The Welsh government funded Social Media Roadshow Wales in Cardiff on 7th February 2012 has been a real success.
Simon Stratton, 32, is a film producer who is in the process of producing a film to be released next year. He attended the training day to learn social media skills to promote his film and developing an internet game.
“We are going to kick off with a crowd campaign because we want to do an online computer game before we release the film” he said.
His team is also making an online game which he is going to name as ‘Banshee’. The game will be free to start with.
“People can go online. It’s a multiplayer game. You can go into the world of the ‘Banshee’. And it’s about paramedics on a night shift,” he said.
His team aim to reach out to people and promote their project by using social media tools.
“We want the word to go out to people. So, I came on this course to learn how to engage arrangements,” he said.
“ I like listening to people and learning what people want really because we’re just only starting and it’s best to know what works and what doesn’t work and the best way to do that is to talk to people”, he added.
He has been a regular twitter user; he attended to Social Media Roadshow in Cardiff today, 7th February 2013, to learn to use social
media more effectively.
“I tweet quite a lot and I thought I knew a lot but then when you come on a course like this you realise you don’t know a lot. I’ve benefitted from it and I would say it’s made my life easier. But also it makes me a better tweeter”, he said.
Anna Roberts is the project manager for NUJ training Wales, the training arm in Wales for the National Union of journalists.
“Basically, we run these workshops funded by the Welsh governments for media workers across the spectrum, not just traditional journalists. It can be people working in any form of communication,” she said.
The rapid change in various social media is having a significant impact on how people interact with one another and these types of workshop help people to increase people understanding of social media.
The main aims of the NUJ training Wales is to make sure that people get trained in the right areas that help them to do their job effectively in social media environment.
“So, what we’re trying to do is make sure that media workers keep developing their skills. They need new skills all the time. Social media has totally changed the way they work,” Anna said.
Emma Meese is the Media Training Development Manager. She manages the Cardiff University’s Centre for Community Journalism. The centre has been established to creating network of hyper local journalists and work with hyper local community journalists across Wales and beyond.
Emma has been very busy recently travelling across Wales’s teaching Social Media skills to people.
“I’ve held a social media road show today which is social media road show Wales in conjunction with NUJ Training Wales and Cult Cymru” she said.
“We’ve been to North Wales, West Wales and Swansea. We’ve been to Cardiff today and the purpose of the social media road show was to give a taster of what is available when you start using social media, the doors it can open and how powerful it is as a journalistic tool if you are a journalist and if you are an organisation or company”, she added.
She explained the power of the social media how people depend on them to sell their services and or products. Social media is an effective tool to creating a presence to a wider targeted audience.
“It shows how powerful it can be to build your brand and you reputation”, she said
She warned that journalists should always check their sources and facts and to be mindful of the relevant law. The basic principles of journalism must be always observed, she said:
“There are issues that everybody would encounter such as copyright and privacy issues, but mainly facts verification.”
“You need to make sure that you verify the content just because somebody’s tweeted it, it doesn’t mean that it’s true so you treat them as any other source and if your re-tweeting does that mean that your tweeting is a single source story, how do you know what they are saying is true, how do you know they are saying how they say they are, when they sent the tweet or photo, how do you know if it’s the right photo and there’s legal issues is well. So, you need to beware,” she added.
