlists, I added a playlist of forthcoming acts to Myspace.

We also chatted about using video clips of live performance. We decided the best decision here was to take down if asked. Any full length interviews and performances that take place in one of the Village Underground driver cabs will need a separate release form. I will post separately about this material or you’ll probably see content pop up on all the channels mentioned.