Tag Archives: research

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Social Media use in the West Midlands: some stats, some caution

A while back I wondered out loud if there was much research about social media use in regions or localities:

tweet

It got quite a bit of retweeting by both local goverment workers I know and by social media consultants, so it had a decent enough reach. Despite that I didn’t get a reply other than a couple saying they’d be interested themselves in the data if I found any. Of course that isn’t to say none exists, just people I know didnt have any to hand.

The reason I tweeted was twofold. Firstly I’d been looking at Dan Slee’s presentation that he gave at a national government IT event. Dan quotes quite a few stats around social media use as part of the rationale for using Social Media as part of his professional practice within a local authority. He makes this assertion:

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I’m unsure of the source for the figures for facebook but presumably it’s extrapolated from the earlier quoted figure of 26 million facebook users nationally (now at 29.7m). The population of Walsall is 253,499 (2001 census). So whilst a third of the UK population uses Facebook, 88% of people in Walsall seem to use it.

That didn’t seem right.

My second reason for asking for local social media research was because I knew some was about to be completed for the West Midlands. An internal piece of research by Centro was looking at how to plan future media campaigns and how much note they should take of recent digital developments. So the research was to look at the correlation between public transport use and digital technology take-up.

My wife was key in putting the report together and she’s let me have a copy of it (PDF). Before we look at some findings let’s have some caveats although the survey is pretty confident so to speak. 2061 interviews were conducted across the West Midlands, a sample of this size has a margin of error of +/- 2.2% at a 95% confidence level. The data was weighted to each district (of which Walsall was one) so that the same number proportion were surveyed in Walsall as they were in Birmingham. Gender split was even, class split was even (to give it the lingo: ABC1s, well-off folk and C2DEs, poor folk).

  • Caveat 1: when you get to the districts the numbers are fairly low. In Walsall the sample was 207.
  • Caveat 2: Although the survey was to a quota (it tried to ask the same amount of young people as old people), that quota was for the region as a whole. So it may be that in the districts there’s a slight unevenness across age, gender and class.
  • Caveat 3: under 16s weren’t interviewed, they never are in these things.

Oh and you have to see past all the stuff about buses. In summary, young people and old people use buses and in general they are C2DEs. But onward. Here are some findings for the West Midlands Metropolitan County only about Social Media use:

  • Of those surveyed, 41% used Facebook weekly or more often, 21% used YouTube and 6% Twitter, 2% MySpace.
  • Younger respondents were the most regular users of social networking sites especially Facebook (83%, weekly).
  • Few respondents over the age of 44 used social network sites, this was particularly the case for the over 65’s (6%)
  • Men slightly outpaced women in all forms of use of the internet, while ABC1 use was more regular than C2DE
  • Females (42%, weekly) were slightly more regular Facebook users than males (39%, weekly) while male respondents were more likely than females to use Twitter (7%) and YouTube (25%).

But what about Walsall? That 88% figure? Well the ONS tell us that only 77% of West Midlands folk are internet users (Q1 2011 data .xls file, the stat is buried in table 2) compared to a national average of 82.2%. The Centro district info (caveats above) tells us that for Walsall the figure drops to 66% (poor old Sandwell is a mere 62%). Of that 66% (167,309 people), 54% use Facebook more than once a week. The upshot is, 36% of the entire population of Walsall, about 91,000 people, access Facebook more than once a week.

That’s a lot of people. It’s not 222,00 people, it’s less than half of that, but it’s still a lot. Further, they are predominantly young people. Indeed, across the West Midlands 83% of young people who access the internet use Facebook more than once a week.

So here’s my point. The figures stack up. They’re convincing in their own right and suggest that there’s a generation that is at ease with this technology across a range of devices. For Centro it actually creates a dilemma. Bus users are old and young – both ends of the digital divide. What to do? More cool digital stuff to keep the kids happy and attract more ABC1s out of their cars? What about the OAPs, of whom only 27% have internet access?

