May 21st, 2009
Why Do I Write About Social Media and Social Change?
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Someone asked me recently why I write about social media and social change.
I write about social media because it’s a multi-layered phenomenon that can lead to significant social change in terms of how consumers engage with businesses and citizens engage with civil society organizations and governments.
I have talked about the four layers of social media in my 4Cs of Social Media Framework.
The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.
The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.
The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.
The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.
The 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. Each layer is often a pre-requisite for the next layer, and, as we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them.
I write about social media because we understand it only at a surface level and there is so much more to learn, both in terms of “understanding how it works” and “understanding how to work with it” (which are two different things).
While most “social media experts” are focused on using social media for developing a personal brand, building business relationship and making more money, I write about using social media for social change because that’s what I find most exciting. Once all the hype around social media has settled down, we will realize that the biggest impact of social technologies is in the long term, on how they change the relationships between individuals and institutions, in the context of media, business, civil society and government.
