Convening a community can be the most powerful communication tactic there is.
Online communities offer enormous opportunities to the right organisation. Community members are far more likely to read your content, think of your organisation, give you feedback, share your content, attend your events, get involved in your programmes, and buy your products.
On the other hand, convening a community is hard: few people have time for more than a couple of online platforms in their lives, so attracting them to yours means you need to be uniquely useful to them.
That generally requires a change of mindset and new internal processes across the organisation, because it’s not your community - it's theirs. And getting their involvement means really listening to what they have to say, and then visibly acting on it.
I built the EU Commission’s first online community in 2002, and have built many more successful ones since. If you’d like to chat, get in touch.
More services: start with Communication strategy.
Excellent piece on the Dunbar number, and its implications for social media and society: "For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived together in small hunter-gatherer bands... with the same few dozen people... Our wetware reflects this fact. We can keep track of about 150 friends... 22,350 relationships ... number grows exponentially with t…
One of a great series of Reimagining the Internet podcasts. Guest: the Planetary.Social founder, discussing:the early days of Twitter: "Twitter's innovation ... happened all at the edges... users created everything... inline images and short links and retweets and the app, actual at and hashtags... the company... cultivated this garden w…
people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…
Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…
Even in a world where people increasingly get news from social media, the professional news media is still seen as largely to blame for low trust... Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines the underlying reasons for trust and distrust ...Bias, spin and hidden agendas come across as the main reasons...perceived decline in journalisti…
News Feed Changes Mean Brands Should Invest in Facebook People More Than Pages... The News Feed algorithm is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It now properly reflects what study after study shows the public truly values: relationships... No organization will ever be on the same footing as peers... Invest in Facebook people, more so than p…
A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:
What happened when 60 odd people had a go at the Participation mindmap?
More coverage of the non-scoop of the century ... "companies are desperate to reach consumers, and with hundreds off millions of them visiting social media sites every day, marketers feel like they simply have to be there too, so they are-to the tune of more than $5 billion last year in the U.S. alone... Evidently, they're wasting their money…
Over 70% of EU voters did not vote for the EU. Where now?
One of the topics I've been developing on this blog for quite some time came up at last week's get-together organised by the Belgian IABC chapter: the need (or not) for social media guidelines for EU staff.
PR firm interns posting fake reviews about iPhone apps for their clients. Ghost blogging and tweeting by just about everyone, including thought-leaders in social media. Bloggers not disclosing sponsorship. It's just a matter of time before someone poisons the well for EU social media.
Over on the Belgian IABC's web2eu site, Philip Weiss embedded a TED video of Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, discussing the revolutionary impact of social media. It's really so good I thought I'd repost it here and add some observations
Following rapid and significant expansion into new markets and sectors of governance and policy, innovative union of nation states ("European Union", or EU) seeks an experienced Online Community Manager to gain buy-in at all levels throughout our 27 Members, as well as with external stakeholders on a global level.
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