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Blog -
Social Media
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Sunday, 31 May 2009 04:45 |
The other day I interviewed Beth Kanter, who thinks and writes profusely about how nonprofits can use social media. The interview (on my blog in four parts) was to share at a workshop with local development activists in Portugal who were meeting to discuss how to use social media for social change in Portugal.
I this first video I asked Beth to say something about what she does and what she finds are the biggest challenges for nonprofits in relation to social media. She talks of three challenges:
- The importance of learning - even though the stuff has been around for a couple of years - we're still in the early stages of learning how to use it and make sense of it. We're still in an experimental phase and so we won't get it right the first time. It's very much a situation of learn as you go and of "failing informatively" (Clay Shirky). That's not easy when non profits are short of resources and time and needs patience.
- Organisational culture - social media challenges us to work in different ways and change isn't comfortable.
- Social media is more comfortable to younger people and so we're seeing a process of reverse mentoring going on.
In addition to the challenges Beth talks about I also see (especially in larger nonprofit organisations) a reluctance to rock the boat of the Media, Legal or ICT department. Even an organisation that starts embracing the idea of social media can be fearful. Here is an excerpt of something I wrote for an organisation who wanted to start using social media, but who were reluctant to take on a blog unless it was tightly controlled and with comments disabled:
"Social media tools (including, but not only, blogs) don't replace a traditional website or internal communication procedures. They are complementary to them and represent a different philosophy. The paradigm shift in social media tools is that people who were traditionally users, readers and consumers of information become the creators of easily publishable information. A blog, for example, is about sharing authorship, linking and integrating - it is not about PR or broadcasting or transmitting content.
Nor is using these new tools just an improved way of doing old things, it is a change in mindset about how you do things. The philosophy behind them calls for different ways of viewing (and accepting) how people connect and learn from and with each other. The risk for an organisation is that they contain an element of "not knowing" and are not so easy to control. The advantage is that they have proved themselves to be an effective means of engaging and connecting people directly (in a people-to-people process rather than an organisation-to-people one).
In your case you are not creating another webpage, you are creating an additional and complementary tool that is participatory, quicker and which will include more voices across the network. Successful use of new tools has not come from trying to control those voices (think of Amazon's book reviews that can be quite negative) but rather to open it up to many voices and to become more digitally savvy i.e. to keep up with how to use the tools while also being aware of the potential risks.
So a question for me is if you are committed to take on the mindset for using social media tools. The organisational mindset for adopting tools is much harder than the resolving the technological aspects. We have been talking here about a blog - all these issues will compound in leaps and bounds when we start thinking of all the other tools. Media and ICT departments need to be part of this changing mindset as they are understandably concerned over issues of image, security and technical support. While it is important to address those concerns it is also important to bring them into the mindset of social media."
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