Bristol lands on the social media world map

How you view the arrival of Social Media Week in Bristol next month will depend, I suspect, on how you view the city’s place in the world generally.

For some, it’s a real coup. SMWs are hosted simultaneously all over the world, meaning that from November 14 to 18, Bristol will be spoken of in the same breath as Delhi, Dubai and Copenhagen. Perhaps others might think, about bloody time! After all, London has hosted SMWs for years, and it’s fair to suggest that Bristol’s burgeoning sense of itself as a creative, innovative hub ought to warrant an event like this.

Either way, you’d have to admit it’s rare for an event with an international flavour to be hosted here, despite our progressive, inclusive attitude to the world. Yes, it’s a small city. But I think it’s also down to Bristol’s DIY heritage. We are grassroots, not global. This independent city is bursting with mavericks, outsiders and entrepreneurs – starters of businesses, movements and ideas. As they grow, these ideas are nurtured by a community that is as collaborative and cross-discipline as any I’ve known. Bristol is a place where people look out for each other. But it rarely shouts loud enough about itself for others to hear.

That’s starting to change. It feels like the city is starting to speak with one voice. All those creative businesses, shared working spaces, multi-disciplinary initiatives and technology hubs are beginning to coalesce into one coherent whole, finally bigger than the sum of its parts. The easy bedfellows of art, enterprise and academia are more entwined than ever. Look at the remit of some of the city’s best ideas; notice how blurry the distinctions are between, say, the Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio, Creative England and Bristol Is Open. They all deal with technology and innovation. They all mix public and private funding. They all want to create a climate of creativity and experimentation that we can all benefit from.

The connective tissue in all this is the social and digital technologies that are revolutionising our work and play, regardless of discipline. It’s certainly part of our daily reality here. More than 61,500 people work in digital jobs in the Bristol and Bath region, making it second only to London in volume. According to Tech Nation, between 2010 and 2013 digital companies incorporated in the region grew by 65 percent. The size of our working age population has grown at twice the rate of the national average in the last ten years, and nearly two thirds of that increase came from 22–33 year olds. Presumably this explains the number of people I meet who say they went to university here and simply didn’t leave. And according to a UCL study earlier this year, if you want to start a business in 2016, then Bristol is the place. Its combination of size, cheap office space, decent infrastructure and the number of approved business loans make it the start-up capital of the UK. 
 
More diverse skills, a digitally native workforce, and an entrepreneurial and collaborative mind-set. This is what Bristol has going for it. And you feel it. You want to be part of it. I moved back to Bristol two years ago, having been away in London for 15 years, working in the advertising industry. I now work for a digital marketing agency called True. But I feel in some way, as I suspect many others do, that I also work part-time for Bristol. Or rather, for the idea of Bristol – this city as a unique ecology of agencies and creative businesses finding a way to celebrate and propagate what makes it so progressive, so vibrant. The assumed job of these people – whether they work for Bristol Media or Engine Shed or any number of digital agencies and businesses – is to craft a better and shared narrative of that idea and sell it to anyone who wants to hear it.

And people from elsewhere do want to hear it. I’m promoting a SMW event myself, with talks from Facebook, Twitter as well as expert London agencies. We think agencies, clients and freelancers in marketing and communications here deserve to hear from the best. And the best couldn’t wait to come, keen as they were to witness more of the Bristol they’d heard about.

Events like SMW create a space where big business can connect with communities, or the uninitiated can meet the innovators. Each will be plugged into a shared experience that will make the city more visible on a national, and international, level. And regardless of how you currently perceive Bristol’s status, that’s got to be a good thing.

James is head of strategy at True Digital and chair of APG West.

Read More: Bristol Social Media Week lineup revealed