Growing Your Network

Even with the baggage of an existing Facebook culture and tools that seem to reinforce a cocktail party atmosphere, much can change and in short order. For example, Facebook Apps offer a platform capable of bringing rich new types of engagment into the mix, changing in the process how individuals an groups use the medium. As individuals and organizations experiment with Facebook as a medium, new uses may also emerge. In the face of intensifying innovation, the role of Facebook and other online tools will shift, hit new plateaus, create new best practices, only to change again. The constant is that the properties of the tools and culture of the community will shape Facebook and other media as they emerge.

Though Twitter is powerful, convenient and ever-ready as a tool for broadcasting messages to fans and followers, communicators might be well advised to resist the temptation to share, share and share again.

Back when interruptions came only from phone callers, occasional knocks on my cubical door and the alluring sound of a nearby ice-cream truck, noted author and teacher Tom Demarco wrote about the impact of disruptions in ones stream of thought.  Not a pretty sight, said Demarco, that as few as three interruptions a hour can skuttle all productivity. As the problem of information overload has increased in an age of pervasive communication, is there anything we can do to manage or mitigate the flow?

Contrary to the immense buzz around Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and scores of other technology widgets, tools are not what make social media all the rage. Bigger news is a communications paradigm shift, away from broadcast as a means for getting a message out, and toward a more networked model of communication.

Now that you have dumped many dollars and hours into the web, perhaps this would be a good time to ask what you are getting in return.

Going online and facing hoards of fans and admirers can provide quite a lift in psyche and be good for business.  But can a mass approach to social media deliver strong relationships that help organizations achieve their goals?

The sun is setting on some classic forms of communication that many people know and love. Newspapers are slimmer, analog TV is off the air and much radio programming is over-packaged, rinsed and repeated. While old-style media is losing its role to younger online upstarts, some elements of its legacy may help us to use new online communication tools more successfully.

While there has been much press hype about Twitter and other emerging tools, successful communication requires that their users do more than just experiment with them. Organizations must measure their communication channels by their ability to engage, rather than raw popularity.

Like an old-fashioned gold rush, the 21st century social media craze promises much to organizations who need to raise funds. At first it seems so easy to use the Internet to raise funds for a cause, association or for-profit business. But as users of Facebook's Causes application have discovered, it takes more than technology to succeed online.

To thrive in a world where the best and worst of news can be spread in an instant by almost anyone, organizations must increasingly live by the virality of good intentions to achieve their goals.