In the new political landscape of budget cuts and tight financial margins organisations are coming under increasing pressure to communicate more effectively with the people who use their services. The web contains some fantastic tools to help you both stay close to the people who use your services and publicise what you do to new people. Social Media can also be a fantastic tool for campaigners looking to get publicity for their cause without having the budget to launch a traditional media campaign.

The people involved in the Bradford event are all seasoned digital communications professionals who have given their time for free and will be more than happy to pass on their knowledge of how to get started in using the Social Web. Come along to The Gumption Centre on the 20th July, 5:30pm – 8pm. Click here to book your place.

All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

• The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
• The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
• Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

The first of the ideas is a bit of an abstract one but one I’m convinced will work. Those who know me will know that I’ve always been a bit of an amateur theologian, I like to read about the way religions work and the arbitrary rules they set themselves, as a committed atheist I find it fascinating.

One thing I have always liked was the concept of tithing. Put simply “The tithe is that tenth of our income that we give to God, which enables Him to move on our behalf in the area of blessings”. Now, I’m not advocating that I randomly bestow a tenth of my income on a random church, after all some of these organisations are some of the richest in the country, and anyway I’m an atheist. The idea that I had was that I should give ten percent of my time, ie. one afternoon or morning of the week, over to doing stuff for free. At the same time I happened upon Matthew Knight of yarned, and we hit up a discussion about it. After a brief chat I decided that if he could do it than so can I, so I will. Being a new business, I think 10% is logical as a start figure. I already do about that amount, if not more, of unpaid advisory work but formalising it somehow makes it more real.

From now on Totaal, as a company rule for anybody on the payroll, shall henceforth have one morning or afternoon of the working week as “Tithed Time” to do something good. That means something charitable, something that gives something back to a community or something that is downright cool.

Also, something else that has been troubling me is the lack of perceived ethics in what I do. Now, that’s not the same as a perceived lack of ethics, even if we are a Social Media company, we have so far – and always will have – 100% client satisfaction. I’m as strict a critic as an agent as I was when I was a client and that wont change. More specifically, what we do as a company needs to be framed by what we wont do and what we don’t do.

It’s probably too big an issue to tackle right now but over the next few months I’ll be blogging, and speaking to people I respect offline too, about the best way to develop this ethical policy in more detail. It’s a given that I wont work with, or work for anyone owned by, arms dealers, oil companies or any companies responsible for acts of mass pollution like Union Carbide. What’s really interesting though is can I refuse to work for tobacco companies? I smoke, would that not just be massively hypocritical? Do I try and remain apolitical? I certainly have failed at doing that in my personal life even if I’m avowedly unaffiliated to either of the major parties.

I know some pretty ace people read this blog so if any of you have any thoughts on either of these issues it would be great to hear them. I could really do with some help on the ethical stuff, I want to make an interesting and considered, thought-provoking ethical policy and not a polemic. How do I do my bit for the planet or at least not muddy my environmental karma? HELP!