Tag Archives: social media

SOCIAL FIGURES: A cunning way to find cool Facebook stats

An amazing statistic like a battering ram breaks down doors.

Here’s a good one.

For every one person who buys a copy of the Express & Star in the West Midlands borough of Walsall there are 10 on Facebook.

That’s print outnumbered by digital by a rate of 10 to one.

It’s the single most powerful argument to use social media in local government you can ever have. Why? Because it shows it’s mainstream. In fact, so mainstream it dwarfs what used to be the colossus of the printed Press.

It’s a cunning wheeze I first came across at the landmark LocalGovCamp in Birmingham in summer 2009.

Paul Cole, a talented man from Derby, spoke about how he did it. People never fail to be impressed by the idea.

You create a Facebook advert — but before you hand over cash you are given the chance to narrow down who you want to advertise to.

It’s at this point that you can get the juicy stats.

Here’s how to come up with one than your community:

1. Log on to Facebook.

2. Click the link that says ‘create an advert.’

3. Fill in the advert. Just type ‘hghghg’ if you like.

4.Upload an image. Any will do. This gets you to the place where you can access figures.

5. Look at the figure in the far right of the screen. That’s the figure of people registered on Facebook for the UK.

6. Add your town or city.

7. Select the radius you want to search from from the centre of your area with 16 km the shortest distance.

8. Click search and you have a figure for your own community.

9. Add an age demographic if you like.

10. Add an interest – like football, knitting or fishing – and search on that term too.

Enjoy!

Creative Commons

Measuring http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenhester/3989949630/sizes/l/in/photostream/

LOCAL BY SOCIAL: What should Comms 2011 look like?

Back in the olden days all a press officer had to do was a write a press release and book a photo call.

Boy, how things have changed and more to the point are changing rapidly.

How web 2.0 and web 3.0 will affect the communications unit – or press office in old money – is something that I’ve spent a great deal of time mulling over. Why? Because it’s my job.

I’m a senior press officer at Walsall Council. The job I walked into in 2005 is almost unrecognisable to the one I do now. Yes, it now includes, Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media – or web 2.0 if you are a bit of a geek. But it’s also open data and the challenges of web 3.0.

The nice people from Local Government Improvement and Delivery have asked me to lead a session at their Local by Social online conference on November 3 2010 at 3pm. Looking at the speaker line up it’s something of an honour. There’s plenty for people to get their teeth into on a whole range of subjects.

I’d very much like to hear what your thoughts are. Take part ion the session. Chip in. Listen. It’s all fine. 

Firstly, here is a presentation designed as a starting point and to get the ball rolling…

Secondly, here are a few thoughts I blogged a month or two back. You can read the full version here.

In the days before the web the press office needs to:

Have basic journalism skills.

Know how the machinery of local government works.

Write a press release.

Work under speed to deadline.

Understand basic photography.

Understand sub-editing and page layouts.

For web 1.0 the press office also needed to:

Add and edit web content

For web 2.0 the press office also needs to:

Create podcasts

Create and add content to a Facebook page.

Create and add content to a Twitter stream.

Create and add content to Flickr.

Create and add content to a blog.

Monitor and keep abreast of news in all the form it takes from print to TV, radio and the blogosphere.

Develop relationships with bloggers.

Go where the conversation is whether that be online or in print.

Be ready to respond out-of-hours because the internet does not recognise a print deadline.

For web 3.0 the press office will also need to:

Create and edit geotagged data such as a Google map.

Create a data set.

Use an app and a mash-up.

Use basic html.

Blog to challenge the mis-interpretation of data.

But with web 3.0 upon us and the pace of change growing faster to stay relevant the comms team has to change.

HYPER GO GO: John Peel and eight things to do after an unconference

John Peel once said Punk’s great lesson was that anyone could do it.

All you had to do was knock over a phone box, sell your motorbike and you had enough cash for a day in a studio and 500 7″ singles.

It’s those words that struck me after Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands in Walsall.

Run on a shoestring, powered by enthusiasm, favours and goodwill it saw 70 people from across the local government, hyperlocal blogging and open data communities come together in Walsall.

It should never have got off the ground. Once off the ground it should have crashed. Several times. That it stayed airborne should make all those who came proud.

