SPURspectives

We’ve all been there before — sitting in a boardroom or offsite at a retreat. We put our heads together in problem solving exercises called visioning. We try to solve one of the world’s ills ultimately brainstorming compromises to lessen the problem. Practical realities limit our hope of what could be. Most of the time we leave disappointed or disillusioned with vague results that fall far short of fulfilling the community’s needs. It doesn’t have to be this way, and no, this isn’t yet another blog post dismissing brainstorming and vision statements. The problem isn’t defining a vision.

The problem is using problem solving to create the vision. Problem solving focuses on what shouldn’t be. What’s wrong with that you ask? Isn’t that why most community benefit organizations exist — to eliminate a problem? Yes and no. Hildy Gottleib in her book The Pollyanna Principles posits, and I agree, that problem solving is about defining what we DON’T want. Creating a vision is about defining what we DO want.

Splitting hairs? Not really. How many organizations exist to end poverty, eliminate hunger, or stop domestic violence? All of these organizations focus on changing an aspect of the current reality by defining what we don’t want. They are left vulnerable to a negative framework that is limited by notions of can’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t.

Vision is much larger, it’s about holding yourself accountable for creating a new reality — building a new system based on what we do want. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream, a new reality, a vision of a new system that works for everyone. He didn’t just want to end discrimination against black America — that would have fallen short of his vision. It would have been much easier for him to focus on problem solving based on available resources. But where would that have left us?  How sorry our world would be if that were the case.

Maybe it’s time for you, your board, or your organization to do some self-assessment. Do you really hold yourselves accountable for a vision or are you merely problem solving based on available resources?

Tags: brainstorm, Dr. Martin Luther King, Hildy Gottleib, Jr., Pollyanna Principles, vision

Isn’t it odd how we don’t always pay much attention to the things we really value? Take investing and philanthropy for instance. These are two of the most expensive things that we’ll do in our lives. Yet, most of us are willing to be passive and cede responsibility to strangers. For some reason, we are more than happy to part with vast sums of money and just hope for the best.  But, it doesn’t have to be like this. I think the investment and non-profit communities have a lot to learn from each other that will bring and end to our disconnectedness.

Money is scarce, but so are our time and attention. They’re all valuable. But, when it comes to investment and philanthropy which of these scarcities is the driving factor: money, time, or attention?

On the surface, the obvious answer is money — you have to have it to spend it. But once all of our basic needs are met we should invest and be philanthropic. However when most of us have met our basic needs we simply buy more stuff and put philanthropy and investing on the back burner. Why? We think we have unlimited time and our attention is preoccupied with the here and now. I think the real scarcity that limits our investing and philanthropy is our awareness of time and our short attention span.

A lot of not-for-profits have figured this out. When we’re shown the picture of the cute puppy that needs a home NOW we reach for our wallets. Nonprofit organizations are good at getting our attention. They tell a great story. They tug at our hearts. They make the need real and immediate. But our attention span is short and soon we grow numb to the requests. Eventually, they lose our attention.

On the other hand, the financial service sector tells us with clockwork precision and detail exactly what happened at every moment of each investment’s (currently meager) life. We know exactly what has happened and what is projected to happen mapping out our time to retirement as if we were checking off days on a calendar. But we don’t get excited and invest more than we were. Their reports are clinically precise and sterile. They don’t tug at our heart. They don’t tell a great story — much less MY story. So, they lose our attention.

If funds want us to invest more they need to learn to tug at our hearts and inflame our passion for life — not any life, MY life. If not-for-profits want us to be more philanthropic they need to learn to report outcomes with the precision due an investment — MY investment. If both sectors learn from each other they’ll not only be able to keep our attention, but make sure the world is a better place when we get there.

Tags: investment, nonprofit, philanthropy

The skeptics hope that Twitter will fail almost as much as Rush Limbaugh gloats of wanting the President of the United States to fail. Thankfully, most of us know a winner when we see one. So, what is it about that stream of 140 character tweets that we love so much? How can something so fleeting be so gratifying for some and so maddening for others?

The skeptics are put off by the flow of the stream. It’s too much. It’s a bunch of inane chatter about nothing — a huge waste of time. The faithful are just the opposite, often unable to walk away, seemingly addicted. They both touch on the answer — time.

Twitter’s 140-character stream gives us time, the scarcest of all commodities. We are all strapped for time. We all have shorter and shorter attention spans with more things begging for our focus every day. Twitter works because it gives us the ability to quickly focus and make decisions. A focused Twitter stream lets us quickly scan a massive amount of information and quickly decide if we want to know more. When the answer is yes we can click on a link for more information. When the answer is no, the stream moves on.

