@TexansVsHunger: I think your sentiment is well taken, and I can see how you might get the impression that some or all of the folks above are simply shiny-tech pushers. I won't try to speak for them, but I do want to suggest that they aren't blindly following the latest tech hype and hoping it will change the world — many of them have clear social change strategies.

My own background is rooted in a) on-the-ground community organizing, including 100+ hours of training and many times that in actual organizing, and b) academic study of how nonviolent social change can be successful (my degree is in peace and conflict studies). I know "social change" can be kind of a squishy term (and even more so the strategy-free "social good," which Katrin Verclas has amply discussed), so I want to position myself as specifically interested in fundamental social change, at the political, social, economic and cultural levels. I don't see the challenges as being easily fixed, or short-term, or things that can be addressed with a few pieces of legislation or a few institutional reforms.

With that in mind, I think social media and social networking hasn't entirely matured as part of long-term social change. Where it has been getting integrated into social justice organizing, it's largely been outside the United States, in places like Colombia and Egypt. And even there, while we can see important strategic concessions, not enough time has really passed to see the extent to which social media helped advance social justice campaigns.

I entirely share your frustration with "tech for social change" discussions that fawn over the technology and don't engage on the level of strategic change. I saw this happening in particular during the Moldovan "Twitter revolution" discussion (which Joe linked to above). This "revolution" seemed to captivate a lot of armchair activists on Twitter, mostly because it involved Twitter. They seemed to miss the fact that a) Twitter wasn't actually a big part of the organizing strategy, and b) the campaign itself didn't end up seriously threatening the regime; at best it was a mild skirmish and it certainly wasn't a "revolution" of any kind. (Which is not to diminish the hard work of social justice organizers in Moldova. Mad props to them.)

Your point about social media providing an outlet for people's activism that sucks away people's time for real social change is an excellent one. (A similar dynamic happens every two to four years in the US, when community organizers see their ranks cannibalized by electoral organizing.) Charles Lenchner has written brilliantly about this, using the principle "mission over membership."

Too many nonprofits orchestrate "petition drives" that aren't about advocating for anything other than larger membership rolls. Too many groups ask constituents to make calls to an elected official without even feigning an attempt at explaining how those calls will help achieve a goal or contribute to a longer-term campaign. You're absolutely right that too many nonprofits have no social change theory at all; indeed they're more interested in self-perpetuation than winning (often referred to as the nonprofit industrial complex). And when those groups get their hands on social media, they do incredibly un-strategic things with them.

The fact that social media can be used unstrategically, however, doesn't mean it has to be. To pull a line from my earlier post, political pamphlets, phone trees and jam-the-faxes must have seemed like strategies in and of themselves when each technology first came out. But smart social justice organizers recognized them as tactics, and such tactics were only effective when deployed as part of an overall strategy for social change.

Social media doesn't mean you do less organizing — it means you (can) do it better, or at least differently. You still have to use all the old skills of coalition-building, strategic planning, creative social action, managing relationships and preventing burnout. None of that goes away just because you're engaging with people on Facebook instead of in town halls.

So to get 'round to the original question — the reason I don't feel jaded when I look at all the unstrategic uses of social media is because I'm focused on the end goal, the social change. Social justice organizers are a pretty creative bunch. Throughout history, they've taken a wide variety of technologies and used them strategically to move their campaigns forward. I have no doubt social media has and will become one tool in many organizers' toolbelts.

Yes! This is what I meant when I replied to you about "too much talk, not enough action." This is why I now cringe at the terms "guru" and "evangelist." It's not about being "big on twitter" or even convincing everybody how cool twitter is.   (Though, yes, it is a really really cool tool.)

If your cause is promoting twitter, then great, talk about the awesomeness of twitter all day. But if your cause is something else then USE twitter - and other channels - to get something done for your cause.  

 Social media allows us all to be pontificators... which can   be fun. But I don't want to read hundreds of pontifications all day. I want ACTION.

 (NOTE: I say all this in a spirit of encouragement rather than condemnation. I know I've fallen into the pontification trap before, and I understand. I guess I hope we can all be there to remind each other to get real and get back to action.)

