I felt Manchester Digital could do a lot more to improve how it communicated with members and needed to reach out to work more collaboratively with the local digital community.

Therefore, as part of my role on the council, I’ve taken up the mantle to lead the PR, marketing and communications working group. This group will meet to discuss and improve the way that Manchester Digital communicates externally, identifying problems, challenges and coming up with solutions.

I strongly feel that we – Manchester Digital – can do more to engage digitally with our membership and improve our relevance as the trade body for the north-west digital sector. I hope this group will play a key part in making that happen.

Any member of Manchester Digital is welcome to attend. This will be part of a series of meetings, that I will try and move around so as to accommodate varying availability. Also, I hope to open up some of the discussions online, so people who can’t attend can also engage with the process.

Event details:

Tuesday 21 September, 6-7 pm
MDDA, Portland Street (map).

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Email me technicalfault-at-gmail-dot-com if you plan to attend or have any questions (and please drop a comment below too).

The Manchester Mark I - first stored program digital computer (c. 1949).

It seems I’m spending increasingly more of my free time at that brilliant space known as the Manchester Digital Laboratory. Last Wednesday night, the, erm, Madlab played host to a meeting of North West Digital Communities (NWDC), and I went along to fly the flag for the Social Media Café.

NWDC is a forum that brings together the leaders of digital communities in the north west, with the aim of improve the local digital community by sharing resources and pooling ideas.

These communities are incredibly diverse, representing a wide-range of tech interests; technology users groups; communications and small business. It’s also true to say that there is huge overlap and many people involved in one of the communities will be involved in at least one other. Colleagues from Geekup, Madlab, Manchester Free Software, Manchester BSD group and others were all in attendance.

One of the things discussed at the meeting though was NWDC’s lack of ‘visibility’. Though collectively representing easily hundreds of members, groups don’t know that they’re part of a wider community. This means it’s harder to know about other events happening locally in a similar sphere and can potentially lead to overlap or new groups being created when getting involved with existing communities could provide access to an instant pool of interested individuals.

Groups at NWDC also have one huge thing in common – many people who attend are freelancers, small businesses owners or employees,  or social enterprises. To some extent, this sets it apart from larger trade bodies like Manchester Digital (who are of course NWDC members but operate in a different way).

With better profile and visibility, NWDC could act as a collective voice for these groups who are often under-represented when it comes to influencing the local digital business community within which they operate. Larger businesses are potentially able to allocate time and resources to influencing change, through membership of Manchester Digital particularly. Small businesses and freelancers might find that more difficult to justify, particularly when any sort of paid-for membership often demands tangible value for their return on investment.

This is definitely a view with which I personally strongly agree. Amongst those who were able to attend, it seemed there was also a clear enthusiasm for improving the profile of NWDC, by cross-promoting it to their groups and exploring how it can better serve its members through its collective membership, bearing in mind the above.

One of the first steps will be to better implement and publicise a shared calendar of events. Development of a common, open-source platform for user groups in the region (and beyond) is also being explored. These volunteer-led activities from a group made up totally of volunteers with a passion for the region, for region and for digital are a very obvious example of ‘return on investment’.

Finally, many of us this week are longingly/jealously reading tweets emanating from Austin, Texas; attending the NWDC meeting reminded me of the diversity of talent that we have in Manchester, which makes it a natural destination for anyone interested in digital technology, communications and enterprise.

Perhaps we don’t need a glitzy festival of music and digital innovation – we’re surrounded by our own constant and limitless supply of both! We are, perhaps cringingly, our own continuous  Northwest by North…

Do you have any ideas about how North West Digital Communities could raise its profile? Want to get more involved or hear about what it does? Leave a comment below and visit their website to sign-up for email notifications.

In this post, I’m going to outline why video can be a critical way to deliver key content and share some stats I found along the way. In another post, I’ll share some criteria I worked up for an on demand video delivery system which I think will be a good basis for many organisations considering implementation of video.

A stats-led approach

In any approach to video, I’d start by looking at the stats for your website. When I analysed these for my organisation, I found a 7 per cent drop in average time on site and an increase in bounce rate to over 50 per cent in the last two months. More importantly though, these were not short-term trends that were not just month-on-month, they were year-on-year (on my organisation’s site).

This is not good news. Despite spending time and effort restructuring content, providing more readable content and improving our SEO, there still seems to be a degree of ongoing disengagement with our (primarily text-led) website content.

Therefore, we need to look at how we actually deliver that content. Using on demand video to supplement and replace ‘traditional’ web copy is a natural solution.

Popularity of and access to video in the UK

In the UK, online video is a massively important medium. The use of video sharing sites like YouTube and video-on-demand services like the BBC iPlayer has exploded over the last few years, becoming embedded in the vocabulary of the nation. In the 12 months to March 2009, UK Internet traffic to video sites rose by almost 41 per cent (Hitwise UK Online Video Update, March 2009).

The iPlayer in particular has brought the ease of online video to the consciousness of even new Internet users, but has also raised expectations about the quality of video that can be delivered. This week’s Hitwise dashboard
shows just how much online video dominates the top lists of popular overall websites, entertainment websites and social networking websites.

The current popularity of video on the web is not surprising, considering the level of broadband penetration in the UK:

• over 95 per cent of Internet connections are broadband connections;
• over 60 per cent of those are at speeds faster than 2 Mbit/second (Internet connectivity report, December 2008, Office for National Statistics).

Video is mainstream

These stats show that is the right time to consider creation of online video content as a mainstream method for delivering information, and treat it that way within an organisation of any size, large or small.

Video can be used to produce:

• supporting clips for press releases (relevant staff quotes, Q&As/interviews);
• short case studies that could support your work;
• explanations of complicated processes or procedures;
• key information in British Sign Language, released at the same time as subtitled/English/Welsh versions; and
• small to medium-sized event coverage.

Of course, this video doesn’t just have to be destined for online, external-facing channels. There’s a compelling case to use it for internal distribution, through an intranet for example or at staff briefings.

Although not everyone can access video, either due to technological restrains or through ability to access that type of information, it is still potentially a far more widely engaging medium than just web copy. This may be particularly true for users who may be new to your work or those who have a single-issue interest.

Benefits of live video

Producing your own video content gives you the ability to deliver your message to your audience direct and unfiltered – not subject to interpretation through the media. ‘Live’ video is a natural extension of this – enabling important announcements to be communicated to any sized audience as they happen, again, without filtering through traditional media outlets. The ability for video to be re-shared and embedded in other websites, including in social media news releases, for example, is key to spreading those messages beyond your own channels.

As an example, I recently produced a webcast at short notice for a press conference. With simply a tweet on the morning of the conference, we got 21 viewers. Subsequent views raised that to over 600. For the first time, people interested in my organisation’s work have been able to watch complete announcements in our own words. Overall, these are small numbers perhaps, but it shows what you can do even with short notice events and provides a solid platform for growth.

I have already written a lengthy blog post about webcasting and doing it cheaply. Which brings me to…

Falling costs

The falling cost of producing high-quality video brings in-house production within anyone’s grasp. At my organisation, we have already produced a number of video clips in-house, but given the right equipment, staff resource and training, any organisation can expand their video production capabilities to service wider organisational needs. And the bottom line is that if you can reach and engage more people directly with your messages and campaigns, that has a high value of its own.

Conclusions

Producing video to support your messages and campaigns is a mainstream method for delivering online content. The widespread access to broadband connections, familiarity with services like YouTube and the iPlayer, all mean that users are switched on more than ever to watching video online. Now is the time to take advantage of that and switch on your organisation to the importance of video – it will be a worthy investment.