Yesterday I had a very fun opportunity to be one of the speakers for Mark Your Mark’s Social Media Afternoon, a casual event for staff members to come together to learn about and discuss ideas, trends, tools and more relating to social media. I answered, very briefly, the question, “What is NPTech?”
Here are my slides:
To share or not to share
The main conversation focused on publicly sharing information vs trying to keep information private (whether it’s reports, data, strategy or even success/failure of projects/campaigns). Some conversations point include:
- The culture of sharing in the NPTech community is what creates the most value
- Everyone wins when you share, discuss, create opportunities to learn
- Mistakes are the most important part of charting new territory, need to talk about them
- Sharing takes place formally and informally: presentations at conferences or in reports, online in blogs, in collaborative spaces like wiki, webinars, and so on
- Keeping information private means lots of groups reinvent the wheel without knowing it
- Not talking about mistakes mean more and more time, capacity, and money wasted with groups doing the same things wrong
Why social change fits with social media
Social change relies on communities coming together (whether they are geographic, issue, cause, or characteristic based) to make a profound difference on our world. Social media allows people to come together online in new ways; the tools are only useful, fun, and successful when used as part of a community (how fun is it to use Facebook without any friends?). Thus, tools that create community are great for communities making change.
During the presentation, I was asked about Twitter; specifically what tools I like to use. I get this question a lot. My two main Twitter tools are:
- Twhirl: I like Twhirl because I can launch a window for both my personal and organizational accounts at the same time, let it run and update constantly whether I am reading it or not (unlike having to visit and then refresh a browser over and over), and let it alert me to replies, direct messages, etc. so I can be as much a part of the conversation as I want throughout the day.
- Tweetscan: Sometimes I’m just too busy to give Twitter all the attention it may want 🙂 That’s why I like Tweetscan. I can set up alerts for different words, like Google Alerts, and have it email me a round up so I can reply when I need to and not miss important opportunities to connect other users to information I may have.
Would have loved to have you all there for Social Media Afternoon!
Let’s keep the conversation going here – what do you think about the world of NPTech (the community that has made a tag a self-identifier) or about social media and social change?