At an unconference there can be a massive surge of ideas powered by conversation and debate. It’s a chance to think and be creative.

All that’s great but is that it?

What’s next?

In the few days after the event, a new hyperlocal Pelsall Common People was started by Jayne Howarth, Dave Musson at Solihull Council started to do cool things with Facebook and the organisation I work for Walsall Council started to trial Yammer. That’s a tiny tip of a large iceberg.

Here’s eight things to do after an unconference.

1. Sit down in a darkened room. If it’s been any good your head is filled with ace ideas and you’ll need a good lie down.

2. Blog. It’s one of the best ways to get your head around an idea. Besides. Everyone loves a sharer.

3. Don’t be despondent. If the unconference has been really good you’ll experience mild depression three days later. It’s the ambition – reality axis. Don’t worry. See 4.

4. Do a small thing. Take out a Flickr account. Go and set-up a Posterous blog. You don’t have to add content just yet but you’ve feel a whole lot better.

5. Catch up. Read the blogs and presentations from sessions you couldn’t get to.

6. Stage an unconference yourself. No, really. Do. Find a few like minded people and do it yourself. They’re very rewarding.

7. Think of the phrase Just Flipping Do It. Write it on your pump bag if you like. JFDI It’s a good motto for life.

8. Think of it as training and not a jolly out of the office. Although if they serve cake it should be a fun experience.

I’ve long thought an unconference works short term and long term. It’s the ideas you can do straight away and it’s the slow burning suggestions that strike you 12 months down the line.

Do people have to wait for permission or someone else to create a bargovcamp?

Of course not. You can run one too. It would be hugely cool if from Hyperlocal Govcamp people were inspired to do it themselves.

To continue flogging the Punk analogy, when The Sex Pistols first played Manchester half the audience went out and formed bands. We got Joy Division, New Order, and The Buzzcocks. That we got Simply Red too shouldn’t be held against it.

For my money, and stay with me here, Localgovcamp in Birmingham was a local government equivalent of the Sex Pistols gig because a slew of inspirational things, events and projects came out of it.

Your unconference DIY toolkit

Dave Briggs’ guide to setting up an unconference we found indispensible.

Andy Mabbett said he’d blog on the things we learned and when he does I’ll insert the link [here].

There’ll also be a collection of resources from #hyperwm [here] very soon.

You can look at the images taken on the day at the #hyperwm Flickr group here.

John Popham points out here that an unconference is a cheap way of training in an era of austerity.

I LIKE: How Local Government can do Facebook

Heard the one about the council Facebook group with two friends?

It’s up there with forgetting the rings on your own wedding day for how not to do it.

Back in the day you had to be a fan of a council if you wanted to see what your council was doing on Facebook. Thing is, not everyone did.

As a platform, it’s a behemoth. Theres 500 million registered globally and more than 20 million in the UK.

Today there’s some brilliant examples of how Local Government can use it.

If you believe in the argument that you go where the debate is – and everyone sensible does – then Facebook is a must.

How to do it well as an organisation?  Go to Coventry. They do it brilliantly. Look, observe and learn.

The story of just how they do it is well covered in this blog by Steve Woodward from a talk given by Ally Hook at the Coventry and Warwickshire Social Media Cafe. There’s also this natty video of her talk if you want it direct.

Ally Hook is one of the good people on Twitter. I’d spoken to her before launching our own council’s Facebook fan page.

What’s her secret? Simple. The main messages I took are:

  1. Use the language of the platform.
  2. Be laid back.
  3. Don’t call yourself  ‘Council.’ Call yourself  after the area you represent, if you can.
  4. Don’t have a logo. They switch people off.  Have a nice picture of the place you represent.
  5. Don’t update too much. People will get bored and stop ‘liking’ you.
  6. You can delete abusive posts.
  7. Use a fan page not a Facebook group. You’ll get a breakdown of amazing stats on people who like you.
  8. Interact. Talk to people. They’ll talk back.

Coventry went from 300 to 11,000 in weeks when they started to use Facebook as an outlet for school closure updates.

There are other examples of good work too. Check out this exhaustive study by Ben Proctor . Belfast City Council do good things, as Ben quite rightly points out.

