Social Media For Social Good - Does It Work?

Makepeace Stilhou

It’s a well known fact that the internet has evolved since a while now into what we now call, The Web 2.0. Formerly, the internet acted much on the same principle as the television i.e. providing entertainment, information and knowledge all for the viewers/consumers to intake, interpret and implement in their lives. Social media was borne out of this enhanced social intelligence and a need for respectful engagement of the viewer from all the staged reality TV.

Besides inter-personal communication and the consumer engagement in commercial endorsements, social media has revolutionized the way of giving back to the society. It has enabled charity and causes to become a pastime for the masses, which once upon a time was limited to the productively passionate hours of a few good Samaritans. In a sense, it revolutionized the familiar term in non-profit circles of ‘community mobilization’ where now every cause or non-profit is looking to draw attention from the global community, to be accessible and to be able to reach out to someone in ‘need’ as far as Tanzania, while sitting comfortably in Tokyo.

Social media made philanthropy a fad by making it simple (just a click on a ‘like’ button on Facebook), accessible & non-exclusive (with all the news updates shared on Facebook & Twitter) and engaging (now with all campaigns and organized rallies being announced and even broadcasted online). These have been major steps towards social consciousness, even awakening you may optimistically say, but this revolution is far from complete.

There are more skeptics out there who don’t believe that social media can bring about any REAL CHANGE for social GOOD and to play my own Devil’s advocate, I’m one of them. Like, for instance, can you really claim that your 5000 odd Facebook fans or Twitter followers are sensitized to the cause? If yes, by what standard or criteria? Let’s also not forget people join in fads simply to make an impressive profile in their network. Half the backbone of the social good movement online is resting on this impression management.

Also, the people you get through to and respond back are those already sensitized to the cause and are ever ready to be ‘change agents’. That doesn’t sound bad at all since these ‘change agents’ are the ones to be truly credited for spreading the word on your campaign or cause. But somewhere the limits of your reach end up as far as the same niche circles or groups. So in effect, you haven’t reached out to the masses yet; just a greater number of the pro-active and socially conscious do gooders.

The reason why non profits and cause campaigns jumped on to the bandwagon of social media, even investing (whatever little) on rapidly advancing new media technology, was to rapidly reach a larger and wider audience who could easily viral your cause. Now whether they do this in the spirit of social consciousness or unwittingly to follow the fad is much less important. At least, as far as statistics are concerned.

Measurability of change is the greatest challenge and limitation for causes and non-profits online. Their entry into social media engagement has happened in the most haphazard and unceremonious of ways with enough case studies rattling about its apparent “success” but none defining what indicates as an actual measure of progress (Lets not even debate on the elusively ambitious idea of change).

For any media campaign at this point, social/new media is a growing prospect and a potentially powerful tool for reach and change. The repeatedly quoted examples of the movements in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya have all leveraged on the passion and power that social media has to offer in creating waves of awakening and mobilizing people to action. Still, its reach does not go as far as the grassroots and is still relatively due from the kind of credibility that mass media enjoys by active users and non-users alike (at least in technologically underdeveloped countries). I await the day, that isn’t too far, when a vegetable seller would check the inflation rates on his iPad.

Cross-Posted from http://thealternative.in/

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