Robin Hamman - 29.01.2009
Social media allows people to create and disseminate their messages in their own way and on their own terms.
Social media, as Vicki Costello pointed out in her post here last week, has lots of potential to help individuals, groups and communities to communicate more effectively. This is primarily because social media - a melting pot of social connectivity, conversations and content sharing - allows people not only to create and disseminate their messages in their own way and on their own terms, but also creates opportunities for:
It's pretty powerful stuff so, over the next six to eight weeks, I'll be writing a series of posts - this one theoretical, the rest practical - here to help you learn how to get the best out of emerging social media tools and techniques. This week, in what is likely to be the most theoretical post of the bunch, I'll set the scene by defining social media for those who are a bit unsure what we're on about and will talk about what I see as the key to success on the web today: the ability to use the whole web as your canvas. Over the coming weeks my posts will offer more practical advice on how to actually get started using some of the services and tools mentioned here today.
As I started writing this post, I realised that I didn't really have a one line definition of social media, so I used a social networking tool called twitter to send a short message to my followers, essentially friends and contacts who subscribe to my messages, or tweets as they are called on twitter, asking if they might help. Within a few minutes I had half a dozen thoughtful responses including:
"Social media is a new form of technology based communication. It fosters dialogue, transparency and collaboration." - Stefan
"like real life, just electric?" - Dominic
"Not media, but using technology for a conversation that connects, enables and leads to action, either online or offline." - Jason
"Making things, sharing them, seeing what other people have made, commenting on those things and adding to them." - Chris
My favourite response came from Howard Rheingold, a widely respected author, University Professor, past speaker at NESTA events and a longtime friend who I credit with helping me land my first real job helping build online communities back in 1998, who wrote:
"Many to many media that gains value as more people participate, and which enabled people to connect with each other."
There are hundreds of services and tools which could justifiably fall within the definition of social media - below are just a few that spring to mind:
The important thing to understand about each of these services is that that they tend to do one thing very well indeed, but are less good at other things. Social media is no exception to the cliche, which often rings true, that you've got to have the right tools to do the job. So, for example, if you want to post photographs and have discussions with other keen photographers, you'd be hard pressed to find a better place than flickr to do that but you probably wouldn't want to use flickr for collaborative working.
This is where we start talking about using the whole web as your canvas (with much owed to Tom Loosemore, who did much to bring this idea to life for me) - an idea which has, at it's root, the idea that the internet is a vast network of interlinking conversations.
In the past, many people and organisations cared only about the growth of their own website. This is a bit like trying to plant a single apple tree at the end of a fenced garden. It might blossom, and bare a few apples, but it's unlikely to flourish without other apples trees in the close vicinity with which to cross-pollinate. Uploading an image or video straight to your website or blog does exactly this - it services the audience already inside the fence but it's impact is confined, and thus smaller.
When you think of the whole web as your canvas, you use links to send your visitors to other places on the web to bring visitors back to you. You distribute content all over the web - photos on flickr, posts on your blog, short messages from out in the field to twitter, podcasts to odeo - each time reaching out to different, and potentially new, audiences. You participate widely, and wider participation takes place around you. It's like planting a whole bunch of trees in an orchard, and watching them each gain from, and contribute to, the success of all the other trees.
The most effective way to grow audiences online is becoming less about having a single destination for people to visit and more about having multiple destinations, a sort of distributed web presence, scattered all over the web. But before you dive right in, make sure you
Before you know it, you'll be growing audiences all over the web. Some of them may very well never visit your website but does that really matter if, regardless of where they're doing it, more and more people are able to learn about, and engage with, what you're trying do?
This post is part of series on using social media to get your message out and, as I'm sure you're gathered from this post, do a whole lot more than just that. In the posts which follow, I'll be providing more practical, hands-on advice, how-to's and inspiring examples to help you get the most out of social media. Please do feel encouraged to follow or join in the conversation.
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