• The overconfident rebel leader
• The party seeker and connector
• The Geek
• The student
• The non-conformist

The Overconfident Rebel Leader
Full of self-belief, cocky self-assurance and a certainty that he has discovered the true path, he is confused, disappointed and sulky that the grown ups will not listen to him, or that they insist on applying their outdated rules or asking irrelevant questions. His followers love him, they can see his genius and they speak or assume his language. “If only those pesky grownups would listen, the world would be a better place”.

The Approval Seeker and Connector
She lives to be popular seeking as many props and symbols as she can to show her popularity. The more the merrier. Life is about being seen and talked about. She feels validated by the chaos and sheer weight of numbers. She’s invited to all the parties, and if not she makes sure she gets in. She knows somebody who knows somebody. She knows she is living a dangerous life and has to be on the ball: one indiscretion and she could be dropped from the “in crowd”. Being herself will not do. Keeping the charade up is hard work.

The Geek
Gone are the days when the Geek never got the girl. The ability to analyze, create and mold technology is now recognized as a valuable skill. The Geek loves to problem-solve and find solutions using technology. Shiny new toys are heaven. It is not unheard of for a Geek to be held in high regard and celebrated. “With my new toys I can perform spectacular tasks and tricks”. Keywords such as “techniques”, “processes” and “tactics” often feature.

The Student
The student loves to lap up all the techniques, tips and tactics that she can. She reads widely on the subject and loves to quote her latest source. The student becomes the “expert” through association and applying newly learned techniques to the letter. Not all students are the same though; some take best practices, add value and context and get the A+.

The Non-Conformist
Not to be confused with “the Rebel” the non-conformist sees the world differently. Often discounted for not excelling within the system, he has a set determination to prove himself. His strength comes from understanding the system, acknowledging the points of differentiation and seeing the gaps. The non-conformist works to objectives, setting out to satisfy or resolve those objectives using the tools and resources available to him. Success through proving himself is the reward. This comes through keeping an eye on the objectives, using the right tools and resources for those objectives and closing the gap between the established and the new.

Yes. This is rather tongue in cheek. No, it is not to be taken seriously. I guess one central message here is that we, as social media practitioners, marketers and online entrepreneurs need to take some responsibility for how social media is perceived and how we integrate it into the mainstream. A mature approach towards satisfying the critics’ concerns and demonstrating value will go a long way towards integrating social media into mainstream or traditional marketing and business initiatives.
I am sure there are more teenage stereotypes that fit the bill. Feel free to add your thoughts.
I for one am looking forward to Social Media growing up beyond the teenage years. Perhaps 2010 will bring more control, a more mature attitude towards social media and a more harmonious dialogue between the young and the old.

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Content no longer sits on a website and hopes for people to come along. It travels. Not only does it travel from the website, smart websites are putting relevant content in front of their website visitors according to their profiles, preferences, searching and navigation behaviour. Social media tools, analytics, CMS, LMS and CRM are being combined to ensure audience and content relevance. The form content is delivered in, video, audio, photo, graphic, text etc. is no longer seen as merely innovative or a gimmick, rather as aligning to learning styles, expectations and delivery mechanisms. Context.

The relationship between content and context is two pronged.

1. Content is created in relation to the context it will be consumed in
2. Context directs content.

For content to be relevant it has to be created in the context of your social media strategy. Understanding the following is a great start:

1. Who are your audiences?
2. Where they live online?
3. What are their learning styles?
4. How they are influenced?
5. What are your competitors doing?
6. How can you differentiate yourself?
7. What is your USP? (Unique selling point)
8. What should you be doing online?
9. What are the rules?
10. What resources and tools do you have at your disposal?

Aligning your available resources and tools to your content goals seems obvious, but so much content is cobbled together in a piecemeal fashion. How many times, for example, have we seen a company start a YouTube channel and not update it?

Context rules social media. Keeping this in mind ensures we prepare, research and create strategies that align our goals with our audiences and resources. Relevant content and content delivery strategies will follow.

This post is reproduced from the original which can be found here

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It is no surprise that the most discussed social media networks are the ones that have excelled from this model, creating a following and infusing themselves into the very fabric of our online lives. Here their determination and vision have created mass following and buy-in, and from that revenue models have been created, or in some cases are yet to be created.

For every Facebook or Twitter, there are thousands of start-ups which have not made it. Not much has been written about them. We prefer to applaud the mighty. We love to pick at, dissect and analyse the ones that have made it. The ones we all want to emulate. How many times have you seen battling niche social networks describing themselves as “The MySpace of Christianity” or “The Facebook of fishermen”? (Ok I made that up but it has a certain poetic quality to it).

