social media

Relationships are about organizations and people (not communications tools)

August 8, 2011 by Ted Fickes

It seems that “email is broadcast communications with the audience” while social media is (or can be) interactive and a way to have a conversation with your audience. Broadcast messaging is a shout at recipients to take action. Interactive or social media may make a call to action but it assumes opportunity for other involvement by the recipient.

Shouting in the storm by Flickr user lanier67 — Organizations that aren't thinking about relationships may be shouting into the wind regardless of communications medium. Photo by Flickr user lanier67.

Communications media have been forever evolving, however, and while some channels may lend themselves to more or less interaction their use as engagement and relationship-crafting tools has more to do with the communicator than the medium. To paraphrase Beth Kanter, perhaps, a fortress organization with a Facebook page is still a fortress.

Social media to the rescue?

We talk about conversation, continued interaction, and (if you like) two-way engagement is viewed as more valuable. Relationships aren’t built in a command and control environment (except in the military, perhaps). An organization, campaign or company that can interact and have a back-and-forth dialog with a constituent or customer is, they say, going to have a more fruitful relationship with that customer (or donor or member).

Social media is sometimes characterized as a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue of organizations besieged and alone inside email and print walls that let messages out while nothing comes in. Social medial will knock down the walls and create a free flow of conversation and information amongst leaders, staff and citizens. All will benefit. Cake for everyone.

Book Review: Lindy Dreyer & Maddie Grant’s Open Community

April 25, 2011 by brightplus3

Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant have have a cool little book out called Open Community that’s worth picking up if you haven’t yet. They published it late last year and it’s very useful and super relevant, and definitely worth a read if you are interested in using online tools for community-building. “Open community,” to Dreyer and Grant, is a community with some sort of shared interests that engage with each other online. It tracks closely to the “networked nonprofit” idea that Beth Kanter and Allison Fine describe in their book of that name, and it actually complements the Kanter and Fine book nicely.

Where Kanter and Fine aim to map out a bigger picture story about what it means to be a “networked nonprofit,” Dreyer and Grant focus on a narrower question: how to use online social media tools to support your community-building efforts. They don’t dive into the use of specific tools, but that’s sensible since anything they might have written about the specifics of using Facebook, for instance, would likely become outdated quickly. Instead, it’s filled with practical advice about how to approach the use of those tools. Getting to know your members, understanding the relationship between your homebase and your outposts, and between your formal and informal outposts, removing the hurdles that keep your community from engaging online, and the critical importance of listening and soliciting feedback from your community are examples of the ground they cover.

It’s very pragmatic, readable, and to the point, and while it’s ostensibly focused on professional associations it is clearly applicable to any nonprofit or interest-based organization, as well. As a bonus, their cartoons are terrific (including, for instance, â€œHey, remind me â€“ whatâ€™s the keyboard shortcut for creating a vibrant, productive online community?â€).

Reading it reminded me of an interview I did with Bonnie Shaw of BYO Consulting a couple of months ago about her work on the relationship between on- and offline communities. A conversation involving all of these folks could be a lot of fun: Beth and Allison on their transformative model for social sector organizations, Lindy and Maddie on the specifics of building online community, and Bonnie illuminating how both can help strengthen communities in their on- and offline manifestations.

By the way, you can keep up with Dreyer and Grant on their SocialFish blog, which is worth adding to your RSS feed.

The Web 2.0 Pivot

April 11, 2011 by brightplus3

Indian Gulch Fire 008 — Indian Gulch Fire (City of Golden photo).

During the Indian Gulch Fire near my community of Golden, Colorado several weeks ago (where I serve as the mayor), one of my City Council colleagues and I found ourselves focused primarily on gathering information about what was happening, sharing the information in a bunch of different ways (including Facebook and Twitter), and listening closely out on the ground and via social media to what our community members were asking and what they were concerned about (so that we could respond to all of that). (I posted more about the specifics of the lessons learned during the Indian Gulch fire on my mayor’s blog.

We weren’t officially representing the city while we were doing this, but by virtue of our roles in the community we had credibility and a lot of folks relied partly on our communication to stay on top of the fire and the evacuation situation. We were both (naturally) very plugged in to what was happening, and we used discretion when we weren’t certain of the facts or where sensitive information was in play, but it was entirely outside the formal command structure and communications system, and it created some consternation within that system that the mayor and a city councilor were engaged in so much independent communication.

This probably sounds like a familiar story. In fact, any organization that is struggling with the pivot to a Web 2.0 world will find itself grappling with these very same types of challenges: how do you maintain the accuracy of information when the flow is dispersed, how do you control the message when everyone has the means to alter it or even challenge it, how do you deploy your communication resources when the information flow far exceeds any capacity you will ever have to manage it, and how do you manage independent communication by people who are part of your own team?

