Social Media is not Community

I'm finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.  Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content...which is *not* community. For example, ABC allowing people to comment on specific news stories with comments and ratings is not a community. Rating and ranking books on Amazon does not create a community.  I am not suggesting that these things do not have value - they do and it is immense and important - but it is not the same as enabling communities.

Communities have the following characteristics:
- They are continuous, not temporal - this is not to say that people don't drop in and out but there is a core membership that interacts together over a long period of time.
- Communities gather around a concept or common goal not around a collection of content (although content does plays a major role, it is not the impetus for the community).
- Communities take on various conversations and activities, led by different members over time - it is not one conversation but many.
- People within communities get to know each other and interact regularly without centralized facilitation and not necessarily in the context of what the community is discussing as a whole.
- Community leaders emerge over time as they continue to take proactive roles in the community and rally other members to their causes. These leaders are community members and they self-select because of their interests - not because they are told to do so...although they can be encouraged to do so.

There are two opportunities for enterprises then. 1 - to use social media to enable conversations and get a better idea of how constituents respond to specific content, initiatives, goals.  This is much easier both to understand and implement. 2 - to create communities that extend their capabilities and engage their constituents in richer ways that results in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and faster operational capacity.  Communities have enormous strategic benefits to companies but require considerable investment (in resources, time, and tools) and are difficult to implement because they have a significant impact on business processes.

Right now the market seems to get social media but we still have a long way to go in helping companies understand the value, requirements, and needs of communities.

Comments

[ScottG]

Yup. I agree completely. While the lines of what is community and what isn't may be fuzzy and subject to disagreement, they're more then just a few Twitter comments.

Patti Anklam's "Net Work" talks about networks having intentionality and purpose. At which point, relationships are defined along with collaborative interactions directed toward a common purpose. She says, "I believe that a community is an aspect of a network that is aware of its common purpose." She goes on, but it would be both difficult and wrong to type the whole book here. I think you'd like her book if you haven't seen it already.

Scott

[Annette Schulte]

Well-said, and I agree. Social media are the tools that the community can use for its networking and conversation and relationship-building.

I had not fully considered the "common goal" point, but it seems obvious now. Methinks I need to think on that some more.

[Christian DE NEEF]

Rachel,

I work in Knowledge Management and community is very important to KM. As in "Community of Practice" (CoP),

Social Media are a technology, a tool (in the broader sense of the word). They are not community and they do not create community. They are at best enablers, facilitators. Social Media certainly do not create the shared values that are required for people to share (knowledge, experience, support, ... whatever) in a community. As Etienne Wenger says: members of a community are informally bound by what they do together -- from engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problems -- and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities.

So, more than rating books of sharing music tastes... for a community to thrive, some form of commitment/sense of belonging is required.

Christian.

[Rachel Happe]

Great comments - and I will check out Net Work!

[David Wallace]

The "social media" trend-let and buzzwords like 'crowdsourcing' wrongly gives the impression that user-generated content can replace news reporting, advertising, voting or other work where there are 'experts' with skills. Fans make an implicit assumption that everyone else out there is 'just like us' and wants to (or can) participate.

Communities in knowledge work thrive when people get - and offer - value from others and build trust. One key difference from 'social media' is a group with a shared goal or mission (open source software) as opposed to just open platform (YouTube, Twitter and other current 'open mic' sites).

My favorite example is the Thinkpads.com website. Started by a single reseller, it has grown into thousands of users and created a deep knowledge base (without IBM's support or permission). It has moved from CompuServe to its own website and matured along with the web since the 1990s.

[Malcolm Kass]

I agree. They do get confused.

[Anne Gentle]

Thank you so much for this post, Rachel... I am a technical writer who is reading and writing a lot of "deep thoughts" about documentation and conversation and community, and this post clarified so much for me! I'm very grateful.

[Stephane LEE]

Great post and comments...

I'd like to add that social media implies "media", which spells "push" in my mind.

Whereas community means that a common goal unites people, and that goal can be improving a brand products&services.

The brand will in that case favor a "pull" strategy, enabling the community to produce content and be part of the social media.

What do you think ?

[Tim Wilson]

Great post! We regularly run into clients who say they want to "build a community" but are *thinking* that they want to "use social media" and really *need* to be working on finding the best ways to "engage with their customers."

[Phil Fersht]

Rachael,

Completely agree that social media provides the tools, not the community - the people define and create the community based on common interests. We are getting some tight-knit blogging communities in some niche areas where there is a common goal to share information and getting together socially.

For example, Jason Busch runs a great blog "spendmatters" in his area of procurement, and uses his blog to bring together his readers and other bloggers socially, in addition to being a content portal:

http://www.spendmatters.com/index.cfm/2008/7/10/Now-4-Bloggers-and-Beer--Tomorrow-Night-in-Chicago

Many people who are new to blogging / social media, do not realize the time investment to develop relationships with other people to build communities, based on common interests.

Phil.

[Rachel Happe]

Great additions to the conversation - Tim great insight and that jives with what I'm seeing - what people say/think/need is often confused...sometimes just by language but often by the concepts.

On the social media front - I do see social media as engaging and 'pulling' in the audience but I see that as just having a conversation around content which in my mind is different than creating a community of shared interest/goals/priorities.

This seems to have hit a nerve of sorts so keep the conversation coming (this blog is just a conversation in my mind...and while I know a lot of people who contribute I still control the topic of conversation centrally...hopefully valuable but not a community!)

Thanks for all the excellent comments!

[Robin1966]

Great explanation, which will make sense to a lot of people. It seems that the most powerful communities are the ones that deeply affect people’s lives e.g. the first geographical communities or neighbourhoods right through to ones that help people in their job e.g. user groups. Enterprises that can bring something of real value to the communities that affect people’s lives, rather than creating them as selling tools, are the ones that will be successful.

