Getting Birmingham Businesses online
(pic Dr Craig)
This is part crowdsourcing, part just setting my stall out.
One of the aspects of my new job that I’m wrestling with is the notion that no matter what kind of business you are you need to have an online presence. In Digital Birmingham we have a target for increasing the amount of businesses trading online but ‘trading’ needn’t necessarily imply buying or selling online. It might mean getting customers interested enough to talk to you about a contract over a rival. It might mean increasing your business contacts by using any number of social media networking tools. It might simply mean getting yourself listed in online directories enough times so that you come up high in google when a new customer is fishing around.
But how do you develop a strategy to get Birmingham businesses online? Here’s my take on it as a series of questions that I’d welcome responses on:
What are we measuring?
Pete Ashton has a specific target in mind for Custard Factory clients. He wants 50% of them blogging by next year and at the moment 18 of them are. Anything with content that can be subscribed to counts. So Pete has a baseline to work on, it’s measurable and specific. What’s the appropriate measure for the city as a whole? There are some EU benchmarks which are worth considering and tell us lots about the national picture for e-commerce (UK is 2nd in the EU for enterprises selling goods online) but they only cover part of the story.
So my first question is really: What’s the measurable? Is it an E-commerce one or a ’subscribable content’ one or something else?
Why should Dean the Builder care?
Dean is knocking a hole in the wall of my living room on Friday (it’s okay, I asked him to). He comes recommended by a neighbour. But Dean is just a phone number and a cheery smile - he’s legit and everything but works alone or in a small team and picks up work based on personal contacts. He’s got tons of work so what’s being online got to do with Dean? There’s plenty of places you can see a generic rationale for getting businesses online but little tailored to specific sectors. Dean is reasonably priced, in fact I think I’m getting a bargain for the work he’s doing. He doesn’t need to advertise for more work but I wonder if there’s a place online where he could pitch for higher value work? Same effort, more reward should maybe be his goal.
So the real question here is: Do we need a sector-specific approach or a wider there’s-something-for-everyone approach?
How do we make change happen?
I like the Social Media Surgery approach. Get some keen people in a room and give away your knowledge for the greater good. Is that scaleable across the city? Seems a tough task if it is. Are there enough online experts to go around? Perhaps instead there’s a staged approach to take. Business leaders could start to use the tools themselves and hope that others follow. Perhaps identify and support a specific business on its digital media journey (no I’m not asking Dean, he’s got a hole to create). I’m unsure a ‘let’s-do-workshops’ approach will work at this scale. It’s a ‘heart-and-minds’ thing isn’t it?
So: what are the specific actions we need to take? On the ground working with businesses or a big fat PR campaign?
Who’s on board?
Which businesses in the city are already doing this stuff? The media/creative industries ones certainly are and they should really be demonstrating to others the benefits of working online. I suspect the business sector as a whole is still very firmly of the belief that websites are brochures. At best they can show off stock. Perhaps you might sell stuff through it. But online as a way to build customer networks, social media as a tool to position yourself as the supplier of choice, as a way to continue the conversation started at the golf course - that thinking seems a way off yet. But there are useful corporate examples out there and maybe a public/private coalition could help drive this forward.
Which brings me to: Who is the ‘we’ that need to make change happen? Digital Birmingham + Chamber of Commerce? + Universities? + Tech firms? + a network of leading bloggers/social media types?
Any thoughts on all this are welcome.
A two pence bus fare for the digital age
I have a new job. I’m off (on long-term secondment actually) to work for Digital Birmingham as their Economic Development Manager. As part of my interview I had to do five minutes on how I would put Birmingham on the digital map. It was five minutes without PowerPoint so I wrote a speech which I thought I’d reproduce here (and no, I don’t quite answer the question but I do talk about buses a lot and yes, I added the embedded links afterwards):
“Birmingham feels strangely exciting at the moment. I say strangely because as someone who’s lived here all of his life, ‘exciting’ is a status that Birmingham has only occasionally reached the giddy heights of. But there is one time when I remember Birmingham reached a frenzy, when an event affected everyone in the city. No, I’m not talking about the double whammy of the G8 and the Eurovision in 1998 but rather, about the now almost legendary decision by the city council in the early 1980s to introduce 2 pence bus fares for under 16s. What halcyon days they were. That long-held dream of going all the way round on the number 11 bus could now be made a reality. The question of what to do on a weekend now had a simple answer – get on a bus and stay on it, see where it took you. It was a decision that mobilised a generation of idle youth. It took us to town and back every Saturday and left us plenty of change for space invaders and a cup of tea in the café on the sixth floor of Lewis’s.
In his article on youth culture from 1981, Gary Clarke actually makes reference to Birmingham’s 2p bus fares. He notes it caused uproar amongst the population, everyone was talking about it. He describes the moral panic caused by this mobilisation. To quote him: “Birmingham youths have created new meaning from the conventional activities of shopping and public transport”. But what’s this got to do with Digital you’re asking? The quote’s interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a better summation of how I spent my teenage years. Secondly, I suspect that is how we’ll be talking 20 years down the line about the digital tools we’re seeing now. That is, as conventional activities.
Actually you’re probably thinking what’s all this got to do with buses? Well, the most exciting blogger in Birmingham right now is a Bus Driver. TWMDriver has his own blog as well as a Twitter account where you can leave him a question about life on the buses. Also, Jon Bounds, author of the Birmingham Its Not Shit blog, wants us all to spend the 11th of the 11th this year on the 11 route, leaving at 11am. He wants an army of Brummie bloggers out there, talking about it, recording it, photographing it. Why? Because it’s there I suppose and because blogging connects you to people and once in a while can actually mobilise them to do something they may not have thought about doing otherwise.
