If you’re following my twitter feeds you would have noticed a spike in productivity last week. I was “live tweeting” from Social Tech Training, a conference sponsored by Web of Change and the Social Innovation group at MaRS.
This conference happened at a good time for 21inc. We’re about to select the next 21 Leaders from over 100 applicants. We’ve launched this new site and are aiming for the fall launch of an exciting program aimed at providing leadership opportunities to young people in communites across New Brunswick and Atlantic Canada.
Through social media there’s an opportunity to engage all these folks in ways unavailable even 5 years ago. Social media isn’t a panacea despite what the proselytizers out there say it is. It’s a communications tool. In a meeting today we joked about the tendency of boomers to become utopian about Facebook, YouTube and their kin. "All the kids are doing it, we need to be there." There are serious limitations to these tools. When done half-assed it's underwhelming. Hence the post on why social media is like teen sex.
But when done well the upside is ginormous. This is exactly the point Sam Dorman makes in this short video, where I asked him to talk about the link between leadership and social media.
A better understanding of how to provide value to friends, supporters and members is the major reason organizations should be thinking about social media. Creating a Facebook fan page is a start, but no where near enough. The fact that most people attending the conference had job titles like Director of Social Media or E-marketing Manager shows that nonprofits, who represented 99 percent of attendees, are starting to get it.
A big shout out to the McConnell Foundation who sponsored our attendance!!
1 comments:
Sounds like a great event.
I'm looking forward to where the selection process leads. How might you involve the 79 people who applied, made the top 100, but won't get one of the 21 spots? I'm currently working on developing a plan to use social technologies to involve more people in organizational development through a more participatory volunteering model of some kind, particularly for people who are not interns or in permanent positions and who might be also be geographically scattered.
Maybe you plan on focussing energy on the 21 and leaving the others to find their own way. However, it would seem there is a valuable level of interest among those outside the cut, even if, for other reasons, they don't make the top 21. I don't know what the answers are but it's a question I'm purusing with some intensity these days - if someone is interested, that interest and attention are a valuable asset in some way. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
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