Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter.com and a certified expert on creating and sustaining online communities, had a great post last week on the idea of social media. He’s actually talking about the online presence of a swingset manufacturer, of all things, but I think his point is applicable to nonprofit communications, as well, and worth a read. Here’s the nut of his argument:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

One of the biggest questions many of our clients have these days is “What does the online piece look like?” They have a vague notion that there are different rules for communicating online– that you can’t just email your press release to a bunch of bloggers and expect to get a good result, that you need to think about starting a real conversation where your audience talks back to you instead of just beaming your message out and hoping for the best– but the actual mechanics of it all are still fuzzy.

[True story: a colleague recently asked, in all seriousness, "So, how much have we got budgeted for paying bloggers to blog about this?" Short answer: this is not a line item.]

Here’s the thing. Real success in the online world is built on having something that people want to talk about, share with their friends, and generally obsess over and/ or snicker at. In the corporate world, that’s a shinier widget, or a bit of foolishness that’s just perfect for forwarding. In the nonprofit world, it’s a new idea, communicated clearly, or a cause that reminds our audiences of the values they hold dear, all wrapped up in a viral video, or a community-fostering web site. Sure, you need to understand who your audience is, and where they are online, and you need to make it easy for them to share your story and spread the news. A good set of web banners or a viral video is key to driving traffic. But you can’t buy social media, and you can’t fake it.

Tags: matthaughey, socialmedia

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 5:07 pm and is filed under new media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.