Funny, I clicked on this post from Twitter expecting a realistic conversation about the limitations of social media tools. Instead, it appears everyone took your question about being jaded to mean "How can I get un-jaded," and not, "Should I be jaded?"

The assumption of most twitters above seems to be that these tools work because they're cool OR they've built a career around them, so if you're feeling jaded due to lack of results or encouraging metrics, get over it and get back to your (disappointing) work.  

IMO, social media tools are pretty poor at changing anything that takes more than one or two mouse-clicks. Sometimes that's all you need - making a donation, sending petitions, affecting website ratings, flooding online polls, etc.

Most change, unfortunately, doesn't happen at the end of a mouse-click. But in the long run, these tools also do a good job of hoovering up potential participants for offline actions that will make a difference.  

Perhaps our jadedness comes from a disconnect between the revolutionary nature of the tool, and its less-than-mindblowing uses? If that's the case we'll be managing our own expectations, given enough time.    

Joe, thanks for sharing this and getting a community of conversation evolving on the subject. So many good points raised above that I concur with, especially Romina's and Ivan's points too.  

I sometimes feel jaded (think boggled is sometimes a better term for me!), with the ferocity and pace of conversations taking place in so many places; and often the focus of the talk of the 'tools' rather than the outcomes of what it can help to acheive.
As well as working with large forward thinking organisations, I work closely too with many small rural 'traditional' organisations and find that alot of development work is needed in gentle gradual steps to help them to move forward, and modern fangled media (social media) is very much often just one of the many area's that we'll work on. But instead of focussing on this new emcompassing glossy media, we work together from the vision and mission outwards.   Less about the tools but more about the goals they want to acheive then to look at how they can reach their goals. Slow and painful at times, asking an organisation, it's volunteers, trustees, staff and partners to make a big cultural shift.   It's often not instant ( - unlike 'social media' which can be pretty instantaneous in its effects, to set up a blog, photo sharing, video sharing and more can take just a few moments). Added value in being able to not only do work more effectively, but to share the results of the work with partners and stakeholders for example, and enabling a better dialogue and voice from your members and so on.   Efficiency if looking from the mission first perpective, using tools that can help enhance with internal knowledge management will help too, and can also be used for external collaboration/knowledge sharing.
And on it goes.
There is so much goodness that can come out of embedding and embracing modern media as part of an organisations evolving being; and we witness it daily on all the various networks helping us to connect, share and communicate our stories.

I sometimes feel personally a little jaded with the social media sphere, often only because I can't always keep up with it all (information overload combined with noise), and digest everything good that is happening out there.   Sometimes I feel disconnected from the conversations, and at other times am invigorated by what I see, hear and experience.

Often it's nothing to do with the tools themselves, but the vision, enthusiasm and drive from those who can see the change that they want to make and will embrace whatever is needed to meet that need, using the best means to achieve that goal.   That's what makes the whole nonprofit sector such an exciting, innovative and unique place to be part of!

Great post Joe!  Making change is hard - and changemakers routinely go though the high's and lows. What social media is adding to the mix is more option on how to make change happen. It's a big piece in the future of how we engage, serve, and work and it's challenging to the conventional ways of doing things. And that doesn't make it any easier - so no wonder you and everyone else I know in this space find themselves jaded at some point. It's also because this is about change that people get recharged and back into the game.

I've just been thinking about the need to actually look at how tools are being used for social change and understanding: what makes them useful, how it they might actually change the processing of making change, and how the tools might actually be changed (or new tools created) to be more useful in social change. In my digging so far I haven't found anything really getting at this.

Personally, I'm particularly interested in Twitter (or rather what Twitter represents) because I believe it has the potential to be the most accessible, interactive public medium in history. If that's true I think it will open new opportunities for social change and systems that support a just and sustainable society. To be clear though - that's a very different conversation than "how do current organizations uses twitter to execute their mission and programs more effectively". The conversation about the medium is about understanding and influencing it to best support a just and sustainable society vs. trying to employ the medium for a project that's going live in the next month. And for practitioners in the field that's a tough, often blurry, tension to carry.  

Thanks for this post, and for everyone who chimed in beforehand. As I said, I'm better at reacting at things (this comes from my academic training - I'm an analyst of issues and problems, and then I propose solutions). I can only speak from my two organizational experiences (VanChangeCamp and MentalHealthCamp).

