Drimnagh is Good

Drimnagh had its first social media surgery last  Tuesday as part of the ‘Digitise the Nation‘ event held by the Irish Internet Association. The plan was to hold 3 surgeries in one day (with hindsight maybe 3 was a bit ambitious).

Anyhow, the times set were from 10-12pm, 2 – 4pm & 7-9pm. The surgery was held in Drimnagh’s local youth centre The Bosco on Davitt Rd, Drimnagh. The Bosco youth on an employment training programme acted as surgeons alongside digital/social media experts @stephenoleary of O’Leary Analytics & @jl_pagano. A BIG thank you to them all for coming along & being social media surgeons for the day.

Eddie O’Neill who champions Drimnagh all the time & runs Drimnagh Celtic a local community football club was one of our first social media patients. Eddie wanted to know about twitter & how he could use it to promote his club.

The 10 o’clock until 12 o’clock went great and the surgeons were kept busy for the two hours. All sorts of questions were answered from helping a lady update a 2001 microsoft card for making software, to helping local man Tommy Tyrrell search the web & check out what cruises were coming to Cobh this year. There was a good atmosphere with the young & old learning from eachother.

The 2 to 4pm saw no one turning up at the centre looking for help. So @jl_pagano got busy showing one of the Bosco youth lads (who loves rugby) how he could use twitter to engage with other rugby enthusiasts & learn more about the sport. And @stephenoleary managed to squeeze in a game of pool with some of the other Bosco youth. I helped Ger the youth co-ordinator set up a twitter account for the Bosco to help promote the work they do & to connect with the Drimnagh community in realtime.  You can say hello to them here on twitter at this address @theboscocentre.

In the video here , one of the youth participants interviewed Maria Cooke (another social media patient) to see what she thought of her visit.  Maria had come in wanting to know how to copy & paste & to find out a little bit more about twitter & facebook. Maria like most people we talked to were delighted with what they learnt & wanted to know when the next one is on.

The evening session went really well & turned out to be very sociable. We helped Eileen & Anna set up email accounts for the first time, talked to Peter about setting up a blog & helped Frank learn how to burn a CD. All in all, approx 20 people came to the surgery on the day & hopefully they all went away feeling a little bit more knowledgeable about digital &social media.

Lastly, check out this excellent post from Marcus Breen where he talks about How to DO Social Media and his thoughts on what social media is all about. Really social media is just another communication tool, its like the telephone, newspapers,  the radio or email. We use it to converse, to connect, to collaborate & share thoughts, ideas & stories. Just like we have always done.

So do you use social media? What tools do you use? Would you come to a social media surgery? What would you like to know more about?