Centro’s marketing is now fairly informed. The headline figures used by Walsall seem uninformed – they’re over-extrapolated. And I worry about that. I worry that in local government there’s a tendency to want to create solutions ahead of doing the research. Research can be dull (I’m surprised you’re still reading), but it allows for targeted interventions. I wonder how much the sometimes very  cool social media activities produced within local gov (some listed here) amount to anything more than marketing exercises. Typical of me of course but I’d like to seem a more cautionary, better informed approach. Less of the quick wins, less of the gimmicks and more solutions that target the citizens you need to reach.

I was going to talk about twitter but it’s pretty much a minority activity  (of the 207 people surveyed in Walsall only 23 used and it’s very much for young, male, ABC1s). Also tweetathons and their benefits or otherwise are discussed elsewhere.

Thanks to Mrs H for access to the stats and for making sure I made clear the confidence level of the research but also its caveats – she rocks.

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Birmingham’s Creative Industries – the ‘business case’

Whilst admiring the yellow courgettes growing on my allotment yesterday I thought to myself: “someone should really write a blog post about Birmingham’s Creative Industries and the whole Local Economic Partnerships thing. Hey, that’s something I could write about”. Fortunately, Chris Unitt on the Created in Birmingham blog got there before me and has got some good discussion going. This therefore is the ‘further reading’ to that blog post: some stats to help set the context and a modicum of opinion.

‘Punch Above Their Weight’
We could do with a restatement of the national picture of the size and scope of Creative Industries (CI) and their contribution to the economy. That’s the ‘Creative Industries’ sub-sectors as measured by government since the late 90s. The last economic estimates for CI in the UK puts them growing at 2% above the rest of the economy, accounting for 6.2% of Gross Value Added (GVA) in the economy and responsible for 4.5% of exports. That GVA figure is worth pausing on. In general CIs are a bunch of sectors that are ‘high value’, the goods and services they create are bought at a high price compared to the cost of producing them. So although in scale CI aren’t vast, they tend, in jargon heavy policy documents at least, to be described as ‘punching above their weight’.

Birmingham’s CIs
So what about locally? Back in 2007 there was a report called ‘Making The Business Case’ (not available online), funded by the City Council, commissioned by the Creative Birmingham board, which articulated Birmingham’s case for continuing to recognise the importance of the CIs: “Birmingham’s creative industries are important to its economy. They generate real jobs and income and respectable amounts of GVA.” They reckoned the sector was worth £1bn or 8.7% of the city’s GVA (Manchester has a figure of 10.9%).

An updated report was commissioned in 2009 which used a slightly different methodology so the two reports aren’t comparable. For example, its GVA figure for 2007 is £663m (see below) but is calculated in a different way and, if I recall correctly, the researchers were very sceptical about the accuracy of calculating GVA at city level. Much of this updated report is summarised in a report in the Birmingham Post from October 2009 but the report itself remains unpublished. It’s a good read though, if only you were able to read it.

Here are some tables from it. Stats only go up to 2007 and even if revised again now would only go to 2008:

So in summary, Birmingham’s Creative Industries do just about ‘punch above their weight’ and remain an important part of our economy. But other smaller cities seem to do a bit better than us – we’ve got less creatives than Leeds and less as a proportion of overall employment than Bristol. We have a growing number of employees in micro firms but a decline in overall creative employment since 2003/4. That’s evidence perhaps that policy that focuses purely on start-ups needs to be supplemented with support for growth of larger firms along with a focus on inward investment.

Not a Charity Case
It’s inevitable that whatever LEPs form in and around Birmingham, the ‘Creative’ sector will be articulated within them. But how they articulate them is really quite important. There is established methodology about what the CI are and despite its flaws at least it’s there and established. I worry whenever I see those definitions rejected. Jerry Blackett, current chair of the Creative Birmingham board is arguing for just such a rejection of established definitions and even for a shift in focus towards philanthropy. That feels wrong. Birmingham’s Creative Industries need a business case, not handouts.

I think this position comes from the confusion of thinking that the subsidised Arts sector has much to do with the Creative Industries sector. There’s overlap of course but in Birmingham the two most significant contributors to Creative Industries value have been Architecture (32% of GVA in 2004) and Software (35% of GVA in 2004). Music and Performing Arts are low-value sectors in economic terms (1.1% of GVA in 2004).

