Ian and I started work Made at the beginning of May, establishing a dedicated social media team here. It’s early days for us yet, but I thought I’d explain a little about what we’ve done here so far to give a feel for the kind of work we do.
Some ongoing work
We brought some work with us – both blog-focussed projects that aim to connect and inform creative communities:
• West Midlands Dance is a valuable resource for the region’s dance sector and is supported by the Arts Council.
• Created in Birmingham is a very popular arts and culture blog locally. Currently run out of the goodness of our hearts, we’re working up some interesting plans to develop the site further.
Some new work
We’ve recently become responsible for the editorial content and some of the social media activity for Dancing for the Games, which is part of the West Midlands Culture Programme for London 2012. With the Olympics just a little over a year away activity around this programme is about to start ramping up.
Ian oversaw the production of an iPad app that’s been made to accompany a high-profile touring exhibition. The app has only been installed on iPads that are built into the exhibition’s display cases, it’s not on general release. We’ll do a proper write-up of this project at some point.
Ian’s also been busy coordinating a usability test that will inform a website redesign for for one of Made’s existing clients. We had our test subjects in the other day, learnt an awful lot from them and are now compiling a report that will inform ongoing work.
Meanwhile, Birmingham Hippodrome asked me to go to Boston to see Cirque Eloize perform a spectacular show called iD which is coming to the UK later this year. As well as producing some copy about the show I shot a couple of very simple videos, one of which has racked up 450,000 views in just two weeks. Result.
A couple of smaller jobs: The Guardian asked us to write a round-up of Birmingham’s summer arts events and I manned a liveblog for an event held by Birmingham Ormiston Academy.
More generally, we’re just finalising some packages of social media services that we’ll be offering to clients to make sure they have access to the levels of support that they need.
Getting out and about
I was asked to speak to quite a few groups of people:
• a CIPR WM meeting focussed on bloggers and blogging
• Using Film in Education, a regional seminar organised by Film: 21st Century Literacy
• some students of Fashion Retail Management at BCU
• a group of creative industries entrepreneurs on the Metapod: Be Effective course.
I also attended Open Culture 2011, The Power of Online Video, a social media-themed meeting of the Midlands Federation of Museums and Art Galleries, Transmedia London and Hacks/Hackers.
There was a fantastic turnout at our final Birmingham Social Media Cafe too. We’ve passed the reins for that over to Karen Strunks and we wish her all the very best with it.
Upcoming
We’re just kicking off an amazing new project which, as well as being a significant web development project, has a great deal of social interaction baked into the core mechanism. It’s exactly the kind of project that that I’d hoped we’d get the chance to work on. More to come on this.
Meetings with some thoroughly interesting people and organisations have lead to some equally interesting briefs, with more on the way. Proposals have been sent and we’re hoping for more to announce soon.
Finally, it’s been a long time coming, but the launch of the new Made Media website isn’t too far off now. We’ve been helping to supply some of the copy for the site, including writing lots of lovely case studies.
So that’s what we’ve been doing
If you think we might be able to work with you on something, just let us know.
