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

[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?

[Rachel Happe]

Thanks for stopping by and all the great comments and additions to the conversation - this is a post that keeps re-circulating every few months.

I remain steadfast in my belief that social media is not community :)

[Jason Breed]

Rachel great post. an interesting note this week was when an exec at a big ad agency told me they had created dozens of "communities" for clients already at this point in both '07 & '08 and only done 2 so far this year. Fairly indicitive of the curve of early adopters moving now into plateau searching for value back to the corp from all this (what i call) movement for the sake of motion. Agencies jumped on the community bandwagon as yet another way to push messaging at unwilling prospects. That was a disservice to the client, the agency and most of all the consumer.

The key is that companies have already spent millions to billions over the past decades developing their communities both online and off if you consider employees, partner eco-systems, consumers, shareholders, etc are communities of shared interest already. The key to unlocking corporate value is really held in the ability to enable and engage those exisitng communities through interaction not content, not messaging, not tools....Interaction.

[Guy Martin]

Rachel,

Interesting post, a lot of which I agree with - however, I do wonder if there actually are temporal (and sometimes semi-permanent) communities that form around social media tools such as Twitter.

Specifically, I'm thinking of Twitter and hashtags like #gov20, #adoption, etc. Yes, there are some temporal communities that form around hashtags for conferences, etc., but I'd argue that a conference like #g2s (Gov 2.0 Summit) and things like #gov20 do end up having a sense of community with members participating in discussions/interacting/building knowledge.

Thoughts?

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Guy -

Thanks for coming by and for the comment. I actually (and I think many would disagree) don't think of hashtag conversation participants as a community. They are an audience much the same way people who attend a concert would be. Now, if there are things like #CmtyChat where it is a regular, recurring thing - then the people who show up regularly start to form a community.

My sniff test on a community is this: If, in the absence of the event or the tool being used, would the people involved just move to a different location. i.e. if #CmtyChat were stopped, would the group of people that attended regularly re-group on Facebook, LinkedIn, or in a different FriendFeed group?

I don't think everyone would agree with me on that one but I feel like communities are about having a network of dense relationships among members which is different than a looser one. I think different business outcome can be expected of each type too.