Mark P. McDonaldYes, look all around you and you see individuals, competing ideas and small groups of people working independently and creating rather than conforming. You see a marketplace of ideas that create and sustain vibrant social systems.
The reason I raise this question is presently people working in the area of social media believe that the community, or what is sometimes called a collective is the object of the technology. They propose that without the community the social technology is a failure.
It is easy to connect community with social technologies, perhaps too easy. Looking out on social media sites or reading stories about groups of people on multi-player games and you want to see the group. Look closer and you see individuals making their own choices, sure most informed but not determined by the community. Those people are the hidden opportunity for enterprises to take advantage of social media.
Tying social media’s success to building a vibrant community holds success hostage to not only attracting people but also maintaining their interest and support. People running sites in order to aggregate people face the same challenges as the late Roman Emperors – how do I keep the mob entertained with bread and circuses.
This is fine for social, entertainment and other sites, but it is dreadfully difficult to transform an entertained mob into an active group. Sure I can stir up a group for short period of time, so long as the actions line up with community interests. You saw that with the 2008 Presidential Campaigns. Those election-based communities have not achieved their goals of converting the community interested in the election into the same force in governing.
A community view of social media limits your view on what communities can do, how they sustain themselves and what is required to keep them going. Our society and our social systems are a blend of individual and collective responsibility and limiting social media to collective action is incomplete.
A mob is a powerful force and rather blunt instrument. Expanding a view on social media to incorporate the individual recognizes that social media can be used to do the hard work required to address tough issues. You need a view that takes into account the individual or small group as they do the things that make other things work. They form that atoms and molecules that make social chemistry effective.
Social media gives motivated individuals new tools to connect, collaboration and communicate with others and yes the broader community. Social media provides an opportunity for individuals to organize, but in the act of organizing they retain their individuality and their choice as to where and how they participate.
I believe that forgetting the individual is one of the reasons the estimated failure rate for communities lasting more than a year is around 80 – 90%. Social communities form rapidly and then dissipate either because they no longer capture people’s interest (the bread is stale and the circus old), or people simply do not see themselves in the community, or that the community is so generalizes that it has lost its meaning.
Executives should pay attention to this phenomenon and think before blindly looking to build communities. Individuals do the work of business, they buy the product, serve the customer, make the decisions, etc. If you adhere to the belief that social media requires a community, then those actions are turned over to the mob that needs to be entertained as much as it needs to be engaged and active.
If you see social media as a platform for the individuals then you may be able to see a path for engaging your workforce, customers and suppliers in new ways without losing sight of them as people.
Can you have a social system without a community? Yes recognizing so expands the opportunities to innovate using social media technologies.
Category: Strategy Technology Tools web 2.0 Tags: personal musing, Strategy, Technology Leadership
5 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Can you have a social system without a community or a collective? -- Topsy.com May 11, 2010 at 8:03 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark P. McDonald. Mark P. McDonald said: Can you have social media without a community? I hope so, some thoughts at http://bit.ly/dqQegI before I am assimilated [...]
2 Eric Sauve May 11, 2010 at 9:08 am
Great article Mark,
One of the distinctions that I have found useful over time is to understand the difference between a social network and a community: a social network being primarily driven by individual users each publishing on their own pages; and a community having many people all publishing to one page/ set of pages. As per your article, the latter has more of a requirement for a community to make the social system as otherwise the space is empty, and having a populated space is half the reason people would join.
One of the things I have also been researching recently is the change from an individual driven system to more of a community system. YouTube is a great study in this in that it started as a free place to store videos online, and now there are communities around music, etc. that keep the place vibrant.
Fascinating topic. I am presenting this Friday no less on some of these things
– keep up the good work!
Eric
3 Jim Harris May 11, 2010 at 9:12 am
Excellent post Mark,
Hording mobs of weak connections (e.g., blog readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members, etc.) seems to be at the center of most social media strategies being both advocated and sought.
To paraphrase William Butler Yeats, these things fall apart because the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the social system.
I agree that social media works best when it is viewed as enabling communities of individuals to come together when necessary to form groups of appropriate size that organically grow and wither as time passes.
Companies (and the social media “gurus” that convinced them) that boast about their number of Twitter followers as if they could mobilize that mob to do their bidding, fail to realize that most of their “followers” stopped paying attention to them a long time ago.
Viewing social media communities as collectives owned by the organization that formed them is a very BORG-like view of the social system:
“Your interests are irrelevant. We wish to improve ourselves.
We will add your followers, fans, and friends to our own.
The social media community will adapt to service us.
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
Of course, resistance is NOT futile — and like you said, you can have a social system without a community, and approaching social media from this perceptive definitely expands its true potential.
Best Regards,
Jim
4 sue killip May 12, 2010 at 1:10 am
Hello Mark Mcdonald,
I think we may know each other from Andersen/Accenture days.. If so I’d love to hear from you on personal email to catch up. I entered email above in order to leave a comment and hope you have access to that information.
In any case, speaking of social communities, as you state the technology is BUILT to handle ebb and flow vs. top down (eg,free commenting, ability to take splinter groups off to other sub areas/blogs etc.) Humans will participate only so far as the group is interesting AND valuable to them. … for ex., I have joined many far-flung communities/groups now simply in service of job search – I read/discuss the comments on many groups so that I can be up to industry speed on the latest HR terminology; however most will fall by the wayside when I get into the business of actually doing another job.
This is fact unless community sites are truly meant to share best practice (in the same vein as linux/OSS sites, which are arguably the most successful ‘social’ sites in existence) and are infinitely searchable using terms that I relate to. These communities rarely exist in the real world. As a commenter stated above (and I paraphrase) it’s often more about getting a huge number of commenters with important titles than it is about actually advancing the collective value to the community.
-Sue K.
5 20dc xxx 5k1i July 2, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Can you have a social system without a community or a collective.. Slap-up
Leave a Comment