Hackney Weekend

As BBC Radio 1 social media producer have spent the last 6 months using social media to bring together young people in Hackney for our Hackney Weekend.

My plan was to:

-Engage young Hackney
-Create community spirit
-Celebrate young Hackney in a positive light to the rest of UK

Building hype around ticket registration I got artists to tweet about the Hackney Weekend, eg Nas tweeted this to his 700,000+ followers:

I visited local groups in Hackney and created fun content made by them that they shared on their social spaces to get the word out about the academy

Check all the films out on the YouTube Take It On channel

Throughout the academy, the social action was HUGE! Live streams, twitter Q&A's, massive guests, real talk, live lounges, all from the Hackney Picturehouse, all being talked about massively on twitter and facebook.

At the Hackney Weekend I took 6 local young reporters and they created a Tumblr page documenting their weekend. I also used Storify to pull together some of the coolest UGC from the weekend.

It has been a 'full circle' experience for me as I met young people working at Break FM, a radio station in Stratford that I worked at over 8 years ago!

It was a joy and an honour to bring such an incredible project to the area that I live and LOVE! 

I was walking home in Dalston 2 weeks after the Hackney Weekend and I heard ‘Amy!’ shouted from a chicken shop, it was a group of young people I’d been working with at the academy. They were energised, positive and singing the praises of the BBC and all we did in Hackney.  I was overwhelmed with pride, for me it is such a wonderful personal journey as it is my home too.