The social network commitment

Getting involved in a social network, whether it be something like Facebook or Myspace, or a content-connected social network like flickr or delicious (I’m starting to get used to writing that without the dots,) is pretty easy. But there are SO many, and they all have their pros and cons.

What I have learned, though, is that a social network is only as good as something that you have absolutely no control over: how many of your real friends and colleagues use it. Sure, you can join a social network, and “friend up” a bunch of people you don’t know. Perhaps you’d meet some cool people. But you’d primarily be wasting lots of time.

And if you’re a nonprofit trying social networks out to figure out how to leverage your modest resources for maximal impact, it’s really important to know where your constituents are.

Over the last two years, I’ve joined more social networks than I can count (even after I vowed, and only a couple of times violated my vow to only join social networks that were based on open standards, like OpenID and ODD (Open Data Definition.)) The content-focused networks, like delicious, slideshare and flickr, I generally use as primarily a one-way method of publishing specific kinds of content to people I know (and, of course, people I don’t know, since it’s public.) I’ve learned that there are only a few that I really need to bother with:

• Facebook: I consider it a watershed moment when my partner joined Facebook last week. The majority of people who are my Facebook friends I’ve actually met in person, and a surprising percentage of my actual, real, in person friends are on Facebook (considering that I am a relatively old fart of the Facebook set at 49.) I’m not bothering with MySpace, Orkut, etc. etc. If, perchance, there was a wholesale migration of my friends to a new platform, I’d certainly move, but it makes no sense to join a social network that might be more open, for instance, if no one I know is there.
• del.icio.us (sorry, I couldn’t help it): I actually barely use the social networking capacity of delicious. I use it as both my personal repository of sites I want to keep tabs with. I know it’s public, and it also serves to share with people interesting stuff I think is worth looking at.
• Flickr: I also don’t use the social network capacity of flickr much, except to keep track of the photos of a few real friends and family.
• Twitter: The nonprofit technology community has chosen twitter as the microblogging service that it uses, so even though I use ping.fm to send status updates to plurk, identi.ca, rejaw, and some others, I never actually go to those sites. Very few people I care about are there (and they twitter too, anyway.)
• Slideshare: Again, a service I hardly use for social networking – I use it to make public presentations that I’ve done.
• LinkedIN: The professional, serious, network. I hardly use it, but I know it’s there, and it can be useful sometimes.
• Plaxo: Once just my address book backup, it seems to now have become a social network on it’s own. I only agree to be friends with people on Plaxo who are actually already in my addressbook (or I know should be.) That keeps the address book more likely to be correct. I don’t want or need Plaxo to be anything else, thankyouverymuch.
• FriendFeed: The compendium, with comments and likes. It’s great that I can follow all of the content (blogs, tweets, Flickr photos, etc.) of people that I want to all in one place.

An oddball one:

• Seesmic: I am completely conflicted about Seesmic. For those of you who don’t know Seesmic – it’s a video conversation social network. I’ve had some great conversations with people (including Deepak Chopra, who seems to not post much anymore.) It’s fun, and I love the idea, and I think it has the potential to be very powerful. But, I have to say that it feels like 85-90% of the conversations on Seesmic are, well, inane. There are some great exceptions to this, like a recent conversation about electric cars. But then it seems like with interesting conversations, some guy pretenting to be a robot, or someone else will post something completely inane, and then it devolves from there. Of course, some large percentage of tweets are inane as well, but there isn’t the same overhead. It will take me half a second to scan the “I’m cleaning my garage” tweet (and another second more to scan the responses, if any,) but do I really want to spend 5 minutes hearing about it? And spend the time playing the responses to it? Not hardly. Also, unlike the others, there really isn’t a nonprofit technology presence (who has the time?) So conversations I care about aren’t really going to happen there until that changes.