I’ve been using social media for a fair few years to bring a spotlight to Southbourne, mainly for its foodie credentials but also to its small independent businesses. The area seems to be doing well.
My business recently opened up a small office in Pokesdown and I wanted to be better neighbour to the area. I had an idea on my drive home and gave Tony Hughes a call, wondering if it was any good and he loved it. We are all in.
In my mind I just wanted to go ahead and do it. In my mind I was envisaging some videos to raise awareness of the lack of lifts at Pokesdown Station, hence the hashtag punnery, that local community groups have campaigned for a long time and wanted to add the weight of our social media connections. We would cover mental health awareness too. There would be music acts playing on the bridge in support of the fact that music venues are closed, and they have nowhere to play.
Tony reckoned we would get arrested if we did that. Part of me thought that would be good PR but then again, some of my businesses are involved in the law enforcement and security sector, so that probably wouldn’t be the best idea.
Now we are aiming to go live with a streaming music event on Friday 31st July. This is pop-up, this is ad-hoc so we are working it all out as we go along.
The initially three videos we posted did really well on Facebook. Twitter/YouTube seem to lag way behind on community issues.
We kicked off the month with an interview with Harry Seccombe of Chaplins. Couldn't really start with anybody else.
Fortunately on the same day there was footage of Chaplins Bar and Urban Reef featured on the BBC South Today News. That got loads of love and views too. Top tip is to tag the people involved.
The third video is a corker. I reached out to a local music artist Simon Fernand and mentioned the project and asked if he could come up with a song about the station and the lift situation. Within a couple of days, he had a fully formed hilarious song. I then recorded some video from the station, he cut it together and bingo - The Pokesdown Station Song. So much so that a TV channel has approached him with the possibility about doing a news piece on it.
There’s still more to come but I wanted to quickly post about it and the reasons why. Fundamentally I love the place work I live but now realise I need to extend the boundaries of my involvement a little further.
