Full Circle Associates

My friend and colleague, Shirley Williams, pointed me to a great resource on digital identity (DI) that she and her colleagues created for their students at Reading University in the UK.  It is called “This Is Me.”

As I saw that lovely Creative Commons license on it, I thought I’d whip up a version for folks interested in social media and the digital identity implications in the non profit and NGO sectors. I thought it would be handing in an upcoming workshop I’m facilitating for the CGIAR starting next week.

Pat Parslow and Shirley uploaded a version to a Google doc. We edited, I did some rewrites and trims, and here is the first draft. I’d love feedback!

This Is Me NGO/NPO-v1.1

(updated to latest version on Thursday, May 21)
(Edited September 7 – there is now a version in Arabic here via the Social Media Exchange)

Sacha Chua’s The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work has a few things going for it. First, it is a great use of simple visuals. See you CAN draw! Second, it has a sense of humor. Third, it does a great job of communicating key ideas in 14 simple slides about how to use social media usefully as one transitions from school to work. Finally, at the core, the slides are deeply embedded with that fabulous magic, common sense.

There are two things I want to draw out of this video. The identity thing and the common sense thing. First, take a look at the slides.

Identity

I have been in conversation with Shirley Williams of Reading University about identity (see her cool site here) and she has been tracking the shift in social media use of her students as they began to explore their identity beyond university and into the workplace. This is also a topic of the CPSquare Connected Futures workshop. David Armano also has a nice post (and visual!) about this topic. What Shirley, David and others are surfacing is a skill set that might very usefully be embedded in both our educational and business organizations. A couple of weeks ago this was a key point to a presentation I made to educators in Estonia. This is a system level change. How is your organization changing to recognize how identity shows up in the era of social media?

Common Sense

Why not make a blog post about two totally different things, eh? Back to common sense. What ever happened to common sense? What the heck IS common sense? How do you define it? How does it show up in your world?

Sometimes I think the most value I bring when consulting is common sense. At other times I think I’m stating the obvious, like the village idiot. There seems to be an interesting overlap that might make us dismiss common sense as boring, not innovative, old skool. Common sense can also be our ruts, our outdated mindsets, even our bad habits. Or good habits grown irrelevant.

So how do we make the most of common sense? When is the village idiot useful?

Thanks to a tip from Beth Kanter, I played with Tweet Clouds today. I tried three options, shown below in screen shots. The first is just my tweets, the second my tweets plus @replies and the third adds my del.icio.us tags. Fun! Notice any patterns? What I find most interesting is the difference between my tweets and my tags!

(The larger size images are easier to read, but too big for the blog page!)

Last week I wrote briefly about the recent Forrester report on building online communities for marketing. Jeremiah Owyang followed up with me and gave me a copy of the report to read. House painting derailed my intent to read it last week and and post my thoughts, but a few quiet hours before Northern Voice in my room up here in Vancouver BC finally gives me the opportunity to reflect on the report.

First, it is a very nice compilation of solid, basic advice on building commercially oriented communities. There isn’t anything particularly unique about the content. It is common sense you can find by combing through what is offered on the net. As usual, the value is in the compilation. But here is where I have to confess. I have read VERY few analyst reports. I work in the non profit world where such products are rarely affordable. I think I had this fantasy idea of what they would be like. I expected some secret sauce. Maybe I know online communities so well that I forget that this stuff is NOT basic knowledge. So I have to wonder about the market for analysts reports. Clearly I am naive!

That said, here are the things that struck me as highs and lows of the report.

Highs:

• It is succinct. Something I am terrible at!
• It focuses on the community members and their needs – be in service to your community
• It offers sound advice for both resourcing a community and being clear on the goals and how they might be tracked. (I’d suggest linking to Beth Kanter’s great stuff on ROI. I need to find the links)
• Solid advice on community management (very happy to see this validated)
• A good attempt to frame community planning in terms of community activity needs rather than from a technology position.
• I was THRILLED to see the advice to make sure you don’t get your community data locked into a platform. This is really important and a lot of people miss this one.

Some of my critiques:

• As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the image about community growth does not give an accurate picture of community life cycle. Communities ebb and flow. Membership turns over. Communities do not grow out and out. It is more like a recursive spiral. Networks, however, can bring life into communities and nurture the emergence of new communities. They are far more scalable than communities, but harder to both measure and “manage.” Which leads me to my next point.
• The report doesn’t fully address or distinguish this very interesting intersection of communities and networks. There is one mention of “a group within an existing social networking site” but this is a huge sweet spot. I suspect most commercial endeavors really want to foster both a network and the communities that form within it. (I define communities as a bounded set of people interacting with each other – not just with content – around some shared purpose over time. So one time use does not a community member make! ) If I were exploring an “online community” strategy for my company, I would not do it without a network strategy as well. I could prattle on about this forever, but I can’t miss the party tonight…
• This raises the issue of identity, which wasn’t present in the report. Identity is a tough topic for an intro piece, but in the end, people define themselves by their identity as an individual (how they show up in a community) and as a member of a community (I am a member of the X community.) There is mention of profile tools, which help manifest identity, but not about how community hosts can nurture a sense of individual and group identity in a community. Identity is a core aspect of brand loyalty. So some attention to how identity shows up and can be nutured is a key strategy.
• From a design standpoint, I think this point is made, but I also think it could be stronger. You need to work with your developers to develop both the technical AND social architecture. Some tools for example, while they look like “conversation” tools, in practice they aren’t and thus don’t support a social conversational architecture, even if the vendor claims they do. There are some great developers who really understand social architecture and there are a bunch who think they do. This is a slippery slope/trap.
• Visual design is not mentioned. I used to dismiss this as secondary. Boy, was I wrong. Visual design that is appropriate to the target audience in critical. I learned this with http://www.shareyourstory.org. Visuals tie to identity, to navigation, and distinguish your community from the hundreds of others out there.
• How to work with “the competition.” Like I said, there are hundreds of other communities out there. Is your strategy to work with or fight against that dynamic? Do you make it easy for your members to move across their communities or do you want to be their central community? The latter is getting harder and harder to do. That’s why (and the report mentions this) thinking about working with a FaceBook strategy might make sense. Having multiple ways for your members to interact in your community that make it easy, while still maintaining enough distinct identity that they IDENTIFY with you.

All in all, it is very cool to be able to read and publicly critique the report. Jeremiah walks the talk of transparency and participating and listening to his network and communities. It is only a pity that the readers of the report may not see this practice in action. It could inform their community strategy as much, if not more, than reading the report. Because supporting online communities is not a formula. It is a practice. And practices have to be… well… practiced!

posted by Nancy White at 9:04 PM

2 Comments:

Candace said…

Interesting post but it loses something when the video is no longer available. Could you give an idea of what was there?

5:38 AM

Nancy White said…

Candace, the YouTube video embedded in the post is showing for me, along with the link. So it may have been unavailable for a bit. But your question leads me to think about how I can more carefully reference external material in case it IS unavailable. Good learning.In any case, it was a montage of Secondlife avatars, merging from one to the other with music in the background. What was fascinating to me was a) they way people have chosen to represent themselves in 2ndLife and b) what I saw in common and different as the images merged from one to the other. How are we alike? How are we different?

6:36 AM