Alexandra Samuel's blog | Social Signal

Web 2.0 and Your Organization
July 24 & 25th, 2007
Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto

How can your organization use social media tools to deepen your relationships with supporters, reach new audiences and raise more money? More than twenty people discovered the power of social media tools like blogs and wikis through a workshop I co-taught with Jason Mogus on Web 2.0 and Your Organization. Jason and I had so much fun teaching that March workshop in Vancouver, and got such a positive response from participants, that we will be offering the same workshop in Toronto this summer.

Here's the skinny:

Are you interested in how online communities like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube can empower your members and customers to carry your message out into the world? Could your organization benefit from deeper collaboration among your team members, clients, partners or the public? Could better knowledge-sharing, stronger relationships and closer communications inside your organization and with your core supporters foster more efficiency, insight and effectiveness?

The latest generation of "Web 2.0" or social web strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

This workshop is designed for communications strategists, marketing managers, and webmasters who are interested in how this evolution of the web can help evolve your organization's online strategy. We will give you the tools, knowledge, and most crucially, the vision for how your organization can use the web as a stronger agent of change. We’ll also cover the nuts-and-bolts, introducing the latest tools so that you know which options are most promising for your needs.

This workshop will take place from 6pm to 9pm on July 24th, and from 9am to 5pm (with lunch break) on July 25th.

Follow this link to register today -- space is limited.

For more information, please contact [email protected]. Or download our leaflet (PDF, 1 MB).

Have you been thinking about how the dramatic rise of Facebook -- and most recently, Facebook's move to open the platform to other developers -- affects your organization or your work? Then mosey on over to the discussion that's currently unfolding on the Facebook Developers Group (sorry, folks, that's a Facebook internal page -- yet another reason to join Facebook now).

There's a lively debate about whether Facebook is a developer's worst nightmare (because Facebook or Facebook developers will scoop whatever you come up with elsewhere) or dream scenario (because Facebook can extend your community and provide a route to viral growth). The same possibilities should concern anyone undertaking a social networking or social media project; after all, why invest in an online community if Facebook is going to knock you out of the game?

That's the half-empty way of looking at Facebook. For people seeking to build online communities -- particularly in the non-profit sector, where resources are limited -- the half-full perspective sees it as a low-cost-to-free way of rapidly connecting with a far larger audience than you could readily bring to an external site. That's why we've been encouraging clients, colleagues and friends to consider how Facebook can complement or enhance their own social networks or online communities.

And -- as the developer debate suggests -- there is a potential risk to ignoring the Facebook phenomenon. Facebook is here, and as a relatively low-barrier development environment, is going to offer an ever-expanding range of features to your supporters, friends or customers. Offer those features yourself, and it can strengthen rather than compete with your community efforts.

Rob and I are spending the next two days at NetSquared, in the company of 21 outstanding teams working on projects that harness social media tools for social change. We met many of these folks for the first time yesterday, in a pre-conference session that brought the projects together for an afternoon of collaborative idea-sharing and relationship building, and we were incredibly impressed by the commitment and creativity that these folks are bringing to their respective projects.