Social use of social media : the small benefits can be the biggest

There’s a lot of talk about the big opportunities and benefits of using social media. Examples of these benefits are customer engagement, direct customer communications, the speed of feedback/results, learning customer preferences, low cost, brand building, credibility of the ‘crowd’ or reach. You can hear or read al lot about the benefits of social media for marketing purposes, customer service, personal use, for relaxation and public services. The discipline you hear less about the benefits of social media is social welfare. Therefore, E-society organized Next: a congress about the benefits of ICT for professionals in social welfare. This congress contained a combination of presentations and workshops of research and good practices during the last ten years. I would like to present some good examples how social media can make a difference in a community.

Tagged with: social media, communities, participation,

Communities and Events

Nearly two months ago I posted a blog on my research and that research now is finished! It was on the subject of experiencing events and the influence an online community can have on that experience. At that time I was busy building an online community for the Highlands blues festival, which is now a fact; blueslife.nl. We wanted to have a solid theory to give structure to the online community. So we based that online community on the theory that experience consists of four vital aspects; socialisation, fun, education and signification. We tried to represent those assets in the form of a wiki page, a forum and the possibility to make a profile and to communicate with each other throughout the whole community. We launched this community a month for the festival took place, and that may have been a bit too late for a community to fully flourish. On May 16th, the date of the actual festival, blueslife.nl had a member count of 60.

Tagged with: communities, events, experience,