Ok, maybe not fully mapping Derby and maybe it’s a bit rough round the edges, but this should give you a good idea of the impact of Social Media in Derby and possibly inspire you to do something similar or even better?

A fair few Saturdays ago, I was bored and thought I’d see how much of Derby was on Facebook. I began to search for key areas (political wards or neighbourhood names), issues, people, places etc and plotted them as nodes on a Mind Map using MindMeister.

I tweeted to Tim that I was doing this and invited him to collaborate. It grew exponentially as we both edited it live and quickly moved beyond Facebook into something more indicative of the many sites in use by or known to both of us.

You can view the map for yourself below and draw your own conclusions about what it tells us. Everything on the map is freely available to public searches. All we have done is carry out those searches for you and put them all in one place.

A Mind Map illustrating the extent of usage of Social Media in Derby, UK.

City of Derby Social Media Map by Paul Cole and Tim Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The map was briefly made available at LocalGovCamp in a session I ran entitled, “Are we listening?”. This session and the discussions it raised have been covered very well already by Sarah Lay, Jack Pickard and Pete Ashton. All posts are definitely worth a read.

I had hoped to have a hyperlink (the small arrow) from each node taking you straight to each web page. Unfortunately, these have only (mostly) been added to Facebook so far.

You should be aware that there is an issue with the links to most of the Facebook Groups as I incorrectly pasted the link to the search results for the group and not the actual group address. This will take me a while to rectify, if I do it at all. To get to a Facebook group with a faulty link, simply copy and paste the exact title as it appears on the node into the search bar on Facebook. Links I have added for Facebook Pages and other sites should be OK.

The map is presented as is, that is, as it was created on that day. It may not be organised perfectly or logically, but it does its job as far as I’m concerned.

The simple experience of searching for and finding what is out there was a good learning experience in itself. You can take what you want from it or try it for yourself in your city or area.

Please share your thoughts with us.

Just a couple of weeks to go now until Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe meets for the first time. This is a bit of a round-up post of things you might be interested in and a couple of things which have merely been passing through my mind.

So – first off – Emily Robe, a social media virtual assistant from Derby, gave a great interview on Radio Derby‘s Aleena Naylor show on Wednesday 16 September. They talked about Emily’s job, how social media can help businesses and marketing through platforms such as Twitter. Emily also gave the social media cafe a mention – so if you’re checking the blog after hearing her on the radio, welcome!

If you missed it you can hear the interview on Listen Again until next Wednesday. Emily’s interview starts at about 1 hour 11 minutes in. Enjoy!

Elsewhere there have been a number of new social media cafes getting off the ground. Lichfield and Devon both held their first meetings on Tuesday 15 September and the Coventry and Warwickshire Social Media Cafe will be launching on Friday 18 September. All three are linked in the Other Social Media Cafes section of this blog.

It’s interesting to see the social media and wider community gather at these events – each run slightly differently on a localised version of the Tuttle model. I’m sure if you are in the area when one is taking place they’d be only too pleased to welcome you to a meeting – take a look at their blogs to see what they’re talking about.

Both of these things got me thinking about what the Derbyshire version of the cafe is, and perhaps even more importantly is not. I’m keen to let it grow somewhat organically from these early days but there are few things I’m pretty sure on in my head. So here is what I think the cafe is and is not. Would be great to have views from other people coming along.

It is:

• An informal networking event.
• Open to all sectors (public, private, third) and both those who work directly with online communications, digital and social media and those who want to find out more about it for personal or community use.
• Mainly for Derby and Derbyshire but welcomes others from outside these geographical boundaries as the experiences and knowledge they have to share.
• (More a it should than an is) Try to capture knowledge relevant to us all and shared at the cafe through this blog and other online spaces. Let us know if you have any ideas about how / where we could do this.

It isn’t:

• A place to sell your product – there are conferences and better places for that. The cafe is about sharing and collaborating not getting a sales pitch
• Affiliated with any one organisation or agenda.
• Over-organised. To a certain extent each meeting will be decided on by the group. I’ve set out some rough ideas about frequency and location in previous posts but it’s one of the things I’d be interested to hear your views on at the first meeting.

So, if you think I’ve missed something vital off these lists let me know. Don’t forget to pop over to Nurphy to join the introductions conversation and see what you think of the platform. Otherwise the blog is open to comments, the #smcderby stream on Twitter is running and the Facebook group and event listing is available too.

A while ago, Paul Cole and I collaborated to document what we could find about social media activity in Derby. We did this ‘virtually’ using an online mind mapping tool called Mind Meister. Robin Good has published a useful guide to social media tools using Mind Meister, which you can view by using the following link: www.mindmeister.com/12213323.

What became apparent to us while compiling this information is the extent to which businesses, organisations and – perhaps more importantly – the public in the area are using social media. The largest area of activity is on Facebook where we found numerous groups that have been set up on issue-based subjects.

Few businesses and public sector organisations in the city have pages on Facebook, but there are a growing  number using Twitter. However, few of these are actively engaging with customers. One notable exception to this, based on my own experience, is Derby Quad (@derbyquad) whose customer service via the Twitter service has been excellent.

[Edit: I've now created a separate page for all of the social media links, which you can visit by clicking on the 'Links' page from the navigation menu or by using the following link: http://socialmediacafe.org.uk/links/]

Let us know if you know of other local organisations using Twitter and Facebook (or other services) and we’ll add them to the list.