Should this be the only way Local Government uses Facebook? Of course not.

For venues and events it works brilliantly. Anywhere where there is a community it can work. People respond strongly to bricks and mortar far more than they do to institutions. Have a look at the Warwick Arts Centre, New York Public library or Solihull libraries.

Enjoy…

Creative commons: Facebook wants a new face SM Lions 12

CAKE TAPE: What cake and mixtapes can offer local government

'Mmmmmm, cake.'

Birthdays are natures way of telling you to eat more cake.

Marvellous, but what exactly does a slice of carrot cake have to say about local government?

Actually, quite a lot. So do mixtapes as a session heard at the excellent Localgovcamp Yorkshire and Humberside revealed.

Why? Two things. First, because it’s all about messing about on a project in your own time so you can learn by your mistakes.

Second, it’s about doing something in a fun, interesting, creative way.

Why Cake? As a wheeze I built a cake blog based on a rash of pictures of cake tweeted by friends from Twitter. It taught me how to crowdsource, how to use WordPress and where a decent piece of carrot cake can be found in the charming Shropshire village of Ludlow (At the Green Cafe since you were wondering. The review is here.) Stuart Harrison (@pezholio on Twitter) then raised the bar with a beer blog.

The excellent Sarah Lay picked up the baton and created a cake map. She got to know about Googlemaps as a result.

Mixtapes? Same principle. A tweet by Sarah sparked a series of blogs, a Flickr group and a Tumblr site. Why? Because mixtapes even in a digital world spark happy memories of taping the top 40 and crafting a tape to say ‘thank you!’ or even ‘actually, I quite fancy you.’

There was even a mixtape built by song contributions at the barcamp built with the help of Janet Davis (@janetedavis).

So what do cakes and tapes teach? In short, go away and experiment in your own time. You can learn. You can do fun things. Then you can transfer some of those ideas to your day job.

Amongst web developers, there is a useful saying: ‘fail forward.’ If you are going to fail, make sure you learn something about it so you can take things just that bit further next time. Messing about on a scheme allows you to do just that, risk free.

Links: Nice ideas that have emerged by messing around…

GOT, GOT, NEED?: Panini stickers as social media

Like a salmon returning to the river it was born Panini World Cup stickers are back. Irrestible. Alluring. Exciting.

And like those fish battling up stream it sparks something deep inside many men – and yes, it is largely men.

It’s a deep seated yearning to hunt and gather Honduras midfielders. Then stick them into a book.

It’s a desire to tell the world: “Switzerland? Yes, I have the complete team. Even their star midfielder  Hakan Yakan.”

What are Panini stickers? They’re adhesive pictures of footballers. But they’re far more than that.

Growing up in the 1980s Panini stickers were the social media of their day.

Armed with a pile of doubles – or swaps – children would show them to other fellow collectors. The ‘got, got, need, NEED!’ commentary gave a status update.

They brought people together. They still do.

Here are some tales of the power of Panini.

1 My brother Paul’s best present

Somewhere on my brother Paul’s book shelf is a tattered Europa 80 Panini sticker book from the European Championships. It cost thirty quid on ebay.

Paul is a reserved man. He’s not given to flights of fancy. The album was the only present I’ve ever given that has caused him to leap from his chair and smile as broad as Marco Tardelli.

It was my way of punching him on the shoulder and saying: ‘Good on you, brother.’

Why? Because it was the first sticker collection we both collected. Not together, of course, but as sibling rivals in a sticker arms race.

We would use a Subbutteo pitch to play tournaments with the stickers as players.

Our mum often asked us why we didn’t join forces and collect them together. Pah! What did she know?

She didn’t understand the thrill of opening a packet of stickers to find Karl Heinz Rumminigge or the Chile foil badge.

2 Panini West Midlands swaps Facebook

Facebook as a platform for swapping. This is inspired. And not just because Russ Cockburn – @dwarfio on Twitter – sent me Stoke City’s Thomas Sorensen.

It’s a case of a digital native using the platform her knows to create something using social media to bring people together. As the Facebook group says ‘bringing the playground to Facebook.’

