A focus on youth and social media

Image credit: hypertypos @ flickr

Recently there has been a flurry of activity around the potential of social media technologies to support the government’s work with young people. Last month we saw the launch of the National Youth Agency’s social networking report, closely followed by the UKYouthOnline barcamp held at DIUS, and the week before I was busy giving a talk on youth and social media at the Delivering High Impact Youth Services conference.

Social media has always been a hard sell to government. Just when managers have finally got to grips with web commissioning, happily signing off briefs secure in the knowledge that they’ll have a nicely designed website to show for their money, along comes the social media crowd with a core message that only by engaging with young people on their turf will government be successful at getting its information across.

However, on the ground youth workers seem keen to engage; feedback from my talk, and the enthusiasm evident at the NYA event show that youth workers are very aware of the need to adapt to the changing social behaviors of the digital native generation. This is in sharp contrast to the response from a recent Society of IT managers (Socitm) event I attended where regardless of the best efforts of Ewan McIntosh to enthuse the crowd as to the potential, much of the talk remaining firmly risk averse focusing on safety, trust, information hording and cost. When Tom Steinberg of Mysociety presented their customer-focused Fixmystreet service, rather than congratulations on delivering added value to the citizen whilst reducing front-office costs to LAs, the Q&A instead focused on the increased cost of dealing with the issues generated, and the inflexibility of LA infrastructure to loosely couple with any outside services such as this without generating huge bills from their suppliers of closed systems.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh; having worked in local government IT I know the pressures managers are under just to keep everything ticking over and in line with legislation. However, I do think that for government to fully benefit from the social media revolution, these blockages at the political and IT level need to be tackled. No matter the enthusiasm shown on the ground from the youth workers starting up their blogs and engaging with social networks, whilst services such as YouTube are blocked at most LAs and there remains a strategic veto on the use of any services that weren’t procured from the big name back-office suppliers, LAs will fail to make these tools core to their interface with young people.

So to keep the momentum and support the dialogue, we have teamed up with 4Children to run a conference in November specifically focusing on Youth and social media. We’ve invited along some of the key players in this field to talk about what they do and the potential for revolutionising the way government communicates with young people, and we’re hoping that participants will walk away from the conference equipped with knowledge, contacts, and best practice to drive forward change within their organisations.

More information on the programme can be found on upcoming.org and I look forward to seeing you all there for some great discussion and debate on the day.