Twitter isn’t a waste of time — it’s the gift of time. Is it any wonder that people with open minds love being able to digest so much information so fast while the luddites spew their scorn? I really don’t have time for that.

Tags: social media, social networking, twitter

We all like to feel in control and hate feeling controlled. Most of us have learned that it is disastrous to try to control other people. Free will is part of what makes us human. When we encounter the human Rock of Gibraltar — someone so stubborn they simply will not budge — it is the better part of valor to cut our losses and move on. It makes no sense to try to convince someone who simply refuses to accept your idea.

Traditional broadcast marketing is an act of pushing your idea — an attempt to persuade everyone. It demands a yes. Filtering is left to the sales team. A good sales team will listen and ask questions to see if there really is a fit. They are happy to hear no, it lets them move on to the next prospect. A poor sales team tries to convince and control — yes is their only answer. It’s something we’ve all experienced with dread.

So what does this have to do with social media? It means that you may never have to face the Rock again. Social media enables believers to raise their hand, volunteer, and follow. Doubters and naysayers need not apply. Social media is social — an act of attraction. It is invitational. It asks who is interested? It asks who wants to participate? Everyone involved is exercising free will. It takes a very determined naysayer to stick it out and hang with a group that’s contrary. So, social media is a filter — it lets yes be yes and no be no.

Imagine how effective your sales team would be if you asked for customers using social media. Cooperation always beats control.

Tags: marketing, sales, social media, social networking

The article below is a guest post written by Max Gladwell AKA Rob Reed, it is the first collective, open-source guest blog post, and it has just been published simultaneously on about 100 relevant blogs, inspiring 100 simultaneous conversations from various points of view. Please join in!

Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That’s the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it’s closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it’s true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor’s office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it’s so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, “How can we go from green hype to green habit?” and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O’Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O’Reilly’s. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What’s more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There’s a app for that. It’s called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone’s dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone’s built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you’ll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin…

Final note: This is Max Gladwell’s third list of “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media.” The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d’etre, this is it.

Related Posts

• Ten (More) Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
• Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
• Ten Predictions for the New Year (MG01)
• Happy New Year! A Max Gladwell Retrospective
• Be a Beacon: The First Principle of Social Media

Tags: social media

My first acting role was playing Walter Winchell in a 4th grade musical. I had no idea who Walter Winchell was — I was a 4th grader in the 1960s and Winchell was a radio gossip reporter during the 1930s – 50s. Even though my dad was a newspaper columnist and tried to explain it to me, I was clueless. The scary part is that I didn’t care. I had a speaking part, I was onstage by myself, and I had my name in the program. During the show I delivered my lines with gusto completely oblivious to the fact that I had no idea who I was portraying or why he was important to the story. My classmates cheered wildly. The parents clapped politely. I remained oblivious — a hero in my own mind.

How often do we take the time to step back from what we are doing and examine our role? We define our roles at home, albeit sometimes loosely. We define our roles at work, sometimes to an extreme. What about our role in a social network?

Given how we go on about building a social networks and using social media to engage people, maybe we should look at the role each of us plays in our organization’s community building strategy. Depending on your goals, there can be a lot of roles to fill. Formalizing who will fill each of the roles and why they need to be filled will go a long way to making your efforts a success.

Who will tell your story? Is it the leader as Steve Jobs is to Apple? Is it a celebrity, or perhaps a child who’s benefited from your services? Defining this role is critical as it gives you a touchstone to point out to followers.

Are you an evangelist promoting the community to the unaware? Perhaps you are a recruiter, sizing up new followers to figure out whom to connect them with in the organization so that they quickly become engaged in your onboarding process. Maybe you’re a mentor who teaches new initiates the ways of the organization, or a sage who preserves and shares your community’s history. Are you a fundraiser making the ask or a host making initiates comfortable?

Mapping out the roles, even if you have to take on all of them yourself, will make your community easier to join. It will remove the mystery and confusion that can make social situations awkward and unclear. I know a lot of people will tell you to just do it. Jump in, there’s nothing to be afraid of, social media is fast and we don’t want to miss out. That may be true. Or you may be met with the same tepid reception as my oblivious portrayal of Walter Winchell.

Tags: community building, community organizer, facebook, LinkedIn, social media, social network, social networking, twitter

Did you ever build a tree house? How about a fort, or a clubhouse? You know what I’m talking about. As children we’d gang together on a mission to build a place of our own a refuge, a place where we made the rules. It was something we’d cobble together from scraps of wood and a fistful of nails on the edge of the woods. Sometimes it was a heap of old blankets, sheets, and towels draped over card tables, chairs, and saw horses in the basement. But it was our spot, we made it all on our own, and it was awesome.