Link: Black Country Facebook swaps

3 It costs £412 to collect a sticker album

Si Whitehouse is good at maths. He’s good at lots of things, actually. He worked out how much it would cost to collect a World Cup 2010 sticker album. It’s more than £400.

I’m not sure whether I should be amazed or frightened at the sums of money involved in collecting these things. You’d get better value for money from a Build HMS Victory in 100 easy to follow steps.

But you know what? I’m still collecting them.

Link: Si Whitehouse blog

4 Panini as Flickr set

Think of it as a photo love story fired by a passion for Panini. I like Dave Russon. He does good things with his camera.

Here he has captured brilliantly the 18-step process from buying, through anticipation, to sticking, to stocking the swaps pile.

LINK: 365 Days of Photos

5 Who is Senor Panini?

They are from Modena. They started in 1960. Two years later they were selling 29 million ‘units’. Their first World Cup collection was 1970. Thank you, Wikipedia.

LINK: Panini Wikipedia

GREEN DIGITAL: How parks and countryside can use social media…

If William Wordsworth was alive today he’d be using Twitter.

Not the old stick-in-the-mud he became but the young man fired by revolution.

 

Why? Because he celebrated the English countryside through the media of the day.

How we think of the landscape was shaped by Wordsworth. Before him, mountains were frightful places. After? Beautiful. And Willie cashed in with an 1810 Guide to the Lakes that was the iphone app of its day.

Exploring how our countryside team could use social media made me trawl through some examples.

Whoever said places work can really well on social media were bang on. That’s especially true of parks and countryside. So how is social media being used by to promote the countryside? There’s some really good ideas in patches out there but nothing fundamentally game changing that makes you sit up and write verse. That says to me that there is plenty of potential.

Photography should be at the heart of what the public sector does with countryside and parks. Why? Because a picture tells a 1,000 words. Because they can bring a splash of green into someone’s front room or phone at one click. Criminally, many sites should be promoting the countryside relegate images to a postage stamp picture.

Here are 10 interesting uses:

1. The British Countryside Flickr group has more than 4,000 members and some amazing images. It’s a place where enthusiastic amateur photographers can share pictures and ideas.

2. Peak District National Park chief executive Jim Dixon leads from the front. He blogs about his job at www.jimdixon.wordpress.com and tweets through @peakchief. It’s a good mix of retweeting interesting content and puts a human face on an organisation.

3. Foursquare, Walsall Council added a landmark in a park as a location. The Pit Head sculpture in Walsall Wood was added to encourage people to visit and check-in. You can also make good use of ‘tips’ by adding advice.

4. On Twitter, @uknationalparks represents 15 UK national parks run a traditional Twitter feed with press releases, RTs and some conversation. With 2,000 followers it’s on 145 lists.

5. But you don’t have to be in a national park to do a goods job. In Wolverhampton, @wolvesparkies have a brilliantly engagingly conversational Twitter stream. There is passion, wit and information that make most councils seem the RSS press release machine that they are.

6. National Trust have an excellent Facebook profile. You may get the impression that members are 65 and own a Land Rover. That doesn’t come across here. They observe one of the golden rules of social media. Use the language of the platform. It’s laid back and it’ll tell you when events are planned.

Yorkshire Dales by Chantrybee
Yorkshire Dales by Chantrybee

7. Even more relaxed is the quite new I Love Lake District National Park is quite brilliant. It allows RSS, it blogs and it really encourages interaction. Heck, they even encourage people to post to the wall so they can move shots into albums.

8.  On YouTube, West Sussex County Council have a slick short film on tree wardens that deserves more than 45 views in five months. Or does this show how much take up there is on YouTube?

9. The rather wonderful parksandgardens.ac.uk is an ambitious online tool for images of 6,500 parks and gardens and the people who created and worked in them. @janetedavis flagged this up. It’s a project she worked on and she should be proud of it. There’s a school zone to to connect to young people too and is populated by google map addresses and photographs. Really and truly, council parks and countryside pages should look like this but mostly don’t.

10. Less a government project, or even social media Cumbria Live TV celebrate the landscape they work in utterly brilliantly. Slick and powerful broadcast quality three minute films do more than most to capture the jaw dropping awe of the fells. They self-host some brilliant films on a changing site. Check them out here.

