Participatory Media Part 3: Time & Effort

Participatory Media Part 3: Time & Effort

Contributing to a participatory media community takes a great deal of time and effort—especially at first. As the temporary excitement for the new wanes, an individual may be struggling to master the new technology as well as a new social context. Before tangible, positive value is seen, participatory media may be prematurely judged as discomfiting, time-consuming work for which no payoff is apparent. Members may naturally stop contributing.

The following video from Howard Rheingold both introduces the new participatory paradigm and describes the difficulty that even his students at Stanford had in integrating social communication tools into their learning practices. Young and bright as they were, Rheingold reports that they were “overwhelmed”:

http://socialmediaclassroom.com/index.php/using-the-smc

To mitigate this resistance, the role of “Community Manager” has emerged. A successful, active participatory media hub for a business—such as a public blog, a public microblog and an internal wiki—needs community management. The Community Manager maintains, champions, and encourages the use of the hub. The Community Manager also moderates, troubleshoots, listens for new ideas and implements new ideas on how to improve the hub. Community management takes time, effort, a clear vision of what the hub is designed to do, a vision of what it has the potential for in the future, and the passion to keep it alive. The Community Manager also needs a paycheck. Realizing this, business leaders resist.

At HarvardBusiness.org (June, 2009), David Armano writes, “I heard something from Brian Wallace of Blackberry that echoed thoughts I’ve been preaching for a while. He said, ‘I was selling in the idea that social media is free, until the community manager headcount came in.’” He goes on:

This underscores a fundamental truth to social media that many organizations underestimate—being social means having real live people who actively participate in your initiatives. It’s difficult to automate.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/debunking_social_media_myths.html

Any serious attempt at gaining long-term value from participatory media must remove the temptation to believe that participatory media is free. It’s neither free to build, free to participate in, nor is it free to maintain. Once built, the media needs to be populated with meaningful, targeted content and it needs to be managed.

The next section, the last in this four part series, offers some practical, actionable recommendations for how to overcome the obstacles of both the effort expenditure required for participatory media adoption and how to mitigate the discomfort of the necessary social context shift.