—–

I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar for the National Center for Media Engagement, focused on community-driven engagement, and present a session at the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, talking about building a social media strategy. Both of these presentations had participants primarily from the public media sector. There were some similarities and differences in both the questions and perceptions around engagement and community. I normally separate my post-presentation blog posts and slides but think it will be valuable to group them together this time.

Defining Community

One of the biggest barriers to sharing our experience and knowledge, and learning as organizations is the belief that we are all so different we can’t actually share or learn from each other. A great example of this is when we talk about working with our communities. To talk about what community means, it’s often helpful to also talk about what community is not: You’ll notice that none of the words on the graphic above say “audience” or “service area”; that’s because all three sections – the community, network, and crowd – are part of your station’s service area, or your organization’s audience. We are not actually engaging with every member of our service area, we don’t know who they all are or what they all do. The people who donate, listen in, connect with our programs by calling in, reading or commenting online, and coming to our offline events are our community. Their friends, colleagues, coworkers and family are the network – the people we reach through our community. The network knows about us but isn’t yet directly connected – maybe their friend told them about a story or a news segment they heard on our station, or they have family members that attend an annual concert. And the crowd is everyone else; yes, they are part of your service area or your “audience” but you haven’t reached them yet. Just because everyone in New York, the US and the world can subscribe to the New York Times, does not mean that the world is the community.

Engaging Community

My NCME webinar focused on community-driven engagement. Using the definition above, the point of the webinar and discussion was to talk about ways that organizations (of any kind) can create opportunities for the community to decide, organize, orchestrate or otherwise fuel engagement. Some of the questions raised in the webinar chat focused on the role of public media organizations as content creators and how community-driven engagement fits in the work they do. I was pleased to see that the responses I gave on the webinar were echoed at the PMDMC conference by the Friday keynote presentation from American Public Media’s Jon McTaggart. The questions he raised include:

• 

is our community directly informing the services we provide?
• is our whole community involved with our station?
• 
are we providing something unique and distinctly valuable to our community?
• what other organizations have a vested interest in the success of our station?
• what do we do that has the whole community talking?

Let’s focus on that first question for a moment: is our community directly informing the services we provide? How is your station creating ways for the community to actually inform the services or programs or content you provide and create? What options do you provide to your community to have share responsibility or ownership for a service, program, or event? How does the community see their impact and influence on your station?

Using Social Media

Many public media organizations are looking to use social media as a way to have conversations directly with community members. Some are using tools like Twitter or Facebook to invite listeners to a post-segment conversation with reporters, moving them from a passive action (listening) up the ladder of engagement to an active action of commenting and discussion. While many organizations of all kinds face the struggle of convincing staff or leaders that social media is worthwhile, many stations are tackling the opposite end of that spectrum, with widespread adoption without any strategy or plan.

The PMDMC conference had a 4-part social media track. My presentation was the first in the series, setting the foundation for using social media. In the presentations section of this post you can follow how to set up a community map, content map, and basic tracking documents; and templates for all of those are in the resources section below. Once you’ve decided you are ready to start exploring how social media can benefit your station, even if you only have 30 minutes a day, here are a few steps to guide you:

1. Start Listening

You can’t know where you want to be or what topics are of interest to the segments of your community using social media unless you start by listening. You can use RSS to subscribe to searches on Twitter even without an account, set up Google Alerts to receive notifications via RSS or email when your station, reporters, segments or programs are mentioned online, and track the blogosphere for people talking about your content.

2. Start Joining

Once you have a feel for who’s talking about what, where, start joining them by leaving comments on the blogs, pointing to content or discussions from your station’s website or blog, and so on. Don’t feel like you have to think of something to say, simply use what you’re hearing in your listening online to reply and join the conversation.

3. Start Creating

After you’ve listened and started joining in, you can now start creating profiles that have a goal and strategic use to compliment the rest of your communications and engagement work. Remember, even once you get to this stage, you never stop listening or joining. Just because you have your own profiles now, doesn’t mean you can stop listening to the community or replying and commenting. The 2-way engagement of social media is especially important to honor for public media organizations looking to create and sustain supporters.