EIGHT things you CAN do aside from write bad poetry about daffodils and shepherds called Michael…

1. A Facebook fan page to celebrate a park or open space. Call it I love Barr Beacon. Yes, the Friends group can use it as a meeting place. But naming it after the place not the organisation leaves the door open to the public too.

2. Give a countryside ranger a Twitter account. Use @hotelalpha9 as an inspiration. Let them update a few times a day with what they’ve been up to. Post mobile phone pictures too.

3. Despite a dearth of amateur good examples there’s potential in short films to promote countryside. You only have to point a camera at something photogenic for people to come over all Lake Poet.

Flowers by Vilseskogen

4. Start a Flickr group to celebrate your patch of countryside. Walsall has 1,000 acres of parks and countryside with amazing views and vistas.

5. Start a blog. WordPress takes minutes to set-up and after messing around only a short time to master. Tell people what you are up to. Whack up a few images. Lovely. For no cost.

6. Make your countryside and parks pages a bit more web 2.0. Use mapping to set out a location. Use Flickr images – with permission – to showcase the place.

7. Add your parks and countryside to a geo-location site such as Foursquare. If the future of social media is location, location, location then venues, landmarks and places will score big.

8. Text. With more mobile phones in the UK than people sometimes the humble text message can be overlooked as part of the package of ways to connect with people. Most councils are also text enabled. Create info boards around a park or countryside with numbers to text to recieve info on what they can see. Change it for the seasons to make best use.

Picture credits:

Newlands Valley, Lake District, UK: Dan Slee.

Wordsworth: Creative commons courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Yorkshire Dales: Creative commons courtesy of Chantrybee http://www.flickr.com/photos/chantrybee/2911840052/

Flowers: Creative commons courtesy of Vilseskogen http://www.flickr.com/photos/vilseskogen/4182443498/

CASE STUDY: How Walsall museum is cooler than Ben Stiller

In Ben Stiller’s  blockbuster ‘Night at the Musem’ exhibits burst to life when the public aren’t around.

Cowboys and Indians come alive and a giant dinosaur plays fetch with a bone.

Walsall museum stores aren’t quite on a par with Washington DC’s Smithsonian but one thing is the same: You’d be amazed what you can find.

Thousands of items are stored as only a fraction can be put on public display at one time.

So how would social media connect a museum stores with residents? Here’s how. In a way that is way cooler than Ben Stiller.

THE EVENT ITSELF…

One Spring Saturday, photographers of the Walsall Flickr group were given special access all areas to take pictures at Walsall Council’s museum stores.

Street signs, an ARP helmet, and typewriters were just some of the treasure trove.

So were items of the nationally important Hodson Shop collection, a huge collection of working class clothes from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Eight photographers spent more than two hours poring over hundreds of artefacts.

What resulted in an amazing explosion of pictures of often rarely seen treasures. Take a look at some of the shots here.

More than 150 images were posted on Flickr in the days after and more than a dozen positive comments were posted on the group’s discussion board.

PLANNING FOR THE EVENT…

Why bother? Why arrange this?

It’s as simple as this: what’s not to like about pictures of Walsall artefacts taken by Walsall people?

Simple as the idea was, three months of planning led to the event itself.

Much praise needs to be given to talented photographer Steph Jennings (@essitam on Twitter) and the forward-thinking Walsall museum curator Jennifer Thomson supported by collections officer Catherine Clarke. Why praise? Because both parties started from different positions and arrived at not just a workable compromise but a groundbreaking piece of work that sets new standards.

REACHING AN AGREEMENT ON  COPYRIGHT CONCERNS…

At the heart of everything was copyright.

Museums traditionally are very careful to guard copyright of their artefacts.

On the flip side, photographers are very careful to guard their copyright too.

In the past, museums have allowed photographers to take shots only in highly controlled circumstances with copyright signed away.

The Walsall approach was different.

The compromise that was brokered was this: photographers retain copyright so long as they accepted that they wouldn’t be able to bring tripods to take saleable pro shots.

That was fine as the Walsall Flickr members didn’t want to sell images.

The group also agreed to limit the size of the shots they uploaded to 1MB and agreed to ask permission before they used the images.

