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Building Communities with Social Media

For any organization, building community among various stakeholders can be a powerful tool for action. Social media can enhance your off-line community activities and build entirely new communities in an online environment. Individuals with disabilities can particularly benefit from online community-building efforts as they eliminate many of the "real-world" barriers that can be so challenging to community participation. Online community-building also allows people to connect with others they'd never otherwise meet "IRL" (in real life).

What Types of Communities Can We Build?

  • "Communities of Practice"' that connect practitioners to one another
  • Specific stakeholder communities - consumers, parents and families, etc.
  • Idea or event communities - connect people around a specific project, event or idea. You can create community around a conference, a workshop, a course, a compelling topic or to accomplish a specific project.

Communities don't have to be permanent - many of the best communities form around a particular project or event and then disband when it's over. Individual relationships that developed during that event can endure, however. You'll also find that if people had a good experience in one online community-building event, they're likely to participate in others.

Some Tips for Getting Started

  • Confirm that your constituency is one that will engage online in a social network
  • Create a space tailored for the community, not the organization
  • Be real - any staff that are present in the community and representing the organization while connecting with members should be free to be real people, so long as there are coherent game rules for what is and what isn't okay for organizational use.
  • Prepare people for ever-changing look and feel of social network (seems obvious, but new users can become easily frustrated when things "aren't where they used to be.")
  • Push people to the social network when it's appropriate (but not when it isn't).

Which Tools to Use

Most social media tools lend themselves to building community - that's why they're called social media. You can build community through a blog and its commenting feature, through Twitter, through Flickr, through YouTube and through social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Ning and LinkedIn. The trick is to use these tools together - in many cases it's the synergy of the different options for connecting and sharing that ultimately builds the strongest communities.

Resources

Retrieved from "http://cilnetsocialmedia.org/wiki/Community_Building"
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