[Gil Yehuda]

Agreed. Very good distinction. Let me add that a community must have some sense of identity. In the corporate world we use team and divisional names to create a sense of belonging. Outside of work, we have looser structures, but still have identity handles, be it via ethnicity, hobby, geography, shared experience (e.g. active alumni members). This gives me a sense of belonging to an identifiable group, which allows me to behave as a member, not a visitor. (This behavior marks the distinction between observer and participant in a community.)

An essential step in creating a community is giving the members a sense of membership identity (in the old days, you'd get a card or a pin -- now you get a picture for your blog). And to your point -- social media does not necessarily give a sense of membership to the members (i.e. watching YouTube does not make you a member of the community of NumaNuma fans).

[Justin Kownacki]

Great point. Don't confuse the ability to communicate with the act of caring about / being interested in those doing the communicating. Laws are not a government, and tools are not a movement.

[francine hardaway]

The best example of community through social media tools I know is Twitter, which formed a spontaneous community when it first began.

[Pete Bond]

I'm all for communities enabled through web based tools but I think it is a mistake, which many make, to refer to a list of members, who could be in their 1000s, as a community. A community is a very special phenomenon and Rachel has given us some great insights into what one ought to look like. In particular I agree with the emphasis on the function of conversation in community building. Web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 software services help to intensify and extend networks of conversation.To Rachel's characteristics I would add at least a couple more, i) the idea of obligation and ii) something referred to as Dunbar's Number . Dunbar's Number is 150 and refers to the maximum of people who can form a human community. There is a similar idea, but a larger number, coming from social network theorist Peter D. Killworth. It's well worth querying wikipedia for more info on the work of Robin Dunbar and community.

In a real human community (less than 150), every member feels an obligation to all the others for maintaining group coherence. We will have obligation in mind when we are negotiating outcomes with others. Obligation is the unspoken need to strike a balance between personal desire and the requirements of other collaborators.Being thus obliged increases the chance of survival, or the ability to maintain group coherence/identity against the pressures of the wider natural-cultural space in which it (essentially a CoP) operates. One’s ability to do this is related to a cognitive capacity to create, and then apply, a variety of strategies by which to influence the behaviour of others and achieve successful coordinated actions (collaboration). It is tempting to conclude that this is what Daniel Goleman called ‘emotional intelligence’.

There is a dilemma here, which is what you call a list of, say, 3000 people, who have all signed on to a particular site, if its not a community?

[Niraj Ranjan Rout]

Hi Rachel,
Makes sense.
I would like to add to it by saying communities on social networks can be expanded to have newer modes of interactions and communication using applications.

What I mean to say is, a community on a social network can go beyond a forum. Using the independence social applications platforms like the Facebook platform and the OpenSocial platform offer, its possible to design communities where people can interact in new ways.

We are a company that builds social applications, and we have done applications where we built forums which have enhanced functionality like updates, upload of documents, and wyswig editors.

-Niraj
Co-Founder, http://www.mobicules.com

[Chelsea]

One thing I am not totally clear on is how you are saying communities cannot be larger than 150. I totally agree with you, but consider MySpace. It was a community "built" for thousands and now millions. Though those millions are not all one community, there are pockets of communities, threaded together by common interests, or real life friends. I think companies can profit from building communities, for say, and large association, and allow sub-pockets to organically grow. Yes, as Rachel says, this takes investement of time and resources, but I don't think communities online are totally unreasonable, especially in an association or nonprofit where one larger theme links many special interest groups (take idealist.org, for example).

[Samuel]

Nice post Rachel. Good idea to clearly distinguish community from social media.
I don't agree with Pete Bond's comment that 'a real community' has 'less than 150' members. I think you're confusing 'personal social networks' with 'communities'. Research has been done saying people have a social network of about 100-150 people in it. These are people they know very well to pretty well. And you can tell something about all the members of your network. 'Communities' can be much larger. I can have 'a shared concern' with a much larger number of people than are in my social network. To be in a community does not imply I have to know all the people in that community. (This relates to Chelsea's comment.)

[Beth Kanter]

Wow, excellent post - this is exactly the issue I've been noodling with over the past week getting a module on online community ready. Thank you.
I'm off to radically rethink what I've put together ... any thoughts?
http://www.wearemedia.org/Strategy+Module+5

[Renay Picard]

Interesting comment and very relevant. Our organization decided to create a community and then fill it in with social media technologies. It has been an interesting road and a valuable one. Social media is all the rage out there but they are really tools for use, whether by an individual person or a group. The challenge, as you mention, is to have the group take on a life of its own, create its own personality. In doing that, the community soaks up what you have to offer and extends it.

Cheers,
Renay Picard
http://community.basho.com

[David Locke]

Communities happen on social software platforms. Yes, some come and go, but others stay. Yes, some don't have goals, but some do.

The twitter PM community is pretty tight. But, then, I knew people in that community before I started twittering. Beyond twitter we had goals, so we continue with those goals on twitter.

[Marcia]

Love: "- Communities gather around a concept or common goal not around a collection of content (although content does plays a major role, it is not the impetus for the community)."

This idea is something it's easy to forget,but really important.

[Chris Koch]

Excellent points. But I think community can form around content and I don't think it takes a great amount of resources to start a community. I follow people on Twitter because I want to learn from them. The way I learn is by reading the links--the content--that they share with me and that I share with them. My ad hoc community on Twitter is completely formed around content--how to do B2B marketing and social media. Sure, you can call those things goals, but I follow people because they provide me with content that I'm interested in. Companies can and should take advantage of this. See my blog post here for more: http://chriskoch.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/why-twitter-is-for-old-people/

[Robin Fray Carey]

Great post. Hmmm is social media still just a kind of broadcast after all?