On Abstract Art and Social Media

When you pass by an abstract painting, what do you see?  Many will see a swirl of mixed colors, often primary colors, red, yellow and blue.  Other see within the details a sense of structure, order and harmony. Without consideration of form and composition, modern art can appear to be a monument to amorphism, shapelessness and lack of coherence.  And so it is with social media.  Its pallate of tools, from Twitter to Facebook, blogs and wikis requires context and form to bring forth meaning and clarity.

I recently put together a catalog of essential characteristics of online communication tools for some colleagues who were struggling to discover the secrets of social media.  I was tasked with helping to bring form and structure to their notion of social media as a beautiful but formless construct. Daily, we see powerful examples of social media swirling to the fore and we take note.  But fine artists, I am told, see their creations as coordinated collections of primitive shapes which can be combined in complex ways. What are the primitives of the social media pallatte that, when combined, create such powerful opportunities for communication?

The proper application of social media tools has roots in their characteristics for facilitating communication, organizing information, and presenting content to their users.  In layman's terms:

1. How does a tool enable people to interact?
2. How does a tool enable people to organize and retrieve information?
3. How does the presentation of content affect the quality of interaction?

If you can align the capabilities of social media tools with the needs of their users, you can create an environment in which conversations, persuasion, collaboration, viral marketing — whatever kind of communication you desire — can grow.

As a small illustration, consider the characteristics of a blog.  Blogs are better in some situations than in others.  Might a blog be the best choices for facilitating conversation among colleagues or friends?  Perhaps the answer will surprise you.  A typical blog's focus on single stories presented in chronological order makes them less than ideal for carrying on multiple strands of conversation. Further, only a blog's owner — not his or her friends — can start a conversational thread.  And because participants cannot see when or whether others are responding to a post until they hit the send button,  they cannot interact in the same manner on a blog as they would in person.  Blogs are not ideal in highly interactive situations. But leverage their ability to focus attention on a particular story of the day and they can be powerful as tools of persuasion, or self-expression.

Faced with the responsibility for planning a social media campaign in your organization, you may see a blur of options as wide as the muddy mix of colors on a modern canvass.  To make the best use of your choices, don't just reach for the closest or the most popular option.  Instead, ask how each one aligns with your stated communication goals, characteristics of your target audience and other related activities within your organization.