Helping a city.

(GBR) MediaSnackers is meeting today with the Nottingham Cultural Consortium, a group of leading arts & cultural bodies/organisations to assist in the development of their online gateway to promote the citys’ cultural offer.

Nottingham has a wonderfully vibrant cultural scene but up until now there is no single resource for listings which exists like in other cities. We’ll be helping them develop one using social media…

Not too many details at this time although we will of course keep you updated here as it’s going to be an ongoing project for us.

MediaSnackers Consulting

Click here.

(WAL) I’m honoured to be invited to share the stage today with (past client) S4C for the Click Here session at the Celtic Media Festival.

We’ve had a great deal of positive response in the wake of DK’s presentation – it really charged up the day for many of the festival goers. A timely reminder to us all of the speed of change with which each new facet is developed, adopted and subsequently owned. Thanks again from S4C for giving us all such a zesty overview of peoples multiplatform habits and appetites.

Meirion Davies, Head of Content, S4C

Related gig: S4C Masterclass

MediaSnackers Speaking/Masterclass

The hub for learning and virtual worlds monthly podcast series.

(WORLD) The twenty ninth RezEd monthly podcast, produced by MediaSnackers with Global Kids.

Featuring an interview with Ted Tagami, vice president for business development for Smallworlds plus a roundtable discussion with representatives from four countries (Brazil, France, Turkey and Japan) discussing how they use virtual worlds.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

0.00—0.24 intro
0.25—2.51 RezEd news with Rik and Amira at Global Kids (any news or events can be submitted here)
2.52—4.57 intro/overview of Smallworlds
4.58—6.07 merging of the ‘social graph’ into a virtual world
6.08—7.51 use of the platforms
7.52—9.25 who the platform is for
9.26—10.26 community and application
10.27—11.52 visibility
11.53—12.15 outro/thanks
13.07—14.17 intro/overview of participants
14.18—15.19 Brazil use of virtual worlds
15.20—16.54 France
16.55—20.22 Turkey
20.23—22.12 Japan
22.13—22.31 thanks (in all the languages)
22.32—25.19 Rik and Amira detailing the upcoming events for the RezEd community (any news or events can be submitted here)
25.20—25.27 outro

Subscribe directly through iTunes by clicking on this icon (download iTunes for free here).

Not using iTunes? Then just copy / paste this feed and drop it into your aggregating software.

Want to suggest someone or put your virtual hand-up to be interviewed? Then get in touch here.

Devour our other podcasts.

Award winners into ambassadors.

(GBR) This morning I’m delivering a 75mins session to a group of past Philip Lawrence Awards winners who are getting together to discuss becoming ambassadors for the project.

I’ll be giving a short presentation and then a masterclass to illustrate the uses of social media as a platform for telling their story.

Thanks so much for the session at the reunion. It was really thought provoking and has already got some of the past winners up and interested in using social media platforms to tell their story – more to come I’m sure. A real highlight of the weekend.

Cheryl Aughton, Events Manager, 4Children

Thanks to 4Children for the invite to participate and who are the organisers of the event.

MediaSnackers Speaking/Masterclass

Getting creative.

(GBR) Barney, Matt & I were in London yesterday at Kings Place (our ongoing music/arts/cultural-venue client).

For the first half of the afternoon we liaised with Kings Place educational outreach worker and worked with a group of eight media students from St Marylebone School and challenged them to create digital stories in and around the venue (thanks to Judi for bringing them).

Check out some of their work on the blog we created specifically for the day (all the content you see was created in under 2 hours).

Kings Place team had another great day with MediaSnackers who are helping us explore and utilise new web platforms and concepts. The outreach project with our local school was outstandingly successful and we’re hoping to feature the content created on the day on our website.

Peter Millican, CEO, Kings Place

The second half of the afternoon we worked with the venues’ team again exploring socal media platforms and strategies plus bringing a host of social media goodies and ideas for their operations.

Related Kings Place posts

MediaSnackers Consulting

MediaSnackers Alumni

The MediaSnackers Alumni are a growing number of past clients that could just disappear into the ether if we didn’t catch up with them. This is exactly what we’re doing! We decided to hunt down and grill them to find out what difference their training had made in the way they work professionally and personally. Each month we plan on showcasing the thoughts and insights from one such individual, next up Sarah Ogle from Everyman Playhouse in Liverpool:

Who do you work for, what’s your role and what sort of things do you do?
I’m Sarah and head up the team responsible for Communications and Sales at two of Liverpool’s most famous theatres (the Everyman and Playhouse).

The team works to encourage new audiences and existing audiences to engage with our work on and off stage. We use the usual marketing mix of direct marketing, print, advertising, utilising the press and increasingly online activity.

Its been a month or so since you have been drenched in the MediaSnackers ‘way’, what did you learn from the experience?
This is where the wondrous Mediasnackers team stepped in and really opened our eyes and a whole new world!

Personally it made me realise that the web wasn’t quite the scary place where I needed lots of geeky knowledge, but that with a bit of expert know-how (in particular the world of wordpress, animoto and ustream) a lot could be achieved with not much money but plenty of ideas.

We wanted as many young people as possible to engage with the production and the results speak for themselves… 40% of tickets were sold to under 26s and we have a fantastically talented team of young digital journalists about to join our newly formed Young People’s Forum.

How have other members of the team/organisation, that didn’t attend the course, received your new techniques?
For the theatres it meant we could engage with a whole new audience with our production of Proper Clever – a new play for young people by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

What has been the biggest and easiest change to make in the way that you work?
The biggest change in the way we work has been largely down to the staff who have moved on since the project, which has meant we’ve had to put some of our plans on hold. We’d hoped to create a similar blog site for our Billy Wonderful tour, but due to time pressures we settled on utilizing twitter instead.

