Social vs. Community

Since the Internet first appeared, we’ve been using it socially, through conversation or through the assertion of relationships (“friending”). There’s also “following,” which may or may not suggest relationship, depending whether it’s reciprocated. If you follow Ashton Kutcher on Twitter and he doesn’t follow you back, you’re not in relationship with him, you’re just part of his audience.

Then there’s community, which we’ll get to farther along.

But first let’s get our stretch our heads around the concept of social networks. We all have our own social networks combining strong and weak connections to other people. You’ve probably seen diagrams of social networks where each person is a node or point connected to others, in a structure we call “scale-free” because the nodes in the network aren’t evenly connected, some nodes have more connections than others, and nodes with many connections are hubs in the network. In a diagram, nodes vary in size by the number of connections they have, and the largest nodes are the hubs. (Oddly, I haven’t seen diagrams that vary the size of a connecting line according to the strength of the connection, which would make sense.)

For our purposes, the difference between nodes and hubs isn’t relevant, though it can be strategically relevant – to presence an idea quickly in a network, for instance, you would pass it to the hubs and leverage their influence.

Before the Internet, we didn’t think as much about our social networks and how they’re structured, in fact many of us probably had fewer weak ties because the overhead for finding and sustaining them was greater. Think fat rolodex and many quick phone calls.

Now it’s relatively easy to accumulate weak connections through social media, though strong relationships still require more commitment of time and energy, and are therefore limited for any individual. How many deep connections can you manage? This can be relevant to the scale limits of relationships and can have an impact on the size and growth patterns of communities, which we’ll get to eventually, I promise.

Social network platforms don’t necessarily enable community- building. Having identified connections on one of these systems, we can share and have conversations without necessarily changing the strength of our connections or engaging in discussions that persist for more than a day or three. (I often refer to Facebook or Twitter conversations as “drive-by.”) Important for the distinction I want to make here, we’re relating as individuals without building group coherence, which is fundamental to community.

Example of a weak connection that never gains mass: I’ve never met Sally Golightly, but she sends me a friend request on Facebook because we have friends in common and she thinks I might be interesting – and maybe Facebook suggested me as a connection based on common friends or affinities. Seeing what we have in common, I confirm the request. We’ve never met, we may or may not ever get into each other’s heads, but we’ve articulated a virtual, reciprocal connection via social technology. It’s a weak connection and it stays weak.

Even weaker: on Twitter or Google+, Sally could just follow my posts without reciprocation, but without reciprocation there’s no sense of relationship, she’s just part of an audience. In this sense, the act of following tends to be more broadcast than social. On Twitter you can set parameters that ensure intimacy, but the default use of Twitter is neither intimate nor conversational. It’s people throwing ideas and links into a stew of short form media, and while conversations can emerge, they’re inherently fragmented and shallow. (Some Twitter users will say that they have conversations that are neither, but I’m not seeing it – and I’m not making a value judgement, I’m just reading the pattern.)

So, slightly redundant here to make the point, social media is shared media, and the sharing is in contexts where ties can remain weak (which is not to say that they can’t become stronger, but the point is that strong relationships aren’t required – when I share a link on Twitter, I’m sharing it with a diverse audience that combines degrees of relationship, weak ties and strong ties.)

In these contexts, there’s no coherence of affinity – they’re not organized around a subject or interest or clear commonality. Each person has a different set of relationships – everyone’s Twitter feed or Facebook activity stream is particular to them based on who they’ve followed or connected with, so not everyone is in the same set of conversations.

So now we get to community, which is different, defined by group affinity and common history based on shared experience. In the Twittersphere you may have individuals who share affinity and history with each other, but not as a discrete group, and that’s an important distinction.

If you’re planning a social strategy, it’s important to understand this difference. If you’re looking for a level of engagement that’s best served by online community development, you don’t want an approach that’s more about building social networks. You want to focus, beyond mere connection, on affinity, and create an infrastructure that supports common shared experience, where participants evolve a history together, as a group.

Community technologies, then, are those that enable groups to form around particular affinities, have ongoing conversatons and share experiences over time, building history as a group. A community requires facilitation, nurturing, management – we talk about having hosts or moderators and community managers, whereas in social media the conversations are ad hoc and generally unmanaged.

So, for instance, if you want to create a community of practice, you would invite people who share a practice into a context for ongoing conversation and sharing, probably using an email list or forum. You could use Twitter or a Facebook page to get the word out and attract members, but actual conversations would be elsewhere (such as a forum, email list, LinkedIn or Google group).

• Community is good for focus groups, political wrangling and activist work, support around a particular technology or set of technologies, building conversations around an affinity or practice, etc.
• Social media is good for sharing and gathering intelligence, sharing media, spreading memes, marketing, drive-by conversation, etc.

Image by TheBigTouffe via Flickr