Launching The Social Conversation

This week I launched my latest project: a new social media blog and community called The Social Conversation.

The Social Conversation brings my day job as a social media manager together with my love of blogging. It is a blog and community that focusses on its diverse contributors' experiences and practical knowledge of social media. We don't believe there is one way to do social media well. Our aim is to create a community where we can share different viewpoints on the same topic, to allow our followers to decide for themselves and to join in the conversation too.

Igniting the spark

I started blogging way back in 2007. This was the year in which the first iPhone launched, Madeleine McCann disappeared and The Big Bang Theory debuted on TV.

It was a long time ago in digital terms. YouTube was only two years old; Instagram wouldn’t appear for another three years.

One of the reasons I’m still going 13 years later is that blogging has always been a passion rather than a job for me. That passion has taken me in many different and unexpected directions. I’ve blogged about sports, TV and family. Contributed to and ultimately run my own podcasts. Occasional radio appearances. And it also led me directly to both writing freelance for Metro (as a TV reviewer) and switching to a career in social media.

Perhaps oddly, COVID-19 provided the spark I needed to create The Social Conversation. In my current job, I work almost entirely in virtual teams. And with the pandemic forcing everyone to work remotely, this has only emphasised this working model.

It got me thinking. My love of social media is similar to my love of cycling. Why not create a site and a virtual community that provides a place for ‘social media for users, by users’?

Why The Social Conversation is different

And so The Social Conversation was born - me and a team of like-minded contributors. We aim to bring a range of views and experiences – different skills and expertise, different backgrounds, and so on. Our unique selling point is that we are diverse and inclusive.

That’s something else that has been on my mind recently with the Black Lives Matter protests and ongoing issues with minority representation in the influencer industry.

We are a team of bloggers and social media professionals.

We represent agencies, brands and influencers.

Some of us are working parents; others stay-at-home mums and dads.

We are from different ethnic backgrounds, and from the LGBTQ+ community.

But the truth is we have more commonalities than differences. We work with and talk about social media every day, sometimes in a professional capacity but more often as users. And it is those experiences that we want to share.

It's good to talk

Social media is now virtually universal in developed economies. Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users. That’s about the same number of people as China and India (the two most populous nations on Earth) combined.

Social media is everywhere. It brings us the latest news. It allows us to connect instantaneously with others who share our interests anywhere in the world. Sports, politics, TV, film: nothing is immune from social media’s ubiquitous reach.

Social media excites and terrifies us in equal measure. For better or worse, it is an inextricable part of our 21st century lives. And we are better off for talking about and understanding how it shapes our perceptions of the world we live in.

That’s where The Social Conversation comes in. Share our experiences; join the conversation. After all, it’s not called social media for nothing.

You can find The Social Conversation in the following places:

• Blog – thesocialconversation.com
• Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/socialconvouk/
• Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/thesocialconversation/
• Twitter – @SocialConvoUK