Last Sunday, we held our first ever meeting at a party political conference. Local, Social, Digital hit Birmingham for the Liberal Democrat conference, and despite running up against a meeting where Hugh Grant was speaking, the room was packed out and the energy was buzzing.

We started off the meeting by showing everyone this short video. And determined not to run just another same old “fringe” meeting, we experimented with the format, making it more audience focussed and this little experiment paid off.  The audience sat around tables, each with one of the speakers (Julian Huppert MP, Mark Pack and Cllr Daisy Benson) present. They then discussed examples of innovative ways of engaging voters, particularly using social media. A flipchart was used to dump negative and blocking comments to enable the dialogue to remain positive. The speakers then fed back from their groups and followed on with a short speech about (in the case of the politicians) their own experience of using social media in their political work and (from Mark Pack) observations about how local councils are way behind others in their use of e-mails, let alone social media.

Nathalie McDermott, from our Local, Social, Digital partner, On Road Media, has posted some of the video clips shot during this meeting on her blog here and Phil Copestake from our other event partner, OPM, wrote this blog about the meeting: “Using social media for engagement: more than ‘just another tool in the box’?” Photographs are also available in this Flickr set and tweets from the day are captured below in a Storify page.

If you are up at the Labour conference on Wednesday (1pm) in Liverpool (you’ll need a conference pass) or the Conservative conference on Sunday (6pm) in Manchester (you can get into this one without a conference pass) we hope you will drop in to one our Local, Social, Digital events there – it would be great to see you.