An In Depth Look at New Media

Charities and voluntary organisations are increasingly using social media to help spread their messages virally across the web, raise awareness and recruiting new supporters to the cause in the process.

What is social media?

Social media (also called new media and web 2.0) is a catch all term to describe a range of audio, video, image and text technologies through mobile and internet to communicate with a wide range of people.

By definition, it’s social – involving lots of people, easily and simply – and open to almost everyone. It doesn’t need to be complex or scary (the whole point is it’s not about complicated technology) and it could help you open up new avenues of interest or simply make your life easier.

A few guiding principles for social media

Like most things, a few guiding principles will make the whole experience a lot better for you, your clients and supporters:

  • Content is king – if you don’t have the content, don’t bother, but do dig into what content you might have e.g. emotive stories work well in audio.
  • Be clear why you want to use social media – what can social media offer you, what do you want to achieve and how does it fit your organisation’s mission?
  • Start simple – don’t try and do everything at once. Experiment, test and work out the best way forward – you can set up a Facebook group much more easily than making a YouTube video.
  • If you’re going to make the effort, put the effort in.  Social media is ideal for experimentation but it will require some time and effort. Very few communities are self-sustaining - if you start ignoring your friends, how long before they start ignoring you?
  • Get help to do it well - there are plenty of volunteers, experts and talented amateurs out there for you to tap into the web of expertise. Some may already be part of your network.  (see additional support)
  • Interaction and communication count – remember it’s all about interaction and communication. Social media doesn’t work if people can’t be social! It’s not one way traffic, it’s not you pushing information to them.
  • Try to see past tools – start simple with an individual tool but look at what you’re trying to do and what will work best for your community and whatever you’re trying to achieve
  • Identify reasonable measures for success, evaluation and repeat – social media keeps changing and you need to change with it, learn and adapt. Above all you need to know if it’s working or not.

Social media can be seen as a collection of tools but that’s a misnomer. There are tools you can use but it’s worth thinking about what you want to achieve right at the beginning. After all, you’r e so much more than a computer and a website, right?

Blogs
The simplest of all social media tools – the blog (weblog). Blogging is a term used to describe simple, regular publishing of articles or news items, typically written with a personal voice or to get over a specific opinion. Blogs often support commentary from others.

Social networks
Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al are communities offering organisations and individuals the chance to tap into existing groups. Populated with millions of users, these social networks offer organisations the opportunity to reach new groups of people and to be ‘recommended’ by friends, increasing the power of individual messages.

Podcasting
Podcasts are audio blogs or files you can subscribe to, listen to on your computer or download to your MP3 player. As sound media they are accessible, direct and potentially very powerful ways of telling stories. They can also be boring, self-indulgent and top-down.

Photo sharing and Flickr
Flickr is a popular online photo-sharing community that allows anyone to share and organize their digital photos with friends, family, colleagues, and the rest of the world. It can be a powerful tool for organizations and communities, allowing you to share resources beyond individual communities. It also brings experiences to life in a way words simply can’t.

RSS and Newsfeeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a means of syndicating and aggregrating content from websites. If you regularly publish information, RSS syndication may help you get that information in front of more people. If you’re hungry for information, using RSS readers will help you keep up to date with developments and new material on websites without having to visit them every day.

Social bookmarking
Del.ico.us is a social bookmarking website that allows users to save and share web links. You can save links that you think other people might find useful and you can use the tags to search out links in relevant subject areas. It also counts how many other subscribers have tagged your link.

Use it to share resources with others, to keep your own set of bookmarks (suitably tagged) or simply make things available to the wider world. It beats sending out all those links by email and your networks can keep up to date with what you find interesting.

Tagging
Tags are a way of giving control to website users about how they categorise information. When contributing content to websites, users can specify what keywords apply to it. Whilst librarians and information workers might worry that this arbitrary, ad-hoc way of categorising information will cause anarchy, it allows users not just control over the content of information but also it's structure. It is also much more dynamic as new tags appear and become popular, whilst others disappear from use and become redundant. Tags are often displayed as a tagcloud, where all the tags are displayed with the size in proportion to its popularity. (Source: Knowledgebase - www.ictknowledgebase.org.uk )

See also photosharing, blogging and social bookmarking

Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging site limiting posts to 140 characters so succinctness is the key. It’s a way of keeping up to date with others and of discussing often random ideas, regardless of time or place, using either a computer, instant messenger or mobile phone.
With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.

