By Dave Massey twitter.com/brumhour
I’ve been nominated for an award! Blogger of the year at Birmingham Awards! But more about that in just a moment!
Moving #Forward with #BrumHour
Since December 2013, I have been running #BrumHour on a weekly basis, as a free networking event on Twitter. It’s primary aim is for businesses and individuals to tweet about their work or skills, and essentially demonstrate who they are.
I first set up #BrumHour to shout about a charity shop that I was working at. I soon realised that existing twitter networking events did not cover the Birmingham area as fully as I wanted. #BrumHour became a chance for users to see the current status of Birmingham through the tweets of those in and around it.
Tweets from the #BrumHour account are seen weekly over 180,000 times and I’m very proud of what I have achieved in driving this account so far. 15,000 Twitter users follow #BrumHour and many of those are Birmingham and West Midlands based. I did this through sharing content about cultural events, as well as businesses, products and services connected to Birmingham.
I knew that I wanted to develop this further, so in August 2014 I started a blog, which in February 2015 became the wordpress blog that you currently see. It has been viewed nearly 30,000 times in the first 12 months with most of the traffic coming from Twitter.
Then in July of 2015, I was invited to create a #BrumHour radio show for brumradio.com, a new online only radio station based in Digbeth in the heart of central Birmingham. The #BrumHour radio show began in December 2015 and I’ve spent the last six months growing and developing it with my show producers.
On top of this, I became organiser of Birmingham Social Media Cafe aka #BrumSMC in January 2016 – a monthly meeting for those interested in talking about social media. This was a networking event first set up in 2008/09. It has a solid group of people attending the meetings, which has been great.
Across the 2nd half of 2016 I plan to grow #BrumHour even further by building a full website and creating a team of lovely helpers who want to improve their CV and demonstrate their own skills.
I’m delighted to announce that this blog has been nominated for a Birmingham Award for blogger of the year! Along with Full to the Brum, Fashion Mommy, Midlands Beer blog and Rosalilium, this blog has been shortlisted for the award! It’s fair to say I’m pretty shocked and rather looking forward to seeing who will win. Good luck to everyone who is shortlisted!
I’d really love it if you could vote for me here: birminghamawards.co.uk/index.php/voting/
I just wanted to take this chance to say thanks for your continued support, tweets and retweets. I can’t wait to see what happens next on #BrumHour. Join me Sundays at 8pm on Twitter!
Dave Massey, August 2016
