There are sites on which your group can communicate and gather to do its work, like the groupery. But there are other needs for social media.
How do Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and other sites contribute to building your community?
Beth Kanter eloquently describes a frame for understanding how social media fit into the non-profit sector and talks about how she helps non-profit groups get acclimated. Here, I'm going to get more detailed, and I admit I wrote this post in part to help people follow world events.
It's about time: Twitter
One thing to think about is that we're each members of many communities, and sometimes the membership lasts a long time, but for some communities membership is very brief, for example when people come together because of an event.
One reason a community might form and disband in this way has to do with breaking news. Whether it's the a sports playoff, elections, or a tragic global event, people who have that interest come together, meet each other at least to some degree, and may choose to stay in touch or not.
An physically-established community -- like a school, religious, or community group -- has its own time scale which is fairly long. But some event might come up, and you might join an ad hoc community that only lasts the length of the event!
An example: I'm sure you have heard about the tragic and historic riots surrounding the Iran Election. Mashable has written a helpful article: HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media. It explains how Twitter and YouTube have the fastest-breaking news, but it's hard to find and filter for the best examples. Blogs tend to get that information together more quickly than traditional news services (again with a higher degree of questionability in some cases). And if you think about it, for every person with a video camera, there are hundreds with a camera phone: Flickr has a tremendous volume of relevant pictures - again, when they can be sorted through.
Past global events covered this way have included the terrorist attack on Mumbai, and the May 2008 earthquake in China.
Particularly in a diverse school population, some people may be more distressed than others about a global news event. Enabling a mechanism for people to have fluid interactions and share the experience builds relationship strength and fosters community resilience. Yes, it's true that a large percentage of your main group might not want to follow playoffs or a specific world news event very closely. However, by allowing those that want to, to do so, you're building the overall resilience of the group. (Community Resilience handbook by National Children's Traumatic Stress Network - 83 pages.)
So one way to think about how to use social media is to think about the time scales:
- Twitter and other media that can be captured quickly: ad hoc communities meant to be fast, to err on the side of too much information and information that's not quite accurate... rather than not enough.
- Blogs and other media that you want to persist: information that's been thought about and subject to public censure if it's inaccurate, and published as you would any newsletter, whether daily (or more frequently) or quarterly.
- Community information and tools that support the critical work that a community does. Yes, like the groupery.
And what about Facebook?
Facebook, MySpace, and to some extent LinkedIn are meant as a generic area that can be used to fulfill any purpose, depending on the creativity of the user. Consequently they function well as gathering spots. News and "found items" are shared, games are played, photos are swapped. I have heard it said that the absolutely best thing about Facebook is its ability to keep track of everyone's birthdays.
Once you have added a friend who uses Facebook, it's relatively easy to go to their page and see what's going on in their lives (to the extent they want to share). MySpace is similar, and while LinkedIn is focused on professional aspects of peoples' lives, it works the same way: put up a profile, add relevant content, and keep in touch. (I know one family that spans three generations on Facebook, ages 84-19.)
Public social network applications are great places to look for the people you need, and invite them to ad hoc conversations and group interactions elsewhere.
By understanding how social media work together, you can communicate online in a way that's comfortable to all your groups, teams, and family members.
#octribe
