Jeremiah Owyang has a post called "The Many Challenges of Social Networking" suggesting that social networks have passed the peak of inflated expectations and has identified a good list of challenges to success. When I read Jeremiah Owyang's post, two reflections came to mind:
1. Gartner's Technology Hype Cycles: I created that diagram based on the Gartner's theory and have seen it come into play over and over again. About two months, again I used to illustrate this post when I read Shel Israel's post "Is Facebook starting to fade?" This relates to three challenges identified by Jeremiah:
Successful Networks have hard time scaling
Facebook and Twitter (yes a social network too) are suffering from scaling issues, as a result, their sites have a great deal of downtime or latency. The complicated applications will only increase in intricacy as more users are added.
2. Fatigue or Plateau?: I interviewed some digital natives last week about their use of causes and one thing they mentioned as application fatigue -- don't respond to every request to join a cause and delete them. The interview is here.
Plateau or Social Network Fatigue?
I’m starting to see some reports from sources that suggest that the usage of social networks are slowing down, if not reducing perhaps it’s from the endless tasks that occur, or the shinyness has rubbed off.
3. Social Not Working: Jeremiah asked for other challenges and in the comments I suggested that the perception of "wasted time" or what another commenter dubbed "Social Not Working." This came in the comments of a post I wrote about Flickr as part of some prep for a NTC panel and article I'm working on or (social not writing).
The biggest concern we are hearing is from people saying ..my supervisor or our IT staff will not allow us access to online applications (" I am blocked from FLICKR, Utube, Facebook") because they are afraid employees will play rather than work or that people will view inappropriate content at work. The concern is that people's time/use of these tools can not be monitored. And what is making the mainstream news is employee abuse at work.
I immediately thought about this wonderful cartoon from Social Signal, by Rob Cottingham
Jeremiah's list of external and marketing challenges are very relevant to for-profits with dollars to spend in their marketing budgets. While some are relevant for nonprofits, because marketing dollars are tighter, there is probably more upfront consideration and identification of reasons why social networking may not be appropriate for the nonprofit organization.
One of the challenges I'd add to the nonprofit list is the dollar amounts aren't impressive but as noted in a recent Read/Write post about Facebook as a Social Change Platform awareness raising is important (if not difficult to measure)
However, even if Causes isn't doing much to raise money, it is potentially doing a lot to raise awareness. When just the top 5 causes reach about 7.5 million people, that's pretty powerful stuff. Further, each cause is given a group page that has familiar Facebook tools like a wall -- the Cancer Research cause, for example, has nearly 8,000 wall posts. Giving 3 million people a platform to discuss something they're passionate about and raise awareness -- whether or not it leads to money donated -- points to Facebook's potential as a powerful social tool.
Update: Apparently it isn't just young people getting tired of social networking sites, according to the Second 50 Years of Marketing Blog by Joan Fritz, EONs, the social networking site for older people is having problems too.
What challenges do you see facing nonprofits to use social networking sites? Are the challenges identified by Owyang real for nonprofits? Are there other challenges we as a sector face in the adoption and successful use of social networking for awareness, communications, and fundraising tools?
Update: Perhaps a better question might, what are your strategies for overcoming the challenges?
Please note, that each of these challenges can and will be overcome, plans and strategies just need to be laid out.
Posted by: Jeremiah Owyang | February 11, 2008 at 09:20 AM
Nice post, Beth. It would be interesting to see a real graph from one of early tools on the scene.
Posted by: Drew Bernard | February 12, 2008 at 09:13 PM