Crucially, what made this process work was the genuine commitment to make the event work by both Steph and the museum team.

The compromise permission form can be found here.

When social media works well it sees a two way discussion. Brilliant things can happen.

An unexpectedly marvellous spin off led to the setting-up of a museum Flickr group to encourage people to submit images.

AN UNEXPECTED SPIN-OFF…

This isn’t just shots of the museum but a place where, as Steph suggested, pics can now be submitted for ‘shadow’ exhibitions. Planning an exhibition on seaside holidays? That shot of Great Aunt Maude paddling at Weston-super-Mare can be submitted and used as part of a revolving powerpoint of similar images. That’s something the whole family can go and see. Excellent.

This isn’t a Walsall Council success story, for my money. This is a Walsall success story. It was the coming together of museum staff, the communications unit and most of all the enthusiasm of the borough’s thriving and talented Flickr group that made this work.

What we found can work here can easily work anywhere.

Hosting a Flickr meet: Five benefits to the museum.

1. Connecting with non-traditional audience.

2. Showcasing exhibits and helping to find an online audience for heritage.

3. Art. Great pictures are just that. Art. What better way to showcase your artefacts?

4. A set of marketing pictures. At Flickr members’ suggestion the group were happy for their images to be used by the musem. Many amateurs are keen to get an audience for their work in return for a link to their Flickr page and a pic credit.

5. Pictures to link to via a Twitter stream.

Attending the Flickr meet: Four benefits to the photographer.

1. Rare behind-the-scenes access.

2. Being able to retain copyright of images.

3. A unique photographic challenge.

4. A chance – if you are happy to – to showcase your work through council marketing.

Thanks to: Jennifer Thomson and Catherine Clarke from Walsall museum. Steph Jennings and the members of the Walsall Flickr group who attended the session.

BOSTIN SOCIAL: Is it time for a #hyperlocalgovcamp?

As brilliant ideas go the ‘unconference’ is as good as tea and a slice of cake on a summers day.

Get like-minded people in one place and then decide what you are going to talk about on the day. You’d be amazed at the hot house ideas that emerge.

Believe it or not the first event described by such a term was the XML Developers Conference of 1998 in Montreal in Canada.

How does an unconference – or Barcamp – work? Basically, four or five rooms are used with different subjects being discussed in each in hour long slots. Feel like saying something? Just chip in. It’s as simple as that.

They work brilliantly in and around government where there is a willingness to share ideas without being hampered by private sector hang up about competition and bottom lines.

They work well in the hyperlocal community too – Talk About Local have run excellent events – and they’ve even gravitated into the travel industry.

Some of the most exciting thinking I’ve come across has been at unconferences. It’s not exaggeration to say Localgovcamp Birmingham in 2009 utterly revolutionised the way I think and approach my job.

Elsewhere, UKgovcamp in January saw around 120 people with five rooms and eight slots. That’s 32,000 possible combinations. In other words, a lot of knowledge and conversations. Coming back from one such event in London as the train was passing through the Oxfordshire countryside one clear thought struck me.

Isn’t it about time we made the brilliance of the unconference fit into the day job?

Invariably, those who go are innovators. This is great. In local government, there is a need for these key events every few months if for nothing else than the sanity of those who blaze a trail sometimes with little support. But how do you get the message through to the 9 to 5-ers and policy makers who would also really benefit?

It’s an idea I’ve kicked around idly with a few people. Myself and Si Whitehouse mulled this over at the London Localgovcamp. I like the phrase ‘Locallocalgovcamp’ he came up with. It has the spirit of localgovcamp but it’s a lite version.

What it may be is this: A space where ideas could be kicked around in the informal, unconference style.

But crucially, there maybe an item or a hook pre-advertised that may encourage slightly less adept to come along. Besides,  it’s easier to convince your boss to let you go to an event if you know you’ll get something out of it. The pitch of ‘Cheerio boss, I’m off now to drink coffee with geeks and I may just learn something’ is not as compelling as ‘Cheerio, boss, I’m going to this event to learn x and if y and z too.’

The idea of the local meet-up  itself is not especially something new.