Anything was possible in our spot. We formed clubs, shared cookies, told wild stories, and bonded as a little tribe of hooligans. Sometimes our hut was cool enough to attract new blood and the group grew. Once in a while the group got so big that we’d need to make the place bigger.

Those childlike acts of communal creation making a shared space with a mission and purpose were far more important than you may realize. We still do it. We’ve just lost the innocence, exuberance, and imagination. Well, it’s time to rummage through the toy box in your head and rekindle the flame. Your tribe needs you.

Those of you charged with building your organization’s following, and aren’t we all, should take time to consider your group in the context of place. Where do you gather? Where does your social network meet? How do you interact? What gets your pool of peeps to become a posse? Consider it in the context of place.

What kind of group do you want to have? Where do you want to be to best perform? How can you translate that behavior to social media space? Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, Ning, or meet-ups isn’t important. You just need to foster the behaviors that mirror your desired sense of place. Do you want your group to be charged up about the team and rally behind them? Maybe you should model your group’s interaction as you would in a locker room, sports bar, or man cave. Do you want your group to unite in solidarity about a social injustice? Perhaps your group needs a fort mentality. Are you building a team of volunteers to share information about your child’s school as part of the PTA? You may want to consider creating a collective coffee house.

We may have grown up, but our behavior is still tied to our understanding of our location. We create places to facilitate activities and behaviors. As you build your social network, ask your team, what kind of iconic place will best suit our needs? Then build it with all of the zeal that a child’s imagination can muster.

Tags: community building, community organizer, group interaction, nonprofit, organization, social media, social network, tribes

All of the money making hype about social media has a tendency to overwhelm one of its most powerful uses — customer service. Many of us have heard the stories about Comcast and their use of Twitter to manage customer issues. But there seems to be no end of the folks who aren’t sold on its value, so I’m here to celebrate one that obviously does get it — Sprint. Yes, you read correctly, Sprint — the telco that can’t seem to catch a break in the press is actually kicking it in the social networks with customer service.

Sprint has a presence on Twitter with quite a few folks actively participating in conversations. I met one of them, @jbtaylor, while following the Twitter stream one day. I mistakenly assumed he was in Kansas City and struck up a related conversation. He politely let me know that he was in Reston and gave me the contact info for @jgoldsborough in Kansas City. I followed him and he followed back, as did several other Sprint employees. Interesting — kindness to strangers for no apparent reason.

• Victory 1. Simple social networking provides direct contact with local and national resources. Suddenly, I have people.

I followed their conversations and bantered with them occasionally. I even met @jgoldsborough when he spoke at a local conference. I made a brief introduction amid the hundreds of others he received. I even got a believable hint of recognition in spite of the fact that I was the 937th guy to say, “hey, I follow you on Twitter, my name’s…”

• Victory 2. Social networking face person makes public appearances and becomes a real person for the customers. Hey, now I know that guy! I’m feeling pretty good about Sprint.

Then it all went to hell. My wife starts shrieking incoherently about cell phones, Sprint, her sister in England, and I don’t know what else. She’s mad. She had a misunderstanding with someone at the Sprint store about international calls and found out when she got the invoice. So, I did my best calm husband impersonation and told her I know someone to contact.

Then I sent a tweet to @jgoldsborough expecting nothing. Like magic, he replies, and is very helpful. We exchange email addresses. I got my wife to write down her version of the story and we were put in contact on the phone and email with Jennifer in customer service. Poof, problem solved, apologies all around, some new training for the store clerks and everybody’s happy.

• Victory 3. The system works and I am writing about how much I love Sprint customer service.

It’s easy to get excited about how much money can be made selling when a new technology comes along. Sometimes it’s more important to take a long-term view and put the tool to another use, like increasing the lifetime value of your customers.

Tags: Comcast, customer service, lifetime value, social media, social networking, social networks, sprint, twitter

This SPURspectives post is part 4 of a series we’ve written on the various forms of social networks. The position that we’ve put forth is there are at least 3 forms in which social networks exist — pools, hub & spoke, and webs. We also think social networks can transform from one form to the other and can grow in a sequential progression. As previously mentioned, our take on this is, in part, influenced by Susan Fournier and Lara Lee, who recently published an article in the Harvard Business Review, Getting Brand Communities Right, (HBR, Vol. 87, No. 4) where they discussed these three community affiliation models as they relate to building a following for a brand. We think the three models translate to many other types of social networks beyond consumer brands. This post is about the third form — webs, the most sophisticated and powerful of the 3 forms of social networks.

