Hashtags: bridges between communities

I had an interesting brief chat this morning at eDemocracyCamp with Peter Corbett.  We were talking about the power of hashtags.

Most people don’t yet understand that hashtags are an extremely strategic, powerful and valuable way to inform targeted communities about related concepts, events and topics.

For example, if I am attending eDemocracyCamp and hear or share something that may also be a valuable insight to those currently attending FooCamp, I can co-tag my “#edemcamp” tweet with “#foocamp” to share my comment with Foo Camp attendees.  This not only exposes another entire community to this information nugget, but potentially catalyzes discussion around this topic within that community.  This type of cross-pollination can yield unique and innovative solutions because it infuses a discussion with input from a tangentially-related community who have different assumptions, education and perspectives.

This also, however, brings up the interesting line between using hashtags for good and not for evil.  There is a fine line between informing and marketing.  Misuse of the power of hashtags = spam. Informing and enlightening with hashtags is valuable.  Marketing with hashtags dilutes their value.

Rethinking community management

I’m at TransparencyCamp today. It’s phenomenal, exciting and overwhelming.  I participated in a great session this afternoon before lunch called “Drinking from the fire hose: how is a community manager to handle citizen participation in the Web 2.0 age?’  Here are some of my thoughts inspired by this session.

Social media is not about joining THE conversation, it’s about joining the conversationSSSSSS.  Today’s social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies make communications so easy and quick that there are an infinite number of conversations about an infinite number of topics going on within, outside and about any given organization.  No ONE spokesperson or team of spokespeople can handle this fire hose. 

It’s not so much about changing or even more efficiently using communication  tools as it is about changing the architecture of organizational communication.  We are used to a broadcast communication model in which organizations speak AT people.  We need to change this to a collaborative model in which the people within organizations speak WITH one another and WITH people outside the organization.

The only way to really manage this fire hose, then, is to empower everyone within an organization to participate and communicate.  If we do this right, the “community manager” role ultimately becomes obsolete because communication and public affairs becomes a decentralized.  Community relations/public affairs/customer service needs to move from being a vertical department to being a horizontal function within an organization.

In this collaborative communications model, organizations would deputize everyone to be conversationalists–a.k.a spokespeople–for the organization.  This is preferable because:

1. It enables the content experts to speak for themselves rather than having public affairs or customer service mouthpieces speaking on their behalf. 
2. It empowers people to participate in the conversation and, by doing so, catalyze innovation and new thinking

This raises a number of challenges, of course.  Here are a few:

1. Not all content experts are comfortable with or good at creating conversations, collaborating and participating in dialogue. 
2. This changes the role of public affairs/communications leaders from spokespeople to trainers–this requires a different skill set and interest set. 
3. This fragments the conversation, thereby increasing the potential for toe-stepping as there are increased areas of overlap.

Changing the community management paradigm has an equally-important counterpart.  Not only do we need to reinvent how the organization engages with its communities, but we also need to change the model and expectations of constituent involvement. 

In the case of government, citizen engagement would ultimately be a little part of everyone’s responsibility and civic life, driven not by coercion, but rather by personal interest and motivation.  To make this real and valuable we’d need to change people’s expectations from people asking questions to receive an answer, to people asking questions as a way to engage, participate and problem solve.

Online communities versus social networks

This past Monday blogger, FastCompany journalist and social media expert Marcia Connor tweeted, “So what’s *your* theory on why online communities get little press while social networks get all the buzz?”  Her query was for an article or blog post that she’s working on.  Here’s my take on it.  In more than 140 characters.

Online communities get little press while social networks are all the rage because human beings are multidimensional.  This unique quality is reflected well by social networks and not so well by online communities.  Online communities tend to be vertically organized, calling upon a single facet of their participants, e.g. arthritis sufferer.  The richness of social networking is understanding your high school friend as an accomplished scientist and your boss as a dad.  Social media commands a single persona, but one which is surfaces the multidimensionality of each person.

Social networks also have the added dimension of crowdsourcing upon which tools like website discovery tool StumbleUpon are founded.  You learn about tangentially-related and even unrelated things that are of interest to you from like-minded members of your social networks.

Additionally, social networks blend online and offline (retrobuilt) relationships. Online communities tend to be founded either around a geographic area or around a vertical topic.  This blended mix adds texture and flavor that online communities don’t have.

Finally, the self-directed, unmoderated, “owned by the people” freedom of social networks increases members’ sense of ownership and thus, their connectedness to the network, itself.  Online communities tend to be moderated, or at least owned and run by an individual.

I can’t wait to read Marcia’s analysis of this question…!