London digital people in government do something called ‘Tea Camp’. A 4-6pm slot in a department store cafe. Tea. Cake. Conversation. All seems dashed civilised idea. Besides, there’s a critical mass all working in a small area.

Perhaps it’s time for a regional version of this. The West Midlands where I live and work sees an inspiringly vibrant digital community. There is also seven councils within a 30 mile radius.

So what would an as-part-of-the-day-job West Midlands bostin social event look like? 

Two hours? Two rooms? Two sessions? Or is that too short?

Pork scratchings?

What do you think?

Creative commons photo credit: Barcamp: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid laughingsquid.com.

MY C90: Mixtapes are the original social media

Once upon a time there was something more powerful than Twitter, MySpace and Facebook combined.

It was a platform that brought people together and allowed a you a chance to paint on a blank canvas with music.

This, ladies and gentleman was the mixtape.

This was a cassette filled with tracks you’d selected. It wasn’t just art. It was an art.

For over 25s the mixtape was the status update of the day. They could be a love letter, a  sign of friendship or the grandstanding of musical knowledge. All recorded across two sides of a C90 cassette with 45 minutes on each side (or if you were a real oddball, a C60).

From the 1970s to the mid-1990s the cassette was a standard medium for music. With my bedroom too small for all but a ghetto blaster cassettes were the way I listened to music. I wasn’t alone. As a teenager, music was massively important. It help shape who I was. Through it all, mixtapes were how I circulated my thoughts.

Brian Eno used to make mixtapes for his mates. He’d record slow classical music movements back-to-back. They were a prototype to the ambient music he pioneered.

“Composers hadn’t caught up,” he recalled on BBC Radio Four’s Frontrow .

“People didn’t buy records and sit at home between two speakers listening to an LP.

“They bought music and they were cooking or washing up with music in the background.

“New technology means new music. Always.”

In 1990, more than 400 million cassettes were sold in the US. Many for home taping and unlike the slogan no, it didn’t kill music. But what did die was the cassette as a popular platform. By 2007 barely 200,000 cassettes were sold in the US. Those figures are likely to be reflected in the UK.

 

SO, WHAT ARE THE MIXTAPE RULES?

When making mixtapes I’d arrived at a series of golden rules. Always start with two fast paced corkers one after the other. Make the third slower. Surprise with a build between fast and slow. Be unexpected. And never, ever let the tape run out before the track finished. Ever.

In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s story of a music obsessive the mixtape is a way repressed men could communicate. He impressed his girlfriend with a mixtape.

In the late 1990s powered with red wine I  compiled a cassette for a girl.  With Stereolab, The Stone Roses, The La’s and The Beatles it was a combination of care and bravado. Just enough sensitivity with a layer of cool disregard just in case.

The girl who I made that tape for 12-years ago, dear reader, is now my wife. The tape? Somewhere in the loft.

MIXTAPE NIGHT SCHOOL? VIA TWITTER?

A rather marvellous conversation on Twitter sparked the idea of Mixtape night classes. Like woodwork or macrame these skills could be kept alive at Stafford College. What would those sessions look like? Check @janetedavis’ quite excellent Mixtape night school syllabus. There is input there from @sarahlay and @jvictor7 too.

Feel free to contribute your own…

Creative commons credits

Cassettes Erica Marshall

Mixtape links

Philip John’s excellent blog on how Spotify risks failure by not tapping into the social side of compiling play lists is here.

Jim Anning’s Twitpic of his mixtape. I could have had a borrow of that back in the day. The shot is here.

A mixtape USB stick. The dream present for geek music lovers over 25. Amazing. Thanks to @cahrlottetwitts it’s here. 

You can rely on Flickr for having a mixtape group. They’re here.

Steph has written a fantastic post about the mix CD that her chap James game to her in the mid-1990s. It shows brilliantly the stories behind the homemade selections. Read it here.

Epic visionary Sarah Lay has written a  great piece on what the mixtape means to her. It’s a great read and it’s here.

Jamie Summerfield blogged about how a mixtape helped provide the answer after his father died. You can read it here. 

This is genius. An idea by Andrew Dubber for a mixtape making service was picked up by a Canadian web developer who created this wonderful, amazing, brilliant thing here.