Wikis
Wikis are collaborative Web sites that allow authorized users - or in some cases, anyone with an Internet connection - to rapidly and easily change the content of pages, as well as view a history of changes that others have made. Typically easy to set up.

Managing expectations
Some people get it. Some people do not get it. Do not dilute your message for these people. Give them all the inferno. The embers that reach those on the outskirts will eventually turn into flames.

We’ve never expected everyone to ‘get’ everything we do. We mail out hundreds or thousands of flyers or newsletters to reach small numbers of people. We hold events for a dozen people which could benefit thousands. We see the same old faces in the same old places. Social media offers us an alternative, of new ways of connecting new people, of making information and communication truly interactive, supportive and part of wider communities.

Social media offers the opportunity to share everything right now, to connect across geographies, timezones and interests. To work ‘their way’ as much as ‘our way’. To tell stories, to share photos and pictures, voices and video. Maybe we’re bored with words on a page (printed or web) – maybe it’s time to communicate, tailor our interest, interact and to do it in a way which suits us all not just ourselves.

Making the tools work together
It is time to toss out the blog, wiki, podcast mantra. This is bigger than tools isolated for singular purpose. If we keep pushing the tools into categories, new users will continue to only use the tools for those purposes. We should be twisting, stretching and breaking these tools, not neatly packaging content with them. – Jennifer Jones, http://injenuity.com

People have been working together and holding meetings since caveman times, but the trick often missed is how we actually effect collaboration. There may be just two people or there maybe a room full of organisations, but to truly collaborate they must all want the same thing and without saying me, me, me share ideas openly and make plans on how to take it forward. – Paul Webster, WatfordGap

It’s time to go beyond simple tools and use the right techniques for the right job. Some people like audio snippets of people telling stories, some prefer to read articles whilst travelling, others will be excited by photos or video. It depends on what you are trying to do. We no longer differentiate between emails and letters, word processing or databases, we simply use the best tool or combination of tools for the job. Why should social media be any different?

Mash ups
In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data fromGoogle Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. Wikipedia

Social media (web media, Web 2.0) enables us to separate content from presentation. It enables us to use satellite imagery (e.g. Google Earth) to monitor developments in Darfur as we read the news on our mobile phones and listen to podcasts on our iPods. It enables small community groups to record speakers at an AGM, add commentary through a blog, take photos and publish all the resources before the attendees have left the room. It enables us to share thoughts and ideas, audio and video, photos and slides, quickly and easily, using only the technology of the web browser and a simple computer.

See also 21 Inspiring Mashups for Social Change - http://blog.techsoup.org/node/35

What next?

It’s about the message and the audience, not the medium.

Social media works really well up to a point. It offers you the opportunity to raise awareness with new individuals and communities, to communicate in a way which suits them as much as you, to build trust and interest, to share ideas, experiences and learn new things. It offers an opportunity to experiment, to try new ideas which work or might not. Above all, it’s about building interaction and communication, engaging and supporting and making things happen. But it only works if you try, if you follow through and if you have something worth hearing.

So what can you learn, what can you try to make a difference to your community? This is as good a time as any to develop your action plan for social media, no matter how big or small your organisation.

Your fifteen minute action plan – do it now

  • Decide what you want to do – e.g. raise awareness in the local community – and why
  • Review your toolkit and select your tools (the summary of tools in this article should give you a good place to start)
  • Build your team – who is going to help, who will contribute and who will sustain everything?
  • Prepare your content – remember content and presentation are separate. Those with the best stories might be least able to present them.
  • Create your resource – the presentation of content – be it blog, wiki or podcast, and test it with a few people (who? why? when?)
  • Publish, evaluate and do it again. Social media is an ongoing project – so keep going!
  • If you want to start using social media, or simply look at new ideas, now is the time. What’s holding you back?

Further Resources

Simon Davey
Preponderate.network
simon@preponderate.net  
www.preponderate.net  


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