In the case of an emergency response system, unlike most nonprofit environments, there is still a need for an unchallenged command-and-control decision process. Incident commanders need to make big picture decisions that they know will be implemented down through the vertical hierarchy, just as folks down that command chain have to know that their decisions will be implemented as well.

But the part of all this that involves communication and information flow lives outside of this command-and-control chain regardless of how hard the incident commanders work to contain it, and that’s why this is such a familiar-sounding story. (The Emergency Management blog has an interesting post about these challenges from the perspective of the emergency responders.)

The answer doesn’t reduce to adding your social networks to your press release distribution list (although that may be better than nothing). As Beth Kanter and Allison Fine argue in The Networked Nonprofit, you canâ€™t simply layer a social media strategy on top of an organization whose modus operandi is largely defined by deep organizational hierarchies and one-way communication between the organization and its members. Your organization needs to be willing to adopt a â€œsocial cultureâ€ emphasizing two way communication and conversation with people inside and outside the organization, an openness to trying and learning from new approaches, and staff autonomy and agility.

In fact, some of the most important lessons we drew from our experience during the fire in Golden are the same sorts of lessons that nonprofit folks are drawing all the time now as they grapple with social networking:

Our social networking communication efforts didn’t replace face-to-face communication but supplemented and amplified it. In fact, our effective use of social networking depended on a lot of face time.
Our social networking efforts took a lot of time and effort. There are certainly ways to streamline, but there’s no getting around the fact that doing it well requires a real investment.
Most people seemed very plugged in to only one or two communication channels, which meant that using a wide range of channels was pretty important. For some, the traditional media channels were the most important, while for others it was Facebook or Twitter. Know your audience, and recognize that they may be diverse in which information channels they rely on.
The listening was as important as pushing information out. By listening carefully to the conversations on social networks and elsewhere on the web, we were able to identify questions and concerns and respond to them quickly. Similarly, we were able to catch inaccurate information and to notice what rumors were starting to gather steam so we could address them directly.
The social networking conversations were amplified considerably by the network participants themselves. Tweets were retreated, blog post links were shared, email newsletters were forwarded, and so on. Our communication efforts really did end up being a shared, community undertaking.
There is no longer any simple way to control the accuracy of the information (or to control the information at all). For nonprofits accustomed to ensuring that information out there in the world about their organizations is accurate and flattering, this is a tough transition but it’s happening whether they resist or embrace. Consumers, donors, and clients now control information flow and organizational reputations in new and potent ways.
Finally, people want to feel like they are in the loop. This desire is dramatically heightened during a crisis, but that instinct is there all of the time. This is part of why the organizations that use social networking tools effectively use them, in part, to pull back the curtain and give their supporters a more transparent, behind-the-scenes understanding of the work they do. People – be they constituents, consumers, donors, or clients – are more likely to be constructively engaged if you help empower them with accurate information in authentic and candid ways. The tools themselves aren’t really the point.

For the most nimble and cutting-edge social sector organizations, this is easy. In fact, they are already fully inhabiting a Web 2.0 world, using social networking tools to engage, empower, and collaborate with their supporters. For everyone else, change is hard (as Dan Health likes to say).

Bridging Cultures Within Nonprofit Organizations

April 6, 2011 by brightplus3

Bridge over Tagus river, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by flickr user F H Mira.

I’m a fan of Ethan Zuckerman’s research on bridging across cultures and the ways in which our communication and networking systems can either encourage interactions across cultural divides or impede them. But what happens when the cultural bridging that needs to happen is within a single organization?

Here’s a scenario:

A nonprofit has a team of folks who focus on technology, the web, social media, and perhaps even a mobile strategy. Those folks are smart, committed, and capable, and they come up with great ideas for deploying the tools and technologies, but the organizational decision-makers nix the ideas one after another. The easy explanation is that the folks in positions of authority are too old school, or too conventional, or too set in their 20th century ways. Communication channels that we don’t control! Letting other people talk about us – say whatever they want! – on our own website? Giving up control over the message?

No doubt this sort of risk intolerance, command and control mentality, and generational divide are all part of the problem sometimes. But I wonder if sometimes that’s just too convenient of an answer. After all, if that’s the explanation, then there isn’t much you can do about it. But I wonder if, at least sometimes, the answer has as much to do with the political savvy of the techies and with the depth of the cultural divide that separates them from others in their organizations. Even with good, dedicated activists on both sides of that conversation, if the techies don’t understand the politics of direction-shifting within their organization, or if they aren’t able to effectively explain their vision and its value even when they do understand the politics, they are going to get stuck – great ideas and no ability to implement. And that sounds very much like the sort of bridging problem that Ethan describes.