The easiest change is really in attitude… we’re much more likely to say ‘let’s try it’.

Has there been any difficulty in implementing these new approaches?
We’ve still got a few issues around equipment and our wi-fi connection (!?!!) but we’ve been ‘Tweeting’ about our show Billy Wonderful as its toured schools and community centres across the region and are looking forward to doing more and more.

The Mediasnackers approach also made me think again when I restructured the team and now the ‘newbies’ are all in place we’re starting to try different things out.

What future projects do you have planned which utilise social media?
Apart from ‘tweeting’ about Billy Wonderful, we’re looking at utilising social media more as we develop our youth forum and we’re starting to think about how we might use it for a production coming up in the autumn.

Thanks again Mediasnackers.

Thank you Sarah Ogle

See all MS Alumni interviews here

Where we’re at?

Designs for the website has been finalised and the developers notified—hopefully they are eagerly figuring out how to make this not just work, but work beautifully, be a work of art and something they are very proud of indeed.

As the last post just introduced the project, I’ll use this post to go into a little more detail:

In an attempt to document the emotional reaction to Internet usage among 13-19 year olds, we thought about getting a number of postcards created, asking for a response to a simple statement ‘The web makes me feel…’ and the reason ‘why?’.

Simple enough? Well, you’d think so, but its taken quite a while to weigh up the pro’s and con’s of asking such a seemingly obvious / vague question.

We’ve thrown around the exact wording, changed it a number of times, and considered whether it is worth doing at all. But every way we turned, the more the signals turned back to ‘yes’.

The reason why it has to be this simple, is because we:

• want to see what comes back
• don’t want to assume we know what will come back and
• its the most simplest thing (web related) that we can think of asking.

Obviously we could have made things much more complex, but this is a pro-bono project remember and there’s always next year. In fact, its probably a trial run for what might be a much bigger experiment in 2010.

Yesterday I received a box of a thousand postcards, all crisp, stacked and fresh off the guillotine. The next stage is to start the distribution of the cards to past clients and selected individuals. For those that are thinking, ‘guys you’re killing the planet with old media postcards!’—we’re not. They’re all 100% recycled and the ‘old media’ format is essential for our grand plan later on down the production line (which I’ll tell you about another time).

These postcards will be sent out to people that work directly with young people and can guarantee they complete and return them to us. We’re not looking to throw out a thousand and cross our fingers that a percentage come back—nope, all out, all back, that’s the plan. In order to achieve that, we may have to dangle a very attractive carrot in front of all the people who opt to take part.

If you are one of these people, and are interested in receiving some cards and being part of this exclusive project then please comment below stating how many young people you can reach or drop us a message here (UK only—next year we’re hoping worldwide).

More on that next time, until then, I’m going to need several dozen envelopes and whole lot of stamps.

View all The Web Makes Me Feel updates

Keeping track of the growing MediaSnackers Meme.

(WORLD) We probably weren't the first to apply the 'snacking' metaphor to media, although there seems to be a growing adoption in terms of describing the new youth-media landscape—we thought it would be good to keep an eye on the growing MediaSnacking meme:

The technology is rapidly changing. In order for us to remain current and advise our clients on how to successfully navigate Web communities and engage in meaningful dialogue, we have to be 10 steps ahead. Here are some terms that I thought were interesting and would keep you ahead of the curve… (MediaSnackers was one of them)

Exploring whether PR needs some new vocabulary.

I call my behavior "media snacking." If I have time I’ll snack on different stuff from around the Internet.

The Scobleizer waxing lyrical about his media habits.

As the Web’s leading purveyor of bite-sized video, YouTube created a world of media snackers. It’s a sit-forward experience for the most part, done at desks, offices and cubicles.

Exploring video on the web.

It certainly plays to the whole media snacking/bite-size media thing. Plus at 96 seconds long, downloads won’t take forever and won’t cost a fortune. Sure, streaming would be better, but seems like a viable interim option.

A reaction to Nokias video plans.

There are also smaller external factors (+that add up) outside of Twitter’s control and effects that are capturing attention to the website as well. Things like; short attention span of digital natives and their desire to "media snack", the economy (no really, I mean it) and the continual growth of the power of the "status update".

How media snacking is fast becoming mainstream

View all ‘MediaSnackers Meme’ posts

Toxic.

(WORLD) Social media is pure evil.

It’s wrecking our minds.

Giving us lumps.

The internet is the fuel for teenage aggression, which is probably the cause of the one in three kids cyberbullying victims whilst the other two are probably cyberbullying the one in seven teachers.

It’s got so bad this social networking stuff that governments are issuing guidelines because you know it’s only going to lead to more evil when half of young people surf unsupervised, plus, even though there are hardly any kids on it MP’s think Twitter should be controlled

The only next logical answer is to cut off all the plugs, burn the computers and confiscate then bury all mobiles phones.

Social media is pure evil.

If you didn’t already please reread the above with a sarcastic satirical tone.

Where are they?

(WORLD) Mark and I were discussing recently why Twitter is not popular with young people.

Here’s our take:

• it’s not feature-rich: sure you can add friends and follow plus DM or reply but apart from the 140 character update option you can’t do anything else (in comparison to other social networking sites young people populate)
• the service exists: it’s fast been integrated into the aforementioned sites as standard
• it’s already populated by adults: it’s the same as young people getting into Bowls (even if it was fun it’s already dominated by another generation so not cool by association)

NB: I tweeted the same question out to my network and here’s what @m_as, @innovativeteach, @davestacey, @timdavies, @rohdesign, @ianbetteridge, @c_and_t think.

Leave a comment below on your take on why young people are not all over Twitter…

MediaSnackers on Twitter