This is your special invitation to the first Yorkshire Musicians'  Social Media Surgery.

It's an informal, fun event, designed to help musicians improve their use of social media to create communities of fans and supporters, communicate with their audiences, and ensure they are making the best use of modern communications.

What is social media?

Social Media is stuff that helps you to use the internet to communicate with people. It's tools like your website, as well as tools like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, youtube, flickr, soundcloud, bandcamp, tunecore, MySpace, and many more. It's stuff that can be relatively easy to use, although you might need someone to show you how, but it's not always easy to know what to say, when to say it, and what sort of content to put on it. Social Media Surgeries aim to help you with that. 

What is a surgery?

A social media surgery is a pretty informal gathering of people who want to learn how to use the web to communicate campaign or collaborate. They are deliberately relaxed. You will get to sit alongside someone who understands good ways to use the internet and they'll show you useful free tools. If you like what you see they can also help you set up your blog, or facebook page or twitter account. Most social media surgeries have an event every few weeks, so you can keep coming back for help. If you want to find out more about Social Media Surgeries in general, please visit http://www.socialmediasurgery.com

What is a surgeon?

You might prefer to think of them as helpers. A surgeon is someone who knows enough about using social media tools to help someone else. Some surgeons have spent years understanding the internet, others started learning a few months ago but want to share what they know with other community groups and active citizens.

The first Yorkshire Musicians' Social Media Surgery

As far as we know, this is the first ever Social Media Surgery for musicians being held in the UK, or perhaps anywhere in the world. We hope this is the start of a growing movement, and we want to start with a bang. So, as well as coming along and getting some quality advice on your use of social media, we will also be able to provide you with some free food and drink, and we'll have some musicians playing for you. In return for this, we ask that you are serious about wanting to improve your use of social media, and you're not just coming along for a party. We'll be asking some questions of you to make sure this is the case.

We are very grateful to get-ctrl for their generous sponsorship of this event. Please visit their website at http://www.get-ctrl.com/ and use some of their wonderful services.

Many of the Surgeons present will be people with deep knowledge of social media and a keen interest in music. Also present will be Rich Huxley of Hope and Social and Pat Fulgoni of Kava Kava, who are musicians who have been there and done it in terms of making innovative use of social media to connect with their communities. 

And here is Rich Huxley talking about why the event is important