3. All the petals… Comment and reputation Wisdom of the Crowds Questions and Answers Collaboration Social Commerce Blog Platforms Blogs/Conversations Social curation Streams Nicheworking DIY + Custom Social Networks Discussion Boards & Forums Social Networks Listening & Targeting Attention/Communications Dashboards Business Networking Reviews and Ratings Location Video sCRM Documents/Content Events Music Wiki Virtual Worlds Livecasting Pictures http://www.theconversationprism.com/
4. Blog Platforms Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr…. Integrated into existing organization website, or separate. Lots of free options.
5. Discussion Boards & Forums Bulletin Boards, the original incarnation of the internet! Also discussion emails lists Who here is a member of King County ECOnet email list? Environmental Education Association of Washington list? Scuttlebutt? NMEA?
6. Social Networks Facebook, MySpace A place to connect to friends… and to organizations, bands, business, etc.
7. Streams Twitter Because Twitter has taken off, other social media players have become more stream-like. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/12/tools-icons-horror-icons-and-twitter-icons/
12. Location Foursquare You can also “check-in” your location through Yelp, Twitter, and other social media sites….
13. Social Commerce Groupon, Tippr, Ideal Network, etc. etc. etc. Email users about a limited time offer. Ideal Network is using this idea to raise money for selected causes.
14. And one more thing: QR Codes That’s what these things are called. Pugetsound.org Onepugetsound.org They can scanned by a phone, and encode text, a URL, email address, google maps location…
15. Learning from others Resources www.mashable.com www.nten.org www.communityorganizer20.com beth.typepad.com ECO Net Facebook group learn from conversation with each other Social Media Toolbox http://1.usa.gov/STSCentral
After all, there are a _lot_ of options in the social media universe. The Conversation Prism, by Brian Solis and JESS3 provides an idea of just how much there is. See it bigger at http://www.theconversationprism.com/
Here are the labels from all the petals of the Conversation Prism. In red are the ones I find most useful and relevant, working for an environmental non-profit. Your mileage may vary, depending on your organization, its activities and its goals with respect to social media. I just want to give you a good sense of what is out there.
We’ll start with what is probably most familiar. A website! A blog (from web-log) is a social way to have a website. It allows you to speak (by writing new blog posts) and it also allows your audience to reply in comments. There are many different ways to have a blog, many of them free. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are two popular ones. Tumblr.com is gaining popularity, but they are a little different than the older blog platforms, being more stream-like. But we’ll learn about streams in a bit…
You might also be familiar with discussion boards, bulletin boards or forums. Discussion groups were one of the first uses of the internet, allowing users to exchange messages which were posted somewhere where a large group of people could read them and take part in the conversation. Yahoo and Google host discussion groups, but these days you can also make a group on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. Email listserves are also an enduring tool in internet conversations. I am part of email lists for the King County ECOnet, the Environmental Education Association of Washington, the National Marine Educators Association, and several others.
Social Networks are the part of social media that everyone is talking about these days. If you’re the one in a group who doesn’t have a Facebook profile, you might feel left out when everyone else is giggling about a YouTube video someone shared earlier in the day. Or you might be looking over your friend or partner’s shoulder, happy to enjoy it vicariously, without surrendering your own personal information. On a social networking site, users set up a profile and link up with friends they know in “real life” or who they meet through the network. Once connected, users can watch as their network shares a wide variety of information: status updates, news articles, entertaining or informational videos, and much more. And, of course, the user can share their own findings.
If you go outside, you’ll find that a stream is never the same twice. Every time you visit, what’s between the stream banks is entirely new and different. On Twitter, information is constantly flowing as millions of users provide updates on what they’re reading, seeing, and thinking. Sure, there are updates on what they’re eating, but depending on what users you choose to follow, Twitter can be a place to talk to your friends, or a place to keep up to the second on local news headlines.
As the data capacity of the internet has increased and moved beyond text only, the number of images available has also increased. With digital cameras as ubiquitous as cell phones, everyone has new images to share, and services like Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug and Photobucket are right there to help you do it. On Flickr, you can put your photos in groups with other users’ photos and see what new images your friends have uploaded. On SmugMug, you can sell prints. Depending on what you want to do with your images, there is a service that will help you do it. Besides photo-focused social media, you can also share images on Facebook, or use services like twitpic which are designed to help you embed photos in your twitter updates.
Like services for sharing photos, the places to share video are also myriad. While YouTube is certainly the best know, Vimeo has the reputation for showcasing higher quality HD videos, with more art and less lolcat* than youtube.*What’s a lolcat? Here’s a lolcat: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2010/01/04/funny-pictures-your-use-of-technology/
In addition to using social networking to connection to your friends, you can also use social networking to connect with your professional colleagues. LinkedIn allows you to maintain an online version of your resume, join groups, and recommend or be recommended by colleagues.
If you are thinking about how one person could possibly maintain a presence on this many different platforms, here’s your answer. Dashboard programs likeCoTweet, HootSuite or TweetDeck allow you to control multiple networks from one place.
As mobile computing via smartphone becomes more prevalent, services have sprung up to let you track the location of yourself, or friends. Check-in somewhere more than anyone else on Foursquare and you become “mayor” of that location. Sounds silly, sure, but could be useful – what if environmental organizations encouraged volunteers to try to become mayor of a restoration site?
One thing that all of these services want to be able to do is make money, off of their users, or advertisers, or both. Social Commerce is a type of websites that has found a way to do it – by posting daily deals which are only good if a certain number of people purchase them. So because you want to get 20% off at Restaurant X, you put money down for the coupon and encourage your friends to do the same and make the minimum. You get a deal, a business gets a bunch of customers, and a website gets advertising revenue from the business. There are dozens of these sites now, but I believe Groupon was the first. Another variation I’d like to highlight is the Ideal Network, which puts a percentage of the deal money towards as user’s preferred cause, opening up the social commerce to non-profit fundraising.
I’m starting to see these weird barcode things more places. I finally figured out what they are called, and got a reader for them on my smartphone. They seem ripe for some sort of scavenger hunt involving both the internet and the physical world. If you search the internet for QR code generator, you will find plenty of sites, including this one: http://www.qrstuff.com/ which would not only love to generate them for you, but would like to help you get them printed on tshirts and other items.
This is where I point out the most useful resources I have found in trying to figure out how to use social media, and a few new ones that were created to go with the Storming the Sound Central social media presentations. I hope it was helpful!
This is where I point out the most useful resources I have found in trying to figure out how to use social media, and a few new ones that were created to go with the Storming the Sound Central social media presentations. I hope it was helpful!