Social Media for All

Chapter two in Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is called “Jujitsu and the Technologies of the Groundswell”. In this chapter the authors discuss a lot of the different technology that is available on the web and go into who uses them and how.

While reading this chapter I decided this book would be the perfect birthday present for my father. I was immediately reminded of the number of phone call’s I had with him last year where he enthusiastically told me about the class he was taking at the community college that helped you set up and learn the basics of some social media tools. He was utterly fascinated by the growing trend in social media and was watching his colleges and peers jump on this bandwagon and he knew he needed to catch up.

As my father was in this class it felt like he was telling me every detail he was learning about social media, most of which I had a hard time understanding why he needed to take a class on it; wasn’t it just intuitive?

While chapter two to me was what I heard from my father, a basic outline of technologies that are very prevalent, chapter four, “Strategies for tapping the Groundswell”, describes what I imagine my father has been feeling.

The authors discuss the groundswell approach-avoidance syndrome I imagine that is what my father was feeling. This syndrome is describes people who “know they need to get involved, but they’re nervous about moving forward” (66). The authors describe their POST system (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) in order to help organizations create their own groundswell and use the technology to its full potential. They emphasize that you cannot begin with the technology but instead you need a goal that you wish to accomplish and then you can lend the technology to this.

I am finally realizing that I should not have made fun of my father as much for taking his introductory course to social media. As it develops further and the standards are set for the different technologies they are beginning to be overwhelming for all demographics. There is even a new twitter channel that is aimed at helping to teach political twitter users how to increase their civic engagement (and hopefully not make any mistakes like other politicians already have). The technology can be overwhelming and everyone needs some help to understand it.