I like Ivan and the GI net folks so I read the rest of this. He goes on to say"

This is really the principle behind the social web: it's all about conversations."

And that exactly the problem. If you look at even the great and leading work GI net has done with social networks you see no conversations. Look at their social networks and it is almost all one way broadcast from their staff. I believe that he is right in what could happen, but it is not happening yet. If even a large, well funded, and youth oriented movement like theirs cant create conversations then I wonder if Social Networks are useful for constituency-building - at least more than for basic advertising and marketing.

Good point John. The Social Networks offer the potential for members to exert control but that doesn't automatically translate into action.

Any stories out there about successful Social Network conversations going on?

I think you're definitely right about this -- there's not nearly as much conversation as we'd like (though to be fair, the Facebook groups interface is not that conducive to regular conversation, and MySpace messaging goes on behind the scenes). It might be worthwhile to check out the Facebook group for STAND, our student division, which is considerably more active than our own. We've also had a number of discussions, mostly out of necessity, in response to comments on our YouTube channel.

In this case I think it's mostly a practical result of our very small staff -- I'm the only technical person in the organization, and usually the only person engaging users in these SNSes. We hope to grow in the future--

http://www.genocideintervention. net/network/jobs/itassoc

--and until then we probably won't be able to do as much as we want. (If you perceive us as "large," I'm thrilled at our apparent effect, but I assure you we don't hold a candle to any of the big human rights groups.)

In the meantime, I think it's important to focus on the philosophical strategy of engaging with our members and giving them the tools to take action. No doubt more user-generated campaigns (YouTube contests, a big push for discussing a particular topic on an SNS, a Flickr campaign, etc.) would increase the level of conversation, but unfortunately we just can't staff that yet.

If you have any ideas or other feedback on more effective member engagement, I'd love to hear them.

Another organization that I think is using conversations to great effect is WITNESS. I'm really excited about their new initiative, The Hub:

http://hub.witness.org/

I've been telling lots of people about this site (there's a blog post coming) because of its potential to connect conversations to concrete action -- not to mention the usefulness of user-submitted footage of human rights abuses. Our organization is structured somewhat differently -- we don't generally have a lot of people on the ground to submit such videos, as WITNESS does -- but we'll definitely be looking to them for inspiration.

--ivan

Ivan, It was the movement I said that was large and well funded, so I was not talking just about GInet.

I don’t think it has much to do with the size of your staff. Amnesty International seems to be all over on social networks, but all they do is use it as a PR newswire. Not for lack of trying on their part, I just think that social networks are used more for entertainment and socializing than for debate or action.

In my opinion there is a large demographic element to this problem. 95% of the networks users are a young generation who are socialized to communities, either on the web or the phone, in short, unsubstantial, but frequent messages. There was quite a large and robust discussion community back in the age of CompuServe (my time) but when AOL made that all too plastic those communities all migrated off into separate forums. So the audience that wants to have discussions that are more substantive than comments on blog posts are spread out and not highly engaged.

Im not sure what the answer is to be honest because if my theory is right then there may not really be a demand for general population discussion sites. That’s why I thought your proposal and my similar one at Netsquared made sense - because it might be better to concentrate discussions into topic specific locations than hope that these one size fits all sites will eventually change their personality. Then we would just use the large networks as marketing and PR sites.

This is somewhat of a tangent, but I was just re-reading this post on the mayfirst.org blog about experiences helping to build the US Social Forum website/online community this past summer.

http://mayfirst.org/node/471

Interesting tidbit:

Most technology teams are formed with the best intentions: either technologists wanting to band together and support the organizing effort or non-technology organizers recognizing the value of technology and moving to create a space for that work to be done. The effect, however, is the same: all other organizing efforts become divorced from technology. ... Forming technology teams is akin to forming an "organizing" team rather than recognizing that every team is an organizing team.

Most of the blog is about the mechanics of organizing an effective and democratic technology strategy for a collective organization, but since we've ventured into mechanics here I thought some of it might be relevant.

As for discussion fora: I think they're the black holes of the Internet. I haven't seen a robust "forum" since the days of widespread newsgroup use. What I primarily see today are community blogs that encourage commenting -- each person is given the power to speak to everyone else, and everyone else can also speak to them.

Until nonprofits are able to allocate sufficient resources to participate in these kinds of conversations, I don't think there will be much public back-and-forth. (That Amnesty, a big organization, isn't doing it effectively doesn't disprove my belief that small organizations can't do it effectively, as far as I can tell.)

In our experience, most of the conversation happens behind the scenes but ends up being more "actionable" -- activists send us a message on MySpace to get information or ask for help, and then use their own knowledge and network of friends to use the information effectively. It's not a public discussion, but it's definitely a conversation.

To be honest I don't know how a national campaign could ever have real, genuine conversations with tens of thousands of people across the country. I think the more useful function is connecting people to each other, empowering them with information and allowing them to have conversations among themselves and within their (offline) communities.

