The DCSF has just published two guides and a set of videos on using social media to promote positive activities. This is great encouragement from DCSF for authorities to take a social media approach to promoting positive activities.
Enabling the direct feed of positive activity information in social media spaces has long been one of the advantages of Plings (and you can find mention of Plings in the guide) – as the output API enables a whole host of approaches, from the Application-based Bordometer, to automated widgets and feeds of event listings to Facebook pages.
Here’s how the DCSF ‘Social Media Explained’ guide introduces itself:
Social media is here to stay and it is changing the way millions of people communicate.If you have not yet joined Facebook or Twitter, or watched YouTube, you may well wonder what it is all about.But for most young people using social media is second nature, so as professionals at the heart of youth engagement,it is important to understand it and be part of it.With this in mind, this guide is specifically for you, youth project managers, with the following aims:
- To explain social media technologies and functions using simple language.
- To provide you with the tools to increase interest and attendance at your project by working with young people and promoting your activities through social media.
The Social Media Explained guide is also accompanied by some old-school guidance on creating videos for the web, and a series of video clips that outline ways of creating a high-quality video clip about a youth project. Of course, as well as carefully planned video clips, ‘quick clips’ created and shared online (with the appropriate consent and attention paid to making sure they are shared safely) can help promote activities – and so we’re hard a work right now on identifying how the ‘PlingBack’ framework in development can build links between multi-media and Plings records, building on the photo-links recently added to the national Plings.net.
For more on using social media in youth engagement, you can also check out the developing online ‘Youth Engagement and Social Media’ guide and the Youth Work Online community, and if you’re already using social media in promoting your positive activities, then do drop in a quick comment on this blog post to let us know what you’re trying and what you’ve been learning from the process…
