The Social: bringing new Scottish talent to the BBC

I’ve worked on The Social since the beginning and it’s amazing to see it go from strength to strength.

For those of you that don’t know, The Social is a digital platform that finds and nurtures new talent in Scotland.

We started The Social in December 2015. It started as a passion project for me and my colleagues Anthony Browne and Muslim Alim. After the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014, we saw a huge proportion of young people who had become politically engaged. We found that young, Scottish people were underrepresented in the media and their lives were rarely portrayed in an authentic way. We wanted to change this.

How did we start?

There were a lot of late evenings. We spent our time watching a lot of content on social media, back then Vine was a brilliant place for us to find new talent.

We then got funding for a number of focus groups. We brought together as many people as we could, YouTubers, Vloggers, Viners and everything in between. We spoke to them about the BBC in Scotland and what this new channel should look like.

It was clear that we needed to co-create with the people we were bringing on board. They were already creating content that our target audience were watching, we wanted their authentic voice. We gave the team training on using equipment and talked them through the BBC editorial guidelines. Surprisingly, one of our biggest challenges was making sure they kept their own voice. There was something about working with the BBC that made them change what they talked about and how they spoke.

We created a pilot with 30 young people from all different genres, music, drama, comedy and spoken word and used this to prove that the concept would work for younger audiences.

Nurturing new talent

The talent, as with all BBC productions, is an integral part of The Social.

We partner new people with one of our Producers. The producers give them everything they need to know from editorial guidelines to health and safety. We then have a kind of freelancer arrangement, where they get paid for everything we publish.

We’ve found that if someone starts the process - i.e. sends something over to our producers - then they are likely to finish it and get it published. They learn about storytelling, filming and sound equipment to help make their content as good as it can be.

I suppose that’s one of my top tips for people who have a passion for filming and writing. Get out there and do it. One of the most important things you can do is get out there and make something. You can take time to hone your craft and get better, but first you need to create something.

Here’s one of my favourite video we’ve done on The Social - it's a fresh voice with something to say and that really underpins what we are trying to achieve.

Expanding into new countries

Another sign that The Social has been making waves is that it’s now expanding into England. I hope it’s going to do just as well there as it has done here. The main thing they need to remember is to find where the audience need is and work with the young people to create brilliant content.

I don’t think the main idea has to change, it’s all about finding and nurturing young talent from underrepresented areas, so if they keep that up I’m sure it’ll be a success.

Want to find out more about The Social? Head to their website or follow them on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube on @BBCTheSocial.