Early on, Isabella Mori and I decided that we would be the only organizers instead of setting up a committee. This worked in our favor as we are hive minds. We think so much alike it's unbelievable.   We thought out and created a framework of collaboration within which participants of Mental Health Camp would work (presenters, volunteers, organizers). I think much of the success of MHC Vancouver was that we created a framework for openness, discussion, respect for people who shared their stories and the underlying desire to break down the stigma of mental illness and THEN we used social media tools to expand our reach and talk to potential attendees, speakers, etc.

I am sharing these findings because those respond to the last point you made - can we find a target and THEN apply a social media toolkit to it? My answer is - Yes, we can.   That's I think how we ended up being so successful. The participants were engaged, but they were engaged within a framework of mutual respect, love, warmth and sharing. If you were attending MHC you knew what you were going to be in for. You knew that you would be hearing other people's stories of struggling with mental illness and you needed to be open minded, and be respectful and sensitive to these stories, and react in ways that would empower those who shared their stories. I was amazed at the quality of participants and speakers, and truly honored that they shared in this effort.

The question you ask - ARE WE JADED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL CHANGE has a good answer that nobody is willing to give - yes, we are, but we aren't being honest. We all want support for our event, yet we are reluctant or wary to support others events. What happened to "do unto others as you'd like to have done unto you". Many people whom I expected at least a retweet did NOT support my efforts with Mental Health Camp. Many people from the actual social media for social change community, in fact. How does that make me feel? Jaded.  

The fact of the matter is - our best bet for the use of social media for social change, in my opinion, is to be honest, respectful and forthcoming in what we expect from our application of online tools to effecting social change. In my view, Mental Health Camp was hugely successful, and there were many reasons why it was, but much of that was the support from the online community (please note that I said the community and not EVERYONE in the community).

I also think that it is important to be selective, strategic and focused in how we approach social media for social change. You can't be everybody's hero. Choose one or two projects. Go small and then scale up and go viral. And more importantly, remember the rule of RECIPROCITY. If you want support on your project, make sure that you've supported other projects. I had a really bad experience supporting a social media for social change initiative and then asking for support and not even getting a reply tweet back. Not the best way to get me to support this person's next event, right?  

I had also mentioned to Joe that I react very badly to pressure, and I have a policy of being selective. I choose carefully which projects I support but when I support them, I'm fully behind them. I don't like being pressured into anything, and I'm sure many people feel the same way I do but don't publicly disclose this. Gentle nudging and negotiation always wins (at least with me!)

One of the biggest challenges and people fail to realize this is - there are SO MANY PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD. It's hard to get support from everyone. I think Beth Kanter asked in a post how to deal with so many causes (a while ago). One of the best ways, I think, is to re-direct. If you can't help support a cause, why not get a friend (online or offline) involved? I didn't know anyone in the mental health community, and now I do thanks to people who were in the MH community who introduced me to other people. Isabella and I got a lot of support from people who weren't even online!

Overall, my bottom line is - let's look at problems, create a framework to solve them and then engage the social media toolkit. Within that social media tool kit we should never forget to treat everyone in the social media for social change community with respect and interest. Otherwise, the likelihood that people will react favorably to our initiatives will be very small.  

 My 2 cents. Also, Joe - most likely I'll want to publish the text of my super long comment on my own blog. Cheers.

I'm the founder of an organization that operates with no budget whatsoever as we don't ever take cash donations.   What this means is that all press, all contacts, virtually everything was made possible by social networking.   Can that work?   You bet it can.   In the year and a half or so that we've been around we've grown an email list of about 1200 subscribers, held about 100 classes, taught more then 200 people how to keep chickens (and taught a lot of people  a number of other things too)  and  received write ups in almost all of our local printed press including the cover of the local section of the Sunday paper.   Considering that this organization is specific to my city, Seattle, these numbers are pretty impressive as far as I'm concerned.   And absolutely none of it would be possible without social networking.

 Oh, and just for giggles the website is hosted for free by a friend of mine in France that I've never met outside of Second Life.

www.seattlefreeschool.org