Yes, we said this at the head of the previous post, but in case you’re coming in afresh… We’ve just finished a series of three social media training or awareness-raising sessions for the good people at BBC Scotland, in the wonderful studios on Pacific Quay. These sessions were to some extent a remix of the sessions we did in London during the winter and spring earlier this year (which we blogged) but of course, times move on so there a whole load of new stuff in there too. So we’re going to our notes and resources up here both as follow up to the attendees and as – just possibly – a useful bit of “stuff” for the casual reader (with the obvious caveat that this is NOT an essay, but the basis of presentations punctuated with some great Q&A interventions from some brilliant guests)…

Tracking the conversations
The first thing to do if you want to start talking… is to start listening. That’s all very well, but how can you pick out apposite, useful conversation amongst the chattering Babel that is the web? Well let’s have a look at some specific tools.

Capture
Google Alerts
Google Blog Search
Twoogle
Technorati
Blogpulse
Icerocket

Twitter specific stuff
Twitter Search
Twitterfall
Trendistic

Feed Readers
You really only need one of these – and Google is great, but in case you don’t want to put all your eggs in the Mountain View basket, we’ll include a couple of others:
Google Reader
Bloglines 
The cryptically-named Feedreader

Another approach: Handy homepage aggregators
Netvibes
Page flakes
iGoogle

OK… that’s a lot of stuff… NOBODY uses all of ‘em (with the exception of social media consultants who HAVE TO!)… You do need to play with them and create your own “ecosystem”… 

Breakout – the art of listening

We then asked the attendees to break into 3-5 groups. Each group was given a different news story from that day (or previous couple) and asked to use one or two (at most) of the tools listed above in order to find posts/threads/conversations related to the story. These questions might be useful to you when looking for conversations “out there”:

•What new aspects of the story emerged – if any?
•Did you manage to find interesting voices?
•How did the tools compare to each other?
•How easy were stories to find?
•How did the tools compare to standard new gathering sources – the wires, cuts etc?

Best practice in action 1
John Connell then gave a presentation and answered questions from us and the audience. John is a former teacher and head teacher and an educationalist who works full time for Cisco. Somehow he also finds time to maintain not one but two blogs and has – with the aid of the fabulous Tweetdeck – properly mastered the art of Twitter.
John Connell: The Blog
John Connell's Travel Blog

Best practice in action 2:
Bringing the Conversation Back into the Broadcast

Ros Atkins is the main presenter of World Have Your Say, our favourite show on the radio, a 5-day-a-week, hour-long show which involves callers from around the world debating a hot topic. However, to call WHYS a call-in show would be to grievously underestimate it. Rather, it’s a forum in which participants talk to each other, with Ros (or one of his colleagues) “simply” wrangling the conversation. This wrangling, of course, is all in the preparation and the preparation is all about the adroit use of social media.

Simon