This year has zoomed by, marked with lots of travel.

The blog post I started to write has now turned into four shorter ones. The following four posts probably flag my thoughts for 2010.

1. I'm a Web Worker who spends at least 50% of my life traveling so internet and communication facilities on-the-go are a constant preoccupation. One constant concern is internet access. This gets me ranting about crummy internet arrangements in expensive hotels, especially in Western Europe.
2. Let's face it. No-one uses social media. Who in your extended family and friends outside the professional world are using it? I think our frame is to find meaningful ways of extending conversations beyond time and geography - and for the time being this keeps me busy working out how to integrate facilitation and social reporting.
3. For myself I have always had to operate across geographic boundaries. While on the one hand this is quite exotic, on the other it leaves me not knowing how to express myself. Managing my life at the boundary, geographic or otherwise, is a personal struggle that I'd like to get better at expressing, celebrating and making something of.
4. Finally, the tools part. I know that tools aren't it. But I do love to play with them. Just as my mother used to love experimenting with new fruit and vegetables from the market - regardless of how they tasted or how they integrated into the rest of our diet - I'm very happy that there are lots out there to try out and play with. 

 

Following the first question in my interview with Beth Kanter where she talked about the challenges to nonprofits of social media, I asked her what made early adopters successful. She tells the story of The Humane Society of the US whose first attempt was a dismal failure, but who went on to try again and were more successful, and over three years became very successful.

What made them successful was the ability to reiterate, experiment, understand what worked and refine what they were doing over time.

1. 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.
2. Organisational culture - social media challenges us to work in different ways and change isn't comfortable.
3. 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."