Something I take from this thread is that blogs often host good discussions. A blog might be a good anchor for an organization's foray into social media. I don't necessarily mean an "official" blog for the organization, perhaps a dedicated organization member doing a personal blog.

Beth Kanter posted about Jerimiah Owyang's piece about developing a strategy before constructing a Facebook Fan Page. Owyang's post is worth reading, and Beth Kanter's blog is really essential reading when it comes to organizations using social media.

Rather off the wall, but with all the talk about Facebook, I've recently begun to appreciate MySpace more. Many smaller organizations jumped on the social network bandwagon with MySpace. I do find it a handy way to keep up to date with activities in various groups.

I would probably say I'm not the MySpace demographic, but I'm sure I'm not the only geezer who keeps up with various organizations via MySpace. There is content there too that simply isn't elsewhere, especially when it comes to writing and music from Africa.

ivan boothe said:

I think the more useful function is connecting people to each other, empowering them with information and allowing them to have conversations among themselves and within their (offline) communities.

That to me is the key point. I disagree though with your statement:

As for discussion fora: I think they're the black holes of the Internet. I haven't seen a robust "forum" since the days of widespread newsgroup use.

I don't disagree here for the sake of arguing, I want to make a point that links forums to your goal of connecting people.

There are many thousands of forums that have over a thousand active members, but they are almost always very focused on a narrow topic. Many of those create real world person to person connections. But the forum has to reflect an existing base of people that are foused on that one area and who otherwise would like to connect.

My favorite example is the many hundreds of local forums for fishermen. Even in my smallish area there are two forums with each over 1000 active members, just for local fishing, and I know of many hundreds more throughout the country. Yet, attempts to create national fishing forums to link fishermen around the country have for the most part been a complete bust.

More people fish than do any other sporting activity, there are many of fishing magazines with nationwide subscription bases, but when it comes to people getting together to share information and interact people clearly prefer local forums. I am not aware of single fishing blog, and even if there were one, I cant think of a single reason anyone would use it.

Remove the word fishing and replace it with another hobby or interest and you will find similar results but the results will vary based on how people like to intersect and if the the community is really local or organically national. Rock climbing - there are lots of local forums but the national ones with local sections do better. Poker - there are some forums that are country specific but many more that have thousands of active members but have no geographic focus. Even the suport forum for the software we use to run our business has probably well over 1000 members that actively use it to share information - it would be useless if it was just people reporting problems and not staying to help others with their problems, but people do stay. There are local user groups now popping up to be additions the the software forum.

I could go on, but I agree 100% with the idea that the goal should be to create real and usefully connections. I stick by my view that there is a demographic shift to more of a messaging culture for those under 25, but that there are a lot more active online communities that prefer forums and discussions.

I just want to accomplish my goals, and I don't really care what works as long as I can identify it. My gut is that existing social networks are failing at the goal of efficiently creating action oriented connections (as opposed to message oriented), but I admit it may be because I dont use them well.

My gut also tells me that one of the big reasons these networks fail is that they are too general. Just like national fishing forums have failed, if we want to create web based communities that are active on social topics I think we need to create communities that are more local, perhaps not geographically, but local in the sense of being a community for just one cause.

Very interesting thoughts regarding the fishing forum(s) John. Let's poke around a little more and see what is unearthed.

Fishing is truly a local experience, a hobby/sport one practices 1-2 hours from ones house in most cases...usually. Local/regional versus national/global.

Once when helping someone on a homeless project in Europe someone else asked me why I wasn’t helping a person/group in Portland, Oregon. The simple answer was because the person needing the help was in the forum, and their location was not really important to me.

Now is poverty different in Portland, Oregon that say Gulu, Uganda or Kathmandu, Nepal? I think it is different, or at least some of the root causes. To me, there is a scale and efficiency model in partnering with people and groups in developing country as there is just a "bang for the buck" effect overseas you cannot see in the US.

>>Just like national fishing forums have failed, if we want to create web based communities that are active on social topics I think we need to create communities that are more local, perhaps not geographically, but local in the sense of being a community for just one cause.<<

Social cause networks that are topic driven, rather than geographically driven. Perhaps. Though my gut tells me that action driven is the best of all. Be it make a donation, write the president, throw a party, make a phone call, write an article, spread the word, do something in the real world. I cannot only pick one topic (personally) I think they are also interrelated...and it's the lack of interconnected ideas and sharing that has not been very great for many causes.

Creating an environment where members cannot only talk...but also make something happen, that's the ticket for me. Talk, collaborate, share ideas...and take action as well. Chasing down 10K in Razoo funds didn't amount to much for anyone here. Think MTV is a vast wasteland so far. Ned is very slow (though happily not noisy and abusive). Though people still appear to be making good connections here...so that is good.

People under 25 have the time. People over 50 have the funds. Founders, CEO's and social entrepreneurs have little of each.