Over the last month or so we’ve been doing a series of workshop sessions with brap — who work to promote equality — on giving some of their clients an introduction to the opportunities social media might offer their businesses, charities or social enterprises.

Each session was for four hours with around six people — with two trainers. We originally thought that that would be plenty of time and that boredom would be setting in by then — but there wasn’t a session where we wouldn’t have liked to extend just a touch. After some very brief introductions, the first thing we did in each session was to divide into groups of two and play the Social Media Game.

The game is a great way for people to start thinking about the big picture of the social web, how different tools, techniques and ideas work alongside each other — and it also acts as a way to quickly see some of the options that are available. We’ve been playing the game slightly differently; smaller groups (so we can make sure everyone has grasped the concepts behind the cards), tighter questions which the teams can alter to more closely reflect their real situations, and we’ve done an updated set of cards (which you can download here to use or alter yourselves).

After this we worked more directly with each person and started them going on something that might prove immediately useful to them: starting a blog was a popular one, as was learning how to monitor the social web. But the main idea is just to have a go — that might be Facebook, Twitter or even a quick video cast (shot on iPhone so excuse the appalling sound):

We’re hopefully going to be doing some follow up sessions to see how people are getting on… will keep you posted