Writing in 2006, Calvin Taylor noted that it was:

“significant that the arts lobby mostly uses the creative industry tag. Very few other sector bodies, representing other components of what are taken to be the creative industries, use the tag in their sectors promotion work.”

He went on to warn that in the regions, advocacy for the creative industries must rise to

“the challenge of developing a credible evidence base, without allowing judgements of the attempts made so far to be circumscribed by the pressure to deliver yet more advocacy.”

But this can’t be all about stats. People matter, and how we feel about creativity in the city matters also. There’s a really useful research paper (PDF) that looks at regional creative clusters in Birmingham Newcastle/Gateshead. In their conclusions the authors point out that:

“the city-region is a place for cooperation, not just competition […] personal and emotive dimensions are key factors in the decision of creative practitioners to be located in both city-regions. This personal dimension is often underplayed in the development of creative industries…”

[A version of this, without the fancy tables, will probably make it to my column in next week’s Birmingham Post]

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But who appointed the creative policy makers?

I thought I’d post up the diagram I’ve put together for a presentation I’m part of at next week’s Creative Regions seminar at Birmingham University. 

The presentation forms part of a research project that myself, Paul Long and Annette Naudin, all of us from Birmingham City University, are getting our teeth into. The research seeks “to find out something about those who determine creative policy in the UK and their relationship with creative workers who are at the receiving end of policy interventions, decisions and strategies.” That quote is from Paul Long’s description of the work over on his Posterous blog. Go there to read a bit more about the context of the research.

My diagram was to merely describe that between the groupings of public sector decision-makers and sector-specific interest groups sits a kind of social, and social media, ‘glue’ that binds the two together. At some point I think we need to examine the extent to which this glue is similar to the social interaction in other industry sectors or whether it works differently in the creative industries given the speed of uptake of social media technologies.

The diagram (albeit in a slightly earlier form) seemed to cause a bit of chatter when I linked to it on twitter the other night. This is very much an abbreviated list and rather than list programmes of support I wanted to show public-sector groups that actually meet, that in some way make decisions about policy, or shape it or steer its implementation. On the industry side there’s a mix of groups that lobby (e.g. Creative Republic) and those that offer guidance/new knowledge to peers (e.g. Multipack). In the middle are those that comprise public and private sector individuals.

Chris Unitt posted a useful list that helped this and Michael Grimes reminded me of his work in progress in making sense of who’s who in Brum which helped also.

Thoughts welcome – happy to clarify acronyms also.

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Birmingham vs everywhere – Fight!

Birmingham Map

Or to put it another way – I’ve just discovered how easy it is to compare Birmingham to other cities using the nomis service from the Office of National Statistics. These are figures from the industry labor law charts that relate to the labour market. That is, who is or isn’t working, what people earn, what benefits they claim, how much of the population is ‘economically inactive‘. You can pull out stats for regions or local authority areas, or even better, make comparisons between two or three areas.

Pulling up the stats for Brum on their own are interesting enough. Here’s some things I didn’t know before:

  • Average weekly pay for a man in Birmingham is exactly £100 more than women get (£473 compared to £373)
  • The average wage of Birmingham-based jobs is £36 more (£470) than the average Brummie earns.
  • 18.9% of working age people have no qualifications at all (13% is the national figure)
  • 85% of Birmingham jobs are in the service sector
  • We have over half the national average of self-employed females (2.4% to 5.2%).
  • We’ve got over twice the national average rate of Job Seeker’s Allowance Claimants (6% to 2.8%)
  • 2490 businesses started trading in 2007, 2230 stopped trading in the same year. That’s a higher churn rate than the national picture.

You can query many of the data sources as well if you really need to know that in 2008 there were three times as many under 25 men (1540) than women (560) claiming jobseeker’s allowance in Selly Oak constituency. Actually that’s an improvement as it used to be four times as many back in 2000.

But the really interesting stuff comes when you compare Birmingham to other regions. Inevitably I pulled down Manchester from the menu. You can go read the stats yourself and try out other cities. Whatever you do don’t compare us to any other London boroughs – in a fight they win flat out on just about everything.