Kris Putnam-Walkerly
Putnam Community Investment Consulting &
Philanthropy411 Blog

on with the topic now… lots of interesting inputs, both from the post and the comments. While I agree with most of what is written here, walking the talk has left me a bit more disenchanted about potential, and a bit wiser about what really happens.

In my experience, context is a better starting point than the big questions on objectives. Supporting a specific process or one goal at a time (as Joitske put it) is just enough to start, learn the basics and decide whether and how to move on. This also gives better clues to the ‘uninitiated’ on what tools or approaches relate to what they need to achieve.

Asking right away the big questions about strategy can be very demanding and eventually off-putting, when there’s hardly any evidence or experience in a specific sector.

Sometimes a clearer goal emerges as we experiment with things. The process of doing and learning helps us think about what we want to achieve.

Another myth of thinking strategy right away is finding examples and looking for similar experiences before making decisions. This can turn out to be a waste of time: by the time you find something useful, you have tried things out and learned your own lessons.

So, personally, I’m all for the pragmatic approach: start small (a la Beth Kanter), build some evidence, refine and decide how to go on (and *whether* to go on… let’s not underestimate the power of not-doing).

Because context is so important, it’s hard to generalise about metrics. For example, in an organization like the CGIAR, one key point we make for the adoption of social media is increasing visibility of information as a way to increase impact of the research. The assumption is that the more people find your valuable information, the more likely it is to have an impact (of course, impact doesn’t end here, but the web can only do a few things for you…).

A sound approach to traffic analysis may go a long way toward measuring the value of social media in relation to the increased visibility objective. Toward this goal, engaging readers/users of this information in conversations can be important (if for example, a scientist participates in some sort of network activity), but if the measure of success is the ratio of comments to blog posts, I’d say number of page views or downloads of a paper is still more meaningful.

If we’re talking about social media in support of team collaboration, then traffic may not be as important as number of registered users, number of documents/pages edited, number of contributions… the latter would be important in the case of, for example, collaborative editing of a joint paper or a policy document. Assessing the value of the collaborative project should be qualitative, and focussed on the final output (was the policy document approved, well received?).

Sometimes, the contexts and the objectives are really small. If we don’t start seeing some success and lessons learned on small, practical tasks, with a clear end (and deadline), it’s going to be very tough to advocate for change in the way the international development sector thinks about communications, advocacy, participation, collaboration, etc.

After one has a few, significant lessons and successes, then it will naturally become necessary to go up one notch and have a coherent strategy and a set of policies.

And eventually, there’s only so much these tools can do: the cultural change towards collaboration or sharing takes time and different means to happen… sometimes, running a blog instead of a big site is just a cost-effective way to publish on the web, not necessarily the beginning of a revolution…

In conclusion, I only partially agree with the fact that the business processes are tactical entry points, but given my experience, it’s the only thing I can say that it’s working. In general, we need to be smart enough to understand well in advance if the context in which we’re working is suitable for the big vision+reverse engineering exercise, or the “start small-think big” approach or the guerrilla approach on small tasks/objectives, or a combination thereof.

I think alone by analyzing the interaction or contribution we can sense a lot of the level of engagement. I am often surprised to see how little website maintainer take a look at their statistics. “Yes we look once in a while”. Although it allows to constantly improve a website and make it working for your target group. I also think it is a constant trial and error and one needs to be able to learn. Each community seems different and acts different.

But I think tools such as user voice can help a lot to make websites better working. Unfortunately only a minority of website has this beta approach of constantly improving. Not rarely it is once established and that’s it. Unfortunately too often applications are difficult to be restructured and are left to programmers.

totally agree that talking about strategies would the ideal place to start. This is why I really like, e.g. the approach of the social by social game (http://socialreporter.com/?p=624). Starting from the strategic vision of a different future, and then working out how social media can help you getting there.

Having said that, probably this is too much of a jump for most organisations. This is why business processes (as Joitske suggests) is probably, tactically, a more probable entry point. Dion Hinchcliffe has just posted a really nice post on the shift from a product to a “social process” mentality (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=504#more-504).

Cheers,

Giulio