It’s Time to Get Serious About Using Social Media

Nonprofits must stop simply playing around with social media as if it were a pair of shimmering, five-inch Manolo Blahnik high heels and integrate the tools throughout their organizations like a pair of sturdy Timberland walking shoes.

As the media-pundit Clay Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” Social media as tools have reached the boring stage. It is time to cut off the tags and acknowledge that the warranty for social-media tools is up. What changes is what we do with them.

As Beth Kanter and I wrote in our book, The Networked Nonprofit, organizations immersed in social media look and behave more like social networks than traditional stand-alone organizations. These groups look outside and see a world filled with networks of individuals and organizations ready and able to help them, an abundance of smart people of good will ready to be activated for a cause.