A presentation I gave with WOMMA about social web literacy and brands. A central argument is that digital specialists and agencies need to spread social web literacy rather than keeping it to themselves, like digital scribes.
16. Now we are learning
reading/writing on
the social web.
16
17. Network literacy
What you know or don't know
about how networks work can
influence how much freedom,
wealth and participation you
and your children will have in
the rest of this century.
http://twitter.com/hrheingold
17
18. Social web literacy
An understanding of and
competence in using social web
platforms, tools and behaviors.
18
21. How to consume
1. Be skeptical of absolutely everything
2. Although skepticism is essential, don’t be
equally skeptical of everything.
3. Go outside your personal comfort zone.
4. Ask more questions.
5. Understand and learn new media techniques
http://twitter.com/dangillmor
21
22. How to create
1. Do your homework and then do some more
2. Get it right, every time
3. Be fair to everyone
4. Think independently of your own biases.
5. Practice and demand transparency.
http://twitter.com/dangillmor
22
36. Personal
Learning by doing
Build it into your workflow
Share compulsively
36
37. Organizations
Establish principles
Think networks
Open up IT
Grassroots
Frameworks
Measurement
Learning as deliverables
37
38. 1. Understand your networks
2. Be useful to your networks
3. Be live in your networks Image: Jared Tarbell
38
39. Understand
Principles Be useful
Be live
YouTube
Social Twitter
Spaces Platforms Social Space Flickr
Framework Delicious
Facebook
Networks Active listening Assets
Research & Listen
Measure Plan/iterate
Optimise assets Editorial On-site UGC
Processes Content
Widgets / tools
Aggregation Outreach Moderation
Curation
Connecting APIs
Today I’d like to share an emeging idea and a key insight that’s informing how we think about social media and brands at iCrossing.
Let’s be clear up front: this isn’t a guide to how to use social media jargon, or how social media works - there are plenty of resources for that online and I’m assuming a certain level of familairity with social media among people who would sign up for a WOMMA webinar.
What we will be discussing is the idea of social web literacy - or web literacy more broadly - and its importance for, well, everyone, but us as individuals and for the brands and organisations we work with.
I’m trying to stretch my own social web literacy today by keeping an eye on the WOMMA tag on my Tweetdeck while presenting.
If you have ever tried explaining Twitter in a meeting you may have heard something along these lines.
It usually comes with a sneer. It sometimes feels like a gauntlet being thrown down. Sometimes it is your job to pick it up - sometimes it is your duty as a citizen of the web.
I mean, I don’t like
Over the past our years I have had the same conversations over dinner, the same marketing meetings about Facebook and blogs...
I like to win arguments - I always have. But over the years I have learned to realise that not every conversation is conducted on rational grounds.
Often people are saying something other than they mean. Sometimes they aren’t saying anything at all - their words form and emotional response.
“Yuk!” or “Eek!”
So we comfort them, or try to convince them of the virtues of the technology or the platform...
It is because people think they are literate - because they read and write.
We think they are web listerate - because they can use email, a browser, a social network, without too much trouble...
They look at Twitter, they dive in, with a great deal of good faith and expectations that all will be revealed to them.
...and someone is talking about what they had for breakfast.
Truth is my network got it before me by a long stretch.
But I stuck around because they did. And because they kept finding new ways to make it useful to them.
So it started becoming more useful to me.
I’d been here before with blogs. I knew the best thing to do was to hang around and if something made sense to people who I liked and respected it was worth trying to learn.
Plus... I had some literacy, some skills I could bring with me from Facebook and blogs and my broader web literacy.
I love the premise of Google Wave - that email is based on an analogy that is pre-web.
And deep down I loathe email. It’s grinding up of my time, its needy completism, its easy transfer of responsibility to “someone” in the To line...
But first glance at Google Wave means I know I will need to learn this one. I know I will start off illiterate.
Maybe that’s a key spect of social web liteeracy - being comfortable with having to learn stuff every other week.
Literacy. It’s all about not conflating the technology, the marvel of the platform with with the uses that it is put to.
This is the device.
But it was mass literacy that was the behaviour. The behaviour which turned religion, politics, commerce, art, society spinning about.
Howard Rheingold got me thinking about literacy.
He calls it network literacy. I like that. Maybe I should stick with that.
But as my more marketing literate colleagues are always telling me - you talk about networks and they think you mean TV, or telecoms.
Me - I think we’ll get there. But meantime...
...social web literacy is what I will bang on about.
It’s all about personally and around our wider organsiations, developing and spreading social web literacy...
That’s quite a challenge - so I want to talk about some models for thinking about it...
Ross Mayfield - no relation - is someone who has consistently cut through to the quick about how social media works - or rather how we work with it.
I’m still antranced by his partcipatioin curve.
As m’learned colleague Jim Byford pointed out, it describes the learning journey of someone using social media, the ladder of participation as Forrester call it.