Treading the Murky Social Media Waters in Massachusetts

As a follow-up to my article last weekend on 451 Marketing, a Boston-based interactive communications firm that is trying to make headway into new media, I’d like to share with you some neat initiatives and idea generation vehicles that are taking place here in Massachusetts.

I start with two events that both occurred this past Tuesday; one involving the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and the other with the Massachusetts Superintendents Technology Conference.

Co-sponsored by Awareness Networks, CommuniSpace, Topaz Partners, and IBM, the MassTech event was titled, “Social Media: Intranets 2.0 – Internal Social Networks Catch Fire.” Its description, according to the registration page, stated:

Social Networks have been the talk of the Internet for the past year, yet for enterprises, the real action may be out of public view. Internal social networks are transforming knowledge management, communications at employee relations and very large companies, fulfilling through peer-to-peer relationships the promise of early intranets. Forrester has estimated that behind-the-firewall social networks will be a $4.6 billion market in four years. A recent study by Awareness found that six percent of organizations already have deployed internal-facing communities and 33 percent indicate they plan to deploy them.

This session examines the benefits and best practices of internal social networks with a particular emphasis on where to find the payoffs and how to encourage employee adoption.

I learned of this event the night before, yet despite last-minute Twitter messages with the founder of one of the corporate sponsors when I mentioned I planned to show up at the door, hold up my business card saying I provide advice about social media and ask if I can be let in, I never made it.

I did try to drive down from Newburyport to Watertown but I failed to remember the concept of rush-hour traffic. Next time, Ari. Next time.

Thankfully, one of the attendees, Sadalit Van Buren, an information architect and associate of Knowledge Management Associates, blogged about it.

Sadalit elaborates on the morning seminar, focusing on 5 themes on social media in the enterprise:

1. Social media activity is already happening within the enterprise.
2. There’s mutual gain for the employee and the organization.
3. It’s important to have policies around the content.
4. It’s necesary to manage the lifecycle.
5. Get started.

These wise words are echoed by ZDNet’s Chris Dawson who sat-in at the superintendent’s technology conference the same day.

Do educators grasp social media? Not really.

Dawson writes, “Plenty of educators, especially administrators, wouldn’t know a blog from their elbow, let alone have a clue how they might use Twitter or Ning in their districts.”

He relates a comment by one of the keynote speakers, Willard Daggett. In Dawson’s words:

He asked how many of us had BlackBerries. An awful lot of us very cheerfully raised our hands. People really do love their CrackBerries. Then he asked how many of us allow our students to use BlackBerries, PDAs, or cell phones on tests. Obviously we all chuckled, but then he pointed out that, while we can’t let our students cheat, we’re essentially barring them from using tools in class to collaborate that they are expected to use in the real world.

I recall back to my statistics class in graduate school, when on the first day, the professor explicitly told us that every test will be open book and we were expected to use computers, calculators, and other real-world tools. Because that’s what’s used in the real world, he said, not unlike Daggett.

Tell that to my middle school math teacher who failed me on a quiz for not writing out my long division problems, but using a calculator and writing in the answer.

Elsewhere in the Bay State, I see that the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal independent agency that is responsible for the AmeriCorps and other programs, issued a press release last month announcing $2.3 million in grants to empower college students to use social media.

The grants provide seed funding to six organizations to develop the next generation of technology innovations to support college student service. The grant program, the first of its kind by a federal agency, capitalizes on two emerging trends: the strong civic attitudes of today’s millennials and college students, and the explosion in use of social networking sites.

One of the six national recipients of a three-year grant is Tufts University, CIRCLE, and the Massachusetts Campus Compact which received $570,000 in funding “to link higher education institutions, nonprofits, businesses, and government to better deliver services and meet local needs in the Boston region.”

From business and education and on to government, I close this article with the nonprofit world and the Massachusetts Nonprofit Social Media Survey, which Burlington-based Talance hopes interested organizations will submit before the end of November.

The results will help delineate where nonprofits fall in social media adoption rates, how that varies (for example by the size of the org), and what kind of benefits they’re receiving from their efforts. Our findings will provide solid practical value for nonprofits that want to benchmark their own practices.

I’m always on the lookout for neat stuff in Massachusetts and beyond. I don’t care so much for metrics and data, which changes too often. I know, and I hope you my reader, also are beginning to understand the why of social media. As I seek more case studies and best practices to show you the how of social media, I will try to point out where you can implement the new and social media for your organization or business.

I’m sure there are countless other examples in Massachusetts not mentioned above. Care to add a comment? Maybe plug your own organization or an initiative you’ve put out there?

Thank you for returning to my blog! If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, email delivery, or Kindle subscription. You may also reach me on Twitter @ariherzog.

Related posts:

1. How College Systems Like the University of Massachusetts Are Blogging and Tweeting
2. Wary, Risky Business Tackles Social Media
3. How to Enact Social Change via Social Media

Tagged as: education

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