Social Housing 2.0

Earlier this year the Chartered Institute of Housing ran a competition asking the question:

"How do we tackle the problem that the word ‘social’ is good when followed by ‘networking’ and bad when followed by ‘housing’?"

 The competition came and went and working in the social housing sector myself, it got me thinking, how can we use social media to improve the perceptions of social housing, so here's my 'entry' on digibored if you will, have a read and let me know what you think:

"Enter Social Housing 2.0: How we can use the power of our crowd to change perceptions of social housing"

‘Social networking’, is the current buzzword and as housing professionals we are getting LinkedIn in the sector with Facebook and Twitter impacting our personal lives. The genius behind social networking is that it places the ability to communicate easily at our fingertips. 

‘Social housing’, at its core is about offering affordable housing to vulnerable and economically disadvantaged people. Almost a fifth of people in England live in ‘social housing’. However this term brings up connotations of high-rises and run down areas and well it’s all ‘council housing’ innit to ‘Joe Bloggs’.  

To change perceptions we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions. Firstly, how ‘social’ is social housing? Well we may not always knock on a tenant’s door for a cuppa, but we do let tenants into ‘our house’, could you as a mortgage holder consult on your lenders governance and their service standards? Our tenants can. We work within our local communities, supporting local resident groups, promoting financial inclusion and reduce worklessness to build sustainable neighbourhoods, impacting whole communities not just our tenants.

Secondly, how networked are we? Do we talk to the right people in the right way at the right time?  The answer is no, despite being good communicators; we predominately just talk to our tenants and each other. Mr Jones at number 42 may ‘get us’ but we don’t really chat with Mr. Bloggs outside of our social housing universe.

So how do we change perceptions? The first step is acceptance, we need to accept that the term ‘social housing’ carries a negative perception and it’s time to refresh the concept, its time to rebrand… enter ‘Social Housing 2.0’. The second step is trust; trust in the power of our crowd which is a fifth of households in England.

Our tenants are our most enthusiastic advocates but on the whole, most of us are not providing the means to communicate their experiences and pride of being social housing tenants. Social networking places the world at people’s fingertips, but our sector isn’t taking advantage of these tools. We have been slow to introduce online services, and to adopt social networking, these services are seen as peripheral in most housing organisations.

We need to trust in our crowd to change perceptions by giving them a better voice to communicate the good and bad aspects of social housing. This is a courageous step for the sector but let’s seriously look at providing services at our customer’s fingertips to enable them to openly critique us. I don’t know if the term ‘Social Housing 2.0’ will be viewed as positive or negative but it will be powered by the honest view of our crowd and that’s how perceptions will change".

Well there you go, this is my entry, there's many way to lift perceptions of social housing, some people argue that we should follow more traditional media streams by developing better press links or launch television stations for social housing tenants. This is something I plan to explore in a future blog. I mentioned crowdsourcing in my 'entry' several times, so I’ll be talking about crowdsourcing as well as User Generated Content later this week. Thanks for reading...