And I think that’s what I feel is exciting at the moment. There’s seems to be a developing, lively social media ‘scene’ going on and some of us have cottoned on to the fact that it’s cheap bus fare time out there in the digital age. More than cheap actually, most of the tools are free. But, what drove us onto the buses in the 1980s wasn’t just the reduction in fares. That facilitated the pre-existing desire we had to discover, to meet, to share. To spend afternoons in Virgin records flicking through magazines we were never going to buy. Digital technologies aren’t the driver of change - they’re an enabler of change.
So what excites me about this social media landscape is how it seems to be bringing citizens together and connecting them on a whole range of topics. I’d agree that at first glance it seems to be a social space partly occupied by a few ‘usual suspects’ in the creative industries. Yet if you dig deeper, you’ll find a rich seem of bloggers talking about where they live (Vale Mail), their work (a blog dedicated to Night Working in the City), or their interests (myself and others wittering on about our allotments). There are opinion leaders out there of course and what I think Digital Birmingham should be is one of them.
Using my Birmingham Post blog I’ve already written about how those with influence can make use of Social Media to start a genuine debate about the city - to develop, if you like, a Birmingham Digital School of Thought. There is a lot of influence to be gained in this city by being part of the digital discussion. Bloggers have a developing cultural capital that planners and decision-makers are beginning to take notice of. Power comes from what you’re saying as well as what you’re doing – it comes from being a part of the discussion.
We’re potentially heading for an economic downturn and if digital technologies can help us through the worst of the impact of such a downturn – by creating ‘digital’ jobs in the creative industries or in medical technologies or in serious games – then we need to speak up now to ensure those with the money, as well as the power, are listening to us and heed our guidance. What growth there is in the economy is in those and other hi-tech industries – the evidence is out there, let’s ensure we understand it and that it influences change.
So for Digital Birmingham its about exerting your influence by contributing to the debate. Be someone, or something, with a view, a position, a take on things. Digital isn’t a box to tick or a target to reach, it’s not a league table…. It’s a bus. The driver, as I’ve mentioned, is already part of the action. I believe Digital Birmingham can be a powerful body to exert the kind of influence that will mobilise our citizens to get on the Digital bus, stay on it and, as we did on the number 11, go round and round just for the hell of it. Birmingham needs a 2p fare for the Digital age and Digital Birmingham could be the body to make that happen.”
Job starts in September. Nicely evocative bus pic by Pete Asthon
Social Media’s hidden legacy
This is a cross-post from my blog at the Birmingham Post
Two things trouble me about social media. The first is that everyone I read or connect to via Twitter or Facebook or whatever, seems to be having a much more exciting life than me. It’s a world of gallery openings, launches, great nights out or simply wonderful sunny, lazy days untroubled by personal dramas or upheavals.
Not that I’m jealous of course. Well actually of course it’s because I’m jealous. I even get invited to some of the same events that my friends and colleagues go to I just never seem to get round to going to them - either through a lack of willing babysitters or, more likely, a general acceptance that I’m a long way from being renaissance man. A beer and night in front of the telly are usually all the cultural activity I can muster after a day at work.
The key thing that troubles me though is what historians will make of the social media footprints we’re leaving behind us. Specifically, I wonder what social historians will make of Birmingham and its people when they come to look back on our early 21st century twittering. I suspect they’ll immediately smell a rat - what, they’ll ask, our these people hiding? Was life really a joyous social whirlwind? What kind of lives did Birmingham people live and why didn’t they use the new media tools available to tell us about it?
If you lay out this city’s social media network in front of you it would be a bit like those formal, rigid family portraits that adorn our walls as they did our grandparents’ walls. That is, they conceal more than they reveal. The great academic Stuart Hall, himself linked to Birmingham through his time at Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 70s, pointed out how immigrant communities of the 1950s were represented by stiff family portraits, dressed in their Sunday best. What they concealed were lives plagued by prejudice, persecution and social injustice.
Of course Hall was talking about a medium that was already mature. Its rhetorical devices, particularly in portraiture, were already well established. If you popped into your local high street photographer back then the only input you had into the image-making process was what background you would be sat in front of. Social media on the other hand allows for endless choices of expression. Okay so with Twitter you’ve got a maximum of 140 characters but there’s nothing to stop you twittering all day if you want to.
Although social media platforms are in their earliest phases the historian’s gaze will inevitably turn to them as a source of evidence to tell stories about us, probably sooner than it did with photography. It took until the 1970s for academics to see value in personal photography as an area of study and immediately they realised the interesting stuff was behind the image rather that in it.
Plenty of people tell me Birmingham seems to have been quick on the uptake with Social Media. Both in terms of using and testing new services and in terms of having a small group of entrepreneurs who are trying to develop new social media applications from which there is business to be made.
But if we are at the forefront then we need to listen to ourselves now and again. At best we demonstrate the vibrancy of living in an exciting city with lots to offer but at worst it descends into a curious uncritical mush and represents our city as one with its head in the sand - too excitable to see the wheat from the chaf or tell the good times from the bad.
It’s time to think about what’s not being said. Not so much ‘Digital - More Power or Powerless’ but ‘Useful or Useless’.