Social Media Day, Maastricht

The social media day initiative

An initiative of social media news blog Mashable, Social Media Day on 30 June, 2010 was an attempt to gather social media fans and users in cities around the world on the same day.

“Social media has changed our lives. It has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we connect with one another, consume our news, conduct our work, organize our lives, and much more. It’s a revolution worth celebrating,” Mashable wrote on its blog.

The Social Media Day in Maastricht was one of 600 meetups that took place in 93 countries.

Organised by the European Journalism Centre (EJC), the event gave Maastricht residents a platform to talk about the impact social media on their lives and what role they play in a city like Maastricht, especially in the light of Maastricht’s bid to become the European Cultural Capital in 2018.

Planning is everything

The Maastricht Social Media Day 2010 organising team consisted of a few members of the EJC (staff members Eszter Pakozdi, Emma Brewin, Veronica Krupova,Brook DuBois and cameramen Ivan Picart and Remko Nijsten), along with two independent social media users (Mitchell Lee and Monika Saraca).

The event was planned as an international, informal and social evening, consisting of a series of themed presentations/workshops and a final overall group discussion, all held in English.

The promotion effort was done via social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Couchsurfing and immediately gave encouraging results.

Through Facebook alone, 37 people confirmed their participation, with 49 indicating that they ‘might attend’. This example is a clear demonstration of how fast messages travel through social media channels.

Due to the high level of interest, the initial location (Jules and You office) had to be changed to a more spacious one (the Cafe de Twee Heeren conference room upstairs).

In the end however, it appeared that in spite of their information-spreading capabilities, social media platforms are not necessarily reliable channels: only 16 of those Facebookers showed up. Nine participants joined the event through personal invitations.

Six speakers were invited to provide the audience with a general overview of the emergence and the impact of social media in our society, highlighting the connections between social media and business, social media and activism, and social media and participatory journalism.

After a short introduction, the evening began with the presentation of Nicolaas Pereboom from Crossmint, explaining the origins and development of social media. Then Klaus Röhrig from Amnesty International explained how activist organisations can utilise social media. Our third speaker, Irene Senden, gave a presentation about the business social platform, LinkedIn. Speaking from a more local perspective, Sofia Tussis and Seraina Soldner of Maas Media introduced the concept of participatory journalism.

Lei Meisen from VIA 2018, who was to introduce Maastricht’s Cultural Capital concept, informing the audience about the city’s goals and ways of reaching them,  regrettably cancelled his presentation, due to unforeseen circumstances.

Meisen’s absence left the audience wondering about Maastricht’s Cultural Capital concept, all the more since the VIA 2018 website provides no information to the largely English-speaking international community in Maastricht.

Tinkering with participation


Three workshops followed the presentations.

The workshop led by Klaus from the Amnesty International Maastricht Student group looked at how social media can be used to mobilise people and small organisations. Participants were asked to reflect on how student groups can contribute to support Maastricht’s bid for 2018. Lack of integration of foreign students within the city of Maastricht, due in part to the language barrier, was identified as an important obstacle. A possible solution could be the creation of more multilingual cultural programmes to encourage bottom-up/grassroots cultural initiatives in the city. International student groups such as Amnesty International Maastricht Student mainly consist of foreign students who say that they are not involved in activities run in Dutch.

In their workshop about participatory journalism, Sofia and Seraina from Maas Media, a student initiative aiming at encouraging individuals participation in journalism, highlighted the role that media platforms can play in helping Maastricht become a more thriving cultural city, by “collecting existing initiatives across the region and pooling them under a virtual umbrella”. They also emphasised “the need for media to act as a catalyst and to create events where participants can contribute to make local life richer” and “the necessity to keep close to local stories”. The main goal of participatory journalism as they see it is to help spread opinions (ie. blogging) in a community in order to enhance cohesion within a community and to encourage the will to organise and attend cultural events.

The goal of the LinkedIn workshop was to investigate whether LinkedIn could be used to help Maastricht’s 2018 bid. Once again, the language barrier was identified as a main obstacle for the international community, since the discussion on the VIA 2018 group on LinkedIn is carried out in Dutch.  Since translation is not an option on the website, participants concluded that social media such as LinkedIn can only be a helpful tool to support Maastricht’s bid if the dialogue takes place in more languages. Participants also suggested that by excluding non-Dutch speakers Maastricht loses a large number of potential supporters. It was noted that most Dutch people have an excellent command of English, and, more importantly, seem to be happy to use English in their communication via social channels (eg. many links and messages on Facebook are posted in English by Dutch people).

Social media: for integration?

The final group discussion brought everyone back together for a deeper conclusion.

After giving a general overview on the negative and positive aspects of social media platforms and discussing privacy issues on Facebook and best practices on Twitter, the organisers invited the audience to suggest ideas to help Maastricht’s Cultural Capital bid.

Lack of local integration among the large number of international students and foreign residents working for locally based international organisations such as the EJC, as well as language barriers, were flagged as key concerns.

Participants were keen to share their opinions and comment on the fact that the VIA 2018 website, which is responsible for Maastricht’s bid, is not easily understandable for the international community because it is not available in English. Foreign residents are generally oblivious to explanations about the work being done to support Maastricht’s bid and how the city intends to reach its goal.
The main suggestion was again to offer an English page of the website next to pages in Dutch, French and German.

It was also noted that the Maastricht VIA 2018 groups on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have few participants and activity at the moment. This could be improved by generating discussions and suggesting cultural events in English in order to attract and involve the international community. The introduction of more social events in English would attract international students and lead to more culture-related social media posts, tweets, and so on.

One of the participants, Amanda Potter, later blogged about the event (her post, Social Media & Maastricht’s Bid for Cultural Capital 2018), further encouraging the discussion on the topic and even involving Lei Meisen from VIA 2018.

The organisers of Maastricht Social Media Day hope that the event will result in an ongoing ‘discussion board’ and stimulate the local community to attend or organise follow-up meetings.

Posted on July 10, 2010 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under events.