Here’s a quick video interview I did with Annie Shreffler:

Presentations

Resources

Templates:

• Community Map Template
• Content Map Template
• Metrics Template

Books & Collections:

• We Are Media
• Social by Social
• #SOCIALMEDIA NONPROFIT tweet Book01
• Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

Blog posts:

• How to: Create a Listening Dashboard
• 5 Step Social Media Strategy
• Google Analytics for Facebook Pages
• Google Analytics for your Wiki
• List of Social Media Management Systems
• DIY Community Engagement Metrics
• Crowdsourcing vs Community-Sourcing
• Slacktivism: Turning a Like Into Action

The piece is reposted below:

Have we replicated our offline social dynamics and barriers online? I believe we have, and so does Danah Boyd.  As profiled in the New York Observer, Danah talked to the data uncovered in her four years of research on new media use in a presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum.  If we truly are reproducing our offline social divides online, then it’s further proof that the central part of your social media strategy needs to be focused on your audience.

“MySpace has become the ghetto of the digital landscape,” Ms. Boyd explained to the crowd. And many of us in these social environments, she said, “have gotten into the habit of crossing the street like we always do to avoid the riff-raff.” – NYO

You’ve probably heard of Facebook; you may even have set up a group or a fan page there for your organization.  But did you do that because you heard of Facebook in the news, or from a friend? Did you choose Facebook because you evaluated your existing community as well as the audience you wanted to bring into your community, and they were already using Facebook?  Did you consider MySpace? or Orkut? or Bebo? Maybe you’ve never heard of those platforms, but for some large demographics they are the hot spots online, not Facebook.

Let’s step back a minute and consider why a nonprofit or social benefit group wants to include social networking as part of a social media strategy.  Why would your organization want to have a presence on a social network?

• Go where the community already is!  Don’t expect the community to come to you, or even find you, online. Instead, go where they have already set up shop.
• Make your calls to action part of the routine!  Creating calls to action that match the community and can be accomplished, or promoted, in the same space will increase the overall participation you can garner.
• Join the community!  Don’t just come to the party and start asking questions or push calls to action; instead, actually join the community, answer questions, share links or information (even ones that aren’t related to your work but you may just know!), and be a genuine part of the ecosystem.

“The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us,” she said. “It should scare the hell out of us.” – NYO

Choosing the platform or platforms to concentrate your efforts online is crucial.  You may hear about Facebook, but if your audience is on MySpace, it doesn’t matter how much time and energy you put in.  They won’t be there to find you.  When evaluating your community, some of the most influential items to consider regarding social networks include:

• Age: Facebook users can skew older than MySpace; many organizations in the UK have had great success joining the ecosystem on Bebo to extend the opportunity for teens to reach out for social services in a private way.
• Actions: What kinds of “actions” do you want your community members to be able to do? Each platform offer unique functionality and it may not match what your community members want to do with/for you.
• Data: Is your work reliant on certain data (whether for eligibility, age, etc.) that you will need validate, or at least advertise? Each platform displays profile information in different ways and you will need to check your settings and profile customization to ensure you are disclosing what you need, and offering opportunities to connect outside of the public messages.
• Goals: What are your goals for the inclusion of social networking in your social media strategy?  Be sure you don’t get caught up only on functionality that’s new and cool; remember why you’re there.

Danah’s research shines a bright light on an issue many activists and organizations have been concerned about ever since the media hype around Facebook VS MySpace rose as a loud voice in the conversation about social media use.  The issues our social service agencies and social benefit organizations are dealing with offline, in local communities, are showing up online.  It’s imperative that we recognize the social divides permeating online social networks and carefully consider how we craft our online strategies to truly reach and serve our communities.

What do you think? Has your organization had experience reaching your core constituents in an online social network? How did you identify the best place to concentrate your efforts?  What lessons have you learned?

You can download Danah’s dissertation here.