We can't promise you good things will happen when you put yourself out there. But we can guarantee that nothing will happen if you do nothing." -Oren Sherman, Artist...
I've been watching Beth Kanter traipsing across the globe over the last couple of weeks, as she traveled to Australia to give some workshops and a keynote on social media for nonprofits. She's been blogging and twittering and uploading pictures to Flickr the whole time, and I've checked in with her updates a couple of times to see how things were going (mainly to see if she had met up with my friend Jules Woodward, the Executive Director of Flying Arts in Brisbane -- she did).
One of the best things she pointed to during this trip, for me, was the blog maintained by Seb Chan, of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, fresh + new(er). (Thanks to Beth Kanter for the image.)
Seb writes about all manner of things touching on social media and how cultural organizations (including museums, performing arts venues, and others) can use these tools to get things done. The depth and intelligence of the coverage of this space on this blog is just superb -- among the best I've seen.
A recent post that spoke to what I've been working on lately was Seb's review of Groundswell by Forrester senior analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I recently finished reading Groundswell myself, and I've been busy incorporating its ideas into the round of workshops on social media and nonprofits I'm in the midst of right now.
One of the most useful points I've found in Groundswell is the importance of planning for how engagement in web 2.0 will change your organization -- how it works, how it processes information, how it responds to praise and criticism, and more. Some of this you can't plan for -- but you should at least know that change is likely.
Put simply, if you do engage, you organisation will change. If you engage strategically then this change can be managed and paced appropriately. For some organisations it might be most appropriate to deploy a range of ‘listening’ techniques and technologies before leaping into a poorly planned social media project. Even here at the Powerhouse we’ve had social media projects fail because we have over-estimated our intended audiences and their predicted behaviour. {Seb Chan, fresh + new(er)}
Often, I think we embark on social media "strategies" thinking that we are going to change our audience's behavior -- that we're going to "get" them to do something we want them to do.
This is the sort of strategy that is likely to fail. People don't like being "gotten" to do stuff. If there's one thing people can sniff out, it's coercion.
That's where my other favorite part of Groundswell comes in (and Jeremiah Owyang talks about this a lot, too): Fish Where the Fish Are.
It's not about getting people to do something new, so much as it is about going where they are already engaged, and getting down with them there.
That's why the folks at Forrester are always banging on about this POST method of theirs -- it makes you look first at the people you are trying to reach, second at what they are already doing online, and then you can start talking strategy and tools.
I banged on about this myself at some length during my class at Mount Holyoke on Friday, when I presented to a roomful of alumnae of various ages on how they can start thinking about using tools like blogging, social networking, and photosharing for their own nonprofits.
I used the occasion of my own 15th reunion at Mount Holyoke to sharpen some of my favorite event-broadcasting-through-social-media skills. As a result, I know I experienced the weekend very differently -- I was more reflective, more thoughtful about how I spent my time, where I stood, and what I noticed -- because, I suppose, I wasn't just there for me. I was thinking about what you might want to see, what you might care or not care about, and what I might be otherwise taking for granted.
If you want to see some of what I got up to during my reunion/social media workout, you can check it out on:
and coming soon to YouTube...