Publications
Newsletter
Subscribe to our free mailing list for event announcements, CSM news and our latest reports.
Feeds
Subscribe to News RSS feed
Subscribe to iCalendarPlease login or register to post
Copyright & Fair Use Blog
Who is doing social media training?
Posted by JD Lasica on Nov 17, 2008 at 12:58 PM
A handful of us in the social media space are moving ahead with the idea of planning a series of Social Media Innovation Camps around the country. Two weeks ago Jessica Clark posed the question, Could “Social Media Innovation Camps” help power ground-up public media?
We’re still at the stage of gauging reaction (positive so far) and garnering input on similar initiatives (sparse so far. So I thought I’d share what I’ve uncovered to date.
The notion of increasing civic engagement through social media is not a new one, but it has taken on widely differing forms depending on which constituency is being targeted. The kind of user-empowering media envisioned in this project has gone mainstream in recent years with the rise of blogging, video sharing sites like YouTube, social networking sites like Facebook, RSS feeds, wikis, social bookmarking and the like.
We believe that these social media tools can now be leveraged to advance the public good in a more forceful and systematic way. It’s about taking the personal media revolution, making it social, and adding a civic engagement component. And it all starts with training the grassroots leaders in this movement.
After conducting a survey of the kind of workshops and skills training taking place in this space, it’s apparent that the approaches being taken vary widely depending on who’s doing the training. For instance, media organizations, universities and institutes emphasize journalism and multimedia skills in their training rather than social media tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS, Twitter, Facebook or grassroots media sites.
The training taking place today generally falls into three main groupings:
Grouping 1: New media training
New media, multimedia and citizen journalism workshops put on by media organizations, universities and institutes. It should be noted that the vast majority of these workshops focus chiefly on journalism rather than social media or grassroots media tools.
These include such noteworthy efforts as:
• The Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts has organized a number of participatory events since 2006, including “New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs,” co-sponsored by the Minnesota Journalism Center, June 4-6, 2008, in Minneapolis; “Journalism That Matters - Silicon Valley: NewsTools2008,” a concept-design mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs, co-sponsored and held at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, Calif., on April 30-May 3, 2008; the interactive seminar “The New(s) England Revolution: From Politics to Courtroom to Classroom,” held April 7, 2007, at the Univ. of Mass. Lowell, and “Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy,” to be held Dec. 3-5, 2008, in Columbia, Mo.
• The Knight Digital Media Center, housed jointly at University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, and the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, focuses chiefly on multimedia and new media training rather than social or civic media. In addition, a rich set of resources for citizen journalists is offered through the Knight Digital Media Center.
• The National Press Club holds occasional professional development events such as this one on social media.
• The J-Lab in the past has conducted Citizen Media Summits in the past with an emphasis on the success stories of hyperlocal community sites.
• The MIT Media Lab has included tracks on citizen journalism in some of its public conferences, such as the Future of Civic Media gathering in May 2008.
While the Poynter Institute teaches journalism education, leadership and online, multimedia, reporting and other skills, we could find no sessions devoted to social media. Similarly, the Committee of Concerned Journalists offers a deep set of Traveling Curriculum Modules, but none focus on social media or civic media. The Online News Association holds workshops in advance of its annual conference but these cater to online journalism and new media interests. The Associated Press Managing Editors Association Foundation offers NewsTrain regional training workshops and the Online Journalism Credibility Project, a project to test innovative and model approaches in online news.
Grouping 2: Grassroots media training
These are social media and civic media workshops that occur in varied locations by various hosting institutions — specifically, one-off bootcamps, BarCamps, PodCamps and unconferences put on by grassroots organizations, nonprofits, public media advocates and individuals. Unlike Grouping 1, which are professionally run conferences with a primary focus on journalism and multimedia training, these workshops span a wide range of topcis and constituencies and come closest to the Innovation Camps model we envision.
• Global Voices conducts an annual Citizen Media Summit, most recently June 27-28, 2008, in Budapest, Hungary.
• Invididuals have organized scores of PodCamps and BarCamps, such as the Public Media Camp in Santa Cruz in November 2008 geared toward public media consituencies. As cited above, we believe these gatherings are valuable but often lack a cohesive framework, a reliable set of expert trainers and mentors, a curriculum that participants can take away and a follow-through apparatus that enables participants to communicate and collaborate with each other after the sessions end.
• Social Media Club regularly holds social media workshops in locations around the world.
• Netsquared occasionally holds workshops and webinars for nonprofits that center on social media tools.
• The organization Oneworld.net holds workshops around the world on a wide variety of subjects, such as computer training, journalism, social justice and many other topics.
Grouping 3: Corporate social media
The past year has seen a large increase in the number of social media workshops focusing on social marketing and enterprise strategies put on by event planners, consultants and marketing firms. For the most part, these efforts train attendees how to use collaborative tools but generally do not focus on the civic engagement or public good aspects of social media.
• The Society for New Communication Research offers one-day workshops in social media by experts in the field as part of its twice-a-year conferences. SNCR conferences are attended by marketing and PR professionals, advertising and corporate communications managers and journalists.
• One-off workshops and conferences around business uses of social media are on the rise, such as the Social Media Summit (Oct. 20-23, 2008, in New York) and Social Summit 2008 (Nov. 8, 2008, in Oakland, Calif.)
In addition, there are many social media marketing and search engine optimization training workshops and webinars, but such ventures are not centered around civic media and thus fall outside the scope of this study.
As social media evolves to become an even larger part of the media landscape, we believe there’s an opportunity for foundations and corporations to play a greater role in helping to train the key stakeholders creating the media hubs of the 21st century. The first step toward that vision is to train the trainers through an ongoing series of Social Media Innovation Camps that serve the public interest.
Discussion
Thanks for this great survey. I think the Social Media Innovation Camps are an excellent idea.
There is another group not often considered in this discussion. They are community media & technology centers in communities across the country.
Cambridge Community Television (where I work), here in Massachusetts is one of several community media centers across the U.S. that offer classes in blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, and on other social media topics.
Here are a few other centers that offer social media training:
* Media Center in Palo Alto: http://tinyurl.com/633pnv
* Manhattan Neighborhood Network: http://tinyurl.com/5szs57
* Denver Open Media: http://denveropenmedia.org/webvideoguide
These and other community media & technology centers offer enormous potential for communities to embrace public/social media training with civic engagement right their own backyard.
It would be great if this group could have a chance to be involved in this discussion, as well.
Thanks again.