Apr 7, 2010 | blog
Here’s another learning from my recent travels across the country. It has to do with community, and regional participation.
I happen to live near and work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota area, and we have a very good, active social media community. Because of this, its been easy for me to focus locally and (kind of) forget how many other large and small urban centers also have great communities. That’s been the biggest learning as I’ve meet folks from all corners of the U.S. and around the world.
We all have vibrant social media communities, but they’re all different. Some areas seem to be better at marketing, some better at technology or funding. Regardless of the size of the city, the interest and enthusiasm always seems to be bigger than you’d think… and that’s the really fun part.
So my question to you this afternoon is what you’ve been doing to support that community and help it flourish. The benefits of understanding what social media can do for individuals, businesses and your physical communities is growing at an impressive rate. Its more than simply mainstream usage, it’s about people (society) adapting to new ideas and tools that support those ideas. It’s cultural change which can be challenging for some organizations and individuals, and this is where you can help your community.
Getting involved in your local community is the best way to make things happen. Find out what the need is and work on filling it. It may be getting people together at meetups, answering questions, or maybe training. In any case, participating with your local community is as important as keeping up with the new ideas and tools that come out every day.
Picture courtesy Sri Dhanush
Jun 26, 2008 | blog
If you’ve been blogging or interacting on social media sites for some time, you’ll know the real reason many people are interesting in social networking. It’s the people of course! The power of social media is in it’s ability to shrink borders, provide publishing & broadcasting platforms, and do so in ways that make it very easy for people to use them.
That’s what I find most interesting about social media, being able to see people meet, plan new things, and build new things. Sure I like to be part of it too, but my goal is to bring people together so they can find the resources, ideas, inspiration or whatever it is that they need. I like seeing people make that next leap, that next step.
Watching it happen with people all over the world is a great thing, but it’s just as fascinating to see it happening on the local level as well. It’s one of the most important aspects of the social web, and one that I believe that is taking parts of it mainstream. I always hesitate to mention “mainstream”, but I see more and more people experimenting, or starting to use some social features on product sites.
It’s great to see that happen, because as our modern neighborhoods have kind of closed in on themselves, becoming safer, more secure, the physical interaction has waned. So it’s great to see people coming back around and getting more interactive online. In doing so, it seems that they really start getting interested in socializing in person as well. So I think it really generates a lot of community building offline as well as online.
Photo credit: roel1943
Jun 16, 2008 | blog
In past posts on the topic, I’ve often wondered when the average worker would “get” blogging. I have to admit that I finally “got it” recently, but from a different perspective. While working with larger firms, I’ve again had the chance to observe the average office worker. In doing so, “it” occurred to me while explaining how social media adds value to an organization that many folks just don’t have the bandwidth to participate.
It’s not that they wouldn’t want to, rather, it’s that the modern organization is so optimized on searching for productivity gains that there is little room to add back the socialization tools to the mix. To do so without finding the reasons for using more employees’ time doesn’t add value to the organization. Many existing efforts to engage the employee meet with mediocre results because people don’t have interest in helping their employer know more about them.
Another aspect of social media in the enterprise is buy-in. There simply is a certain demographic that will be averse to participating. The reasons for this can be nearly anything, but usually comes back to the fact that many people can’t grasp the value of participating. They may exhibit this perspective in many other aspects of their life as well by not joining community groups or friends in other activities.
So, for those organizations that are trying to leverage the knowledge of their employees, the challenge is to find the channel that they will respond to. It’s more than that however, because just like working to connect with consumers, the business needs to connect with their staff. They need to eliminate the gap between business and employee by being themselves. Executives & veeps need to show their personalities, not their “game face” that they use for business. The employees know about that all too well, they need to see that the business is made up of real people.
Social Media in general has this issue – that people aren’t willing to invest the time, or don’t see any value in participating. It’s not unique to this new way of engaging people. Similar challenges faced radio and television at one time as well, newfangled things that they were. These new community building tools & techniques are still in their infancy and will be a large part of the infrastructure of the new economy that is developing as we speak – the trends in the market prove that out every day.
Photo credit: ShadowStorm
May 11, 2008 | happiness
Being fully engaged in creating community and connecting people.
