I ran into a blog today by Allison Fine, who is an expert on social media and social change and philanthropy. Fine authors the book Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age.In a post yesterday, Fine discussed the relationship of social media and philanthropy and how awareness and impact are two different concepts.
Fine:
I saw a tweet today that was terrific. It was from Trevor Neilson of the Global Philanthropy Group and it read, “The inconvenient truth of social media and philanthropy is that awareness does not equal impact.”
It’s true, awareness is not the same as impact, but it never has been on land either. The question that we have yet to fully wrestle with as to what all of the clicking and friending adds up to, if anything, for social change efforts. We know that social media are very effective tools for connecting people to one another and helping them to build relationships. Social media do this between people and between people and organizations.
It is between these nodes in a network (to be super geeky) that people learn about issues and organizations. A friend asks a friend to join their Cause on Facebook. Someone’s cousin sends out a link to a video about an issue. A trusted source for news, a blogger or journalist, posts a story with a link to an organization. Awareness has been raised and we’re on the road to action, but not quite there yet.
Read the rest of her post on her blog, and it kind of makes sense.
E.C. :)
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