Just read this fantastic post over at AriWriter from guest poster Ethan Yarbrough, who explains how as a social media expert he wants to be asked not only how many social networks he has managed, but how many have succeeded or failed.
Read the details of the two networks he built that did not work and why. "In the first example I misdiagnosed the need and thus designed the wrong solution, in the second case I designed a solution for a need that didn’t exist. I am an idealist and an enthusiast, and my excitement over social networking and media led me to the same mistake that many others have made: I fell for the tools and forgot about the strategy. I fell victim to the Field of Dreams Fallacy: “If you build it, they will come” … it works in the movies, but it’s not a good strategy for designing a social network."
[My bold]
Building community using social networks, whether white label or on public sites like CollectiveX, is not an easy task.
That's why you must have strategic objectives you want to accomplish before you can figure out the roadmap for getting there. Your objective cannot be "we need to set up a social network". Why are you thinking about doing that? Is it because your members are self-forming groups all over the place and you want them to have a home base to do it in? Is it because you have chapters in different locations that could benefit from having a central place to get to know each other? Is it because you want to provide a place for "raise your hand" volunteerism, where everyone knows how to find things they can do for the association and for each other?
This is also why social objects are so incredibly important. After the initial launch, people will not automatically begin to interact in your new space unless you give them social objects and actions to do around those social objects. Being connected by virtue of being members of your organization is not enough. "Networking" on its own is not enough.
Read Ethan's "lessons learned". Major food for thought.
10 comments:
Right on. A "build it and they'll come" mentality will lead to failure. The key is to not only create objects and possibilities for interactions...an organization must clearly define the pathways that move a community member from entry to result. It's this action-orientation that will determine a community's overall success or failure.
Thanks for the shout-out, Maddie. Your final paragraph provides a new angle of fodder that if one's goal of networking is to attract people to come to them, that's a fail. You need to network to attract people to come to you as the (IN)DIRECT RESULT of you're coming to them.
I like to take the idea of having a "strategic objective" a bit further.
People will adopt a new process, technique, or product when it meets an actual need or solves an actual problem.
How do you know there's a problem to solve? People complain about the current system.
Thanks for the comments! I think you know by listening. The social web enables you to really hear what people complain about, but also enables you to see where they are congregating and interacting online. There are a whole ton of strategic "angles" you might be looking at for your organization (recruitment, building buzz around a conference, diversity, engaging Millennials, whatever) and suddenly we have this amazingly open and public way of figuring out where those stakeholders might be hanging out already...
There's also an argument for having the vision to come up with things people might need before they know they need them, but I'd say most associations are not in the business of innovation, sadly... :)
Maddie, I want to comment on your notion of a social object. Reading about that phrase/term here and in your related posts brought me back to my childhood and a "pickup" neighborhood football game in my backyard. I think two of us started it simply by throwing the football back and forth. Another kid rode by on his bike and joined us. Pretty soon, there we're 12-15 kids in my backyard and there was a real football game going on! This was 40 years ago. No email, web, twitter, blog, etc. Just kids in a neighborhood figuring out that a pickup game (the social object) was happening and they wanted to be part of it. I didn't plan to have a game. It just happened! I'm sure it was finished less than 2 hours after it started. But for those two hours it was magic. I'm really just beginning to understand all the tools involved in social networking. Some of what you and others write in this space is opaque to me. But the memory of that spontaneous football game helps me, I think,get what you're talking about. I think you're talking about using modern tools to create a space where a cool pickup game can happen...and then let people remember that it happened in my backyard. Did I get that right?
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Pat - that is EXACTLY right. Can I use your analogy? :)
Maddie -- Of course you can use my analogy!
Maddie -- Of course you can use my analogy!
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