Webs are formed by facilitating the creation of connections, or bonds, between the nodes in a pool of people. Relationships matter. As a leader, your role is to facilitate the creation of bonds between people with common goals and complementary resources or abilities. The combination compounds the value of the individuals. Since there are exponentially more bonds available in a group than nodes, a group will gain more benefit faster by facilitating the creation of bonds than by adding more members. That’s why a small but highly integrated force can defeat a large unruly mob.

However, customers, donors, and volunteers cannot be effectively assigned to groups in the way that military teams are assigned to duty. Customers, donors, and volunteers are self selecting and respond best in self forming groups. That’s why the leader’s role is to facilitate rather than command. You are there to match skill sets and personalities in a complimentary fashion — to help people become friends and learn to enjoy one another’s contribution to the group.

This is largely a matter of empowering members through inclusion in the mission. Each person has a role and adds value. Leaders need to:

• Give members a place to meet, real and virtual
• Provide a range of communication channels, including social media
• Show by example
• Provide inspiration
• Embrace rivalry
• Fan the flames of passion
• Provide praise for taking action
• Publicly reward good behavior
• Provide tools that are easier than starting from scratch
• Be ready to let go — communities defy control

Think back on the groups you’ve been part of or the causes and ideas that you support. The ones you have fond memories of most likely had these things going for them. The rest are simply forgotten. Your fond memories are the legacy of the bonds that were created. Webs are all about the connections.

Tags: donor, hubs, non profit, pools, social media, social network, spoke, web

My previous effort on SPURspectives posted about creating a pool as the basic form of community affiliation — getting people to follow your organization’s online profile. The pool is an essential first step in building your community of followers, but it is also fragile. Your Tweeps, Peeps, or Posse can be prone to fickleness due to their lack of personal connections. The pool relies on gradually developing each follower’s affinity to your brand (see a great piece on transitioning this by Mike Arauz). So, what’s a community organizer to do? Take them to your leader, or more accurately, take your leader to them.

A logical extension of a pool community is to engage members in a hub and spoke relationship by providing pool members with access to a leader in your organization through social channels. Notice I didn’t say ‘the’ leader, I said ‘a’ leader. If you can engage ‘the’ leader to take on a manageable, sincere, real presence online where they become available to your followers, then you should do so. But if your leader is reluctant, cyberphobic, or prone to speaking in corporate tongues from on high, then you are better off finding ‘a’ leader to take on the face position in your community building effort.

This face position’s role is not to sell but to inspire — something that proponents will argue is a higher form of selling and detractors will call lipstick on a pig. I fall in the middle and will leave you to form your own opinion. But, this is what I’ve seen work well. The best leaders can ignite passion by sharing their vision. This is an art form in interpersonal communication. The leader needs to capture the imagination of the listener and pull them into a shared vision. They ask you to follow and make you feel special for the privilege. The best leaders speak to a group and make each person feel they are the only one in the audience being addressed. Great leaders look and act like leaders. We recognize the signals and follow. We want to be lead.

To organize your pool into a hub and spoke (or hubs and spokes) you need to identify the best available leader and coordinate their exposure to the pool. They will be filling many roles: mentor, celebrity, storyteller, and ambassador to name a few. They will need to fulfill duties online and offline — yes, real world leadership, too! Remember, social networks are real groups of real people. Social channels are simply the communications vehicles that we use to communicate through networks (e.g.: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, telephone, direct mail, personal conversations, group meetings, parties,  etc. — any channel with a prompt and response mechanism).

While this sounds daunting, it needn’t be. Churches have been doing this for centuries. Charismatic pastors attract large followings. You’ve seen the hub and spoke social network function in lots of places. Ford Motor Company’s Head of Social Media, Scott Monty, does a stellar job of building a following for Ford. Or consider New Marketing Labs’, Chris Brogan, who has developed a major social network communicating about how to create a major social network. They both work tirelessly online and off with careful attention to what they say and how they say it. You don’t have to start out huge, you just have to start.

The only real problem with the hub and spoke model is that we all change. Leaders change. Followers change. Organizations change. It is very difficult to build a long lasting, growth oriented social network around a single charismatic individual. When the leader moves on in some way the followers are left in the lurch.

The solution is to acknowledge and accept the fact that the hub and spoke model is temporary. It is another stepping stone in building a fully functioning network. Certainly you can always use the hub and spoke, particularly if you are the hub. Just know that the network ends when you end. For longevity, a strong leader can introduce other team members and let them share the spotlight and their unique skill sets. It can either be a growth plan or a succession plan. But, it works through the halo effect — the leader’s shine glows on those who are near. Then you can evolve to a fully empowered web structure. Tune in next time for some thoughts on the full web network.

Tags: community, follower, hub and spoke, leader, pool, social media hub