Social Media for Social Good

I listen to a couple podcasts by Cliff Ravenscraft (Podcast Answerman and Social Media Serenity) and really value the information he gives. But something he’s said a few times recently has been bugging me but a couple brain cells just clicked and I think I get it now. One of his recommendations is to look through your followers on Twitter and remove those that you don’t like (e.g. if they’re spammers). Yes, Twitter is full of spammers but that doesn’t mean you have to play the spammer game.

For the last one and a half years I’ve been working on launching Transition Silicon Valley. It’s meant to be the Silicon Valley branch of the Transition Towns movement. The work is paying off right now in that we’re running a movie series called “Films of Vision and Hope” that’s drawn about 50-60 people per night. The overall message is there are a doom and gloom scenarios in the area of peak oil and climate change, and it’s easy to remain stuck there and not move into positive action.

This evening I attended a panel discussion about “Social Networking” as it is used inside businesses. Obviously there is a wildfire like phenomenon where “Social Networking” and “Social Media” is growing very popular. Why should it stay out in the public only used for sharing with friends and family? It can and is being used within organizations for internal communication within the organization. Any organization is about getting people to collaborate together in delivering the organization’s purpose.

This week Google unleashed some buzz upon the net causing, uh, some, uh, murmurings among the masses (hey, I did that without using the word ‘buzz’). Considering my last post was about taming the social networking firehose maybe one thing to ponder is that the last thing we need is another social networking firehose to explore.

There’s a lot of people teaching that the way of success in social media is to get as many followers as possible. It’s a numbers game where if 1% of followers click on your links and take a desired action (buy a product) then to me n$’s in sales it’s possible to calculate the required number of followers. However it’s likely that making positive social change using social media requires a different approach to this game. And in any case for myself I like to actually use my social media accounts for, you know, socializing.

You don’t have to be a hollywood celebrity to have fans. All you need is a facebook account. What happens from there is up to you.

While it’s true that many of the popular facebook pages are for the usual celebrities, some are clearly not (a.k.a. “I <heart> sleep”). Clearly some people have created fan pages and through some means of manifestment they’ve managed to get millions of people to become fans of their pages.