If this diagnosis is right at least some of the time, the remedy may look a lot like the sort of remedy that Ethan describes: people who bridge those two cultures (i.e., people who get both the techie world and the world of internal nonprofit politics), and communication and social structures that foster unexpectedly delightful interactions between folks on both sides of that divide. I don’t much care for the thought of adding more layers, especially within the larger nonprofits that often seem overly layered already, but if improving internal organizational dynamics and the willingness of those organizations to evolve and experiment is tied to people who can help bridge intra-organizational cultural differences, it might well be worthwhile.

What Gladwell Got Right

February 13, 2011 by brightplus3

Malcolm Gladwellâ€™s latest critique of social networking sparked an energetic response in the social networking-o-sphere, just as his October article did. And his critics are largely right.

Yup, he is missing the point that weak tie relationships can become strong tie relationships.

Yes, he is confusing the question of â€˜why people protestâ€™ with the question of â€˜how.â€™

Indeed, he seems to misunderstand the relevance of decentralized control over the production of media and the distribution of information.

Yes, he continues to attack the least interesting and straw man-est argument that social networking caused the Egyptian revolution. Of course it didnâ€™t. â€œSocial media arenâ€™t causing revolutions,â€ as blogger Allison Fine puts it, â€œthey are aiding them.â€

And, as Ethan Zuckerman suggests, Gladwell missed the most important question altogether: â€œI think the interesting story to watch will be whether social media can help Egypt in the transition to democracy.â€

But I think his ongoing critique of social networking does (obliquely) illuminate the biggest weakness in the social-media-for-advocacy universe: the lack of clarity about the mechanisms of change underlying the use of social networking tools.

Most of the writing (including Beth Kanterâ€™s and Allison Fineâ€™s terrific book, â€œThe Networked Nonprofitâ€) seems rooted in the presumption that engagement through social networking tools is a good thing and will enable or enhance whatever social change goals are in your queue. The mechanism, such as it is, usually reduces to:

more weak tie engagement using social networking tools => more strong tie engagement using social networking tools => more ability to do whatever it is you do

This might be true in the most general of ways, but itâ€™s not very useful for crafting an effective outcome-oriented strategy, especially if you are working with limited resources (i.e., nearly always). It may be that the most effective strategy really does amount to igniting high-volume protests. Kanterâ€™s impressive effort to pressure Apple into making nonprofit donation tools available on the iPhone might fit into this model. Get enough people talking enough about it and you might be able to leverage some high-profile media coverage. And you might then be able to leverage the coverage into effective market pressure.

But if Iâ€™m trying to persuade my City Council to adopt historic neighborhood protections, thousands of Facebook messages from people who donâ€™t live in my town probably isnâ€™t going to be very effective (in fact, they might even have the opposite effect, since what elected representative wants to look like they are responding to pressure from outside their community?). The most effective voices may be the residents and property owners in those specific neighborhoods, so the winning strategy may really be about persuading a very small number of people to get involved in very direct ways. If you want to persuade the Member of Congress from western Colorado (whomever it might be at the time) to support a wilderness bill, direct expressions of support from a small number of Colorado opinion leaders among ranching and farming constituencies are likely to be much more effective than a large number of comments from across Colorado and the country.

The savvier social networking evangelists in the nonprofit world do a good job of highlighting the importance of having clear goals before launching a social networking strategy. Clarity about whether you are more focused on reach or on high levels of engagement, for instance, will have a significant impact on what you do. The next step, though, is to extend that sort of thinking a few steps further back: exactly what social change or community value outcomes are you aiming for, what exactly needs to happen to accomplish those goals, and then how exactly can a social networking strategy help you get there.

Thereâ€™s no one right way to do this. A campaign-focused organizing strategy that identifies the individual decision-makers of consequence can work well, just as the more abstract â€œtheory of changeâ€ or â€œlogic modelâ€ approach that some funders emphasize. But absent some clear understanding of what must happen, exactly, to produce the targeted outcomes, then social networking may or may not have any meaningful impact. And I think itâ€™s safe to say that it wonâ€™t have as much impact as it could.

The main value of Gladwellâ€™s continued critique (which has, ironically, been propelled far more widely because of social media than it would have been otherwise) has been to catalyze a reinvigorated discussion about the value of social networking in social movements. Perhaps it will also help drive a touch more rigor in our thinking about how to use these tools most effectively.