This has perpetuated the “build it, create a following and then figure out your revenue model later” strategy as the one to copy. We all like to document why these networks are successful, what lessons we think can be derived from them and applied to our businesses, and how we can maximise our use of them in order for organizations to gain.

Don’t get me wrong, there is much to applaud, and lots to discuss, however, to avoid stagnating there is a need to step away from this and look at the topic from alternative perspectives.

It is this view of social media that has prompted such a fierce reaction to the executives who calmly and quite understandably ask for some ROI data for social media. “They just don’t get social media” is the combined cry from 10 million of the 10 million 7 hundred thousand #socialmediaprofiles on wefollow. “How do you quantify a relationship?”

I think most of the executives get that. It is a valid answer, but it misses their point. From their perspective, the build it, get people to engage and then figure out how to make it valuable later is not a model that they are familiar with. (I know I am oversimplifying things here, and yes there is more to this argument than this) Just because the innovation, thinking and construction of these tools are derived from this model, does not mean they have to stay in this model.

Organizations already have business models. They have processes set up to ensure that they reach their goals and that they are adding value in a manner that allows the business to continue. Taking the tools, applications and software that drives the social media we know and love and bringing them into established business models in order to facilitate a greater overall ROI requires a shift in application.

Social media does not only exist “out there”. Bringing the tools into the structure of an organization in a way that aligns with their objectives, culture and purpose ensures that value is brought with them. Helping organizations to see the shift happening in relation to stakeholders, collaboration, connections and content, and how social media tools and processes can bring it all together for the benefit of the organization is key.

Thinking about User Generated Value (UGV) verses User Generated Content (UGC) is important. It is not always appropriate for us to engage or discuss overtly or for inappropriate people to alter content. Using filters and permissions based profiles to ensure relevance, or mapping how people navigate your site can add more value and relevant understanding. Allowing the right people access to the right content, and getting them to add value through tagging, flagging, bookmarking, rating etc can help streamline efficiencies, and add more relevance than sifting through reams of comments, suggestions and text. All these tools exist. The fact that they are becoming easier to integrate into legacy applications, CMS and LMS ensures that this is easier and cheaper to do. The gaps between what we want to do, the cost of doing it and the time it takes to role it out are getting smaller.

Too many people are driving the social media vehicle in automatic. Look under the hood, see what tools make it go and adapt that knowledge so it allows organizations to meet their objectives, goals and unique business rules.

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However, while we debate these issues with companies, things have moved on. The technology, thinking and market conditions are ready and ripe for enterprise social software. Social media tools, widgets, and methodologies can be integrated into the very fabric of an organization, pulling together all their disparate elements. Many tools will fade into the background facilitating the connection of conversations and providing online solutions that are intelligent and led by the audience. There is a distinction here between overt user-generated content and underlying user generated-value. We are missing an opportunity if we sit back and wait for people to catch up.

This is not the future, it can happen now and it is happening now. We need to let go of our obsession with shifting the organizational mindset. We have become stuck. We think we cannot move on until this is resolved. We are thinking linearly. Our process often looks a bit like this:

• First get them to acknowledge the value of social networks.
• Get them to want to engage with their customers.
• Teach them that ROI is an old, outdated model.
• Then, once they have bought into it, show them how social media tools and software go beyond social networks.

But this linear thinking and approach is just as much part of the old world as trying to apply an accounting model to social network interactions.

If organizations are struggling to shift their structures to adapt to using social networks then we must do what any self-respecting new thinker would do: we need to listen to them. We need to ask why they are resisting and we need to adjust so we address those concerns, not through argument or debate, but through changing our approach.

We have misunderstood the ROI debate. This was a cry from organizations for us to provide them with solid business reasons for utilizing social media, and we failed them. Through kicking back and telling them that they were wrong, that they didn’t get it, that only a fool would expect to measure the ROI of social media we have made them more obdurate.

The route to understanding is through demonstrating tangible value. We need to understand what their concerns are.

• How are their organizations structured?
• How do they create content?
• How do they manage that content?
• Who collaborates with whom?
• How?
• How intuitive and effective is their CRM?
• How is knowledge transferred?
• What does their intranet look like?
• What about their extranet?
• What is their sales process?

Bring it back to the organization. Addressing concerns that they see as real, and demonstrating how social software and a shift in approach will help resolve those issues will make sense to them.

Social media tools and software may well have been crafted in consumer markets, but its value to enterprises lies in bringing it back to their organization and making it relevant to their business goals and objectives

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Following our previous post, The ROI of Social Media – Get the Biggest Bang for Your Buck, several thoughts need to be added in light of comments, reactions and conversation.

There are two camps, one saying that trying to establish the ROI for social media is wrong and goes against the very nature of social media. For this camp social media is about fluid, open conversations and the building up of relationships. To reduce this to mere measurement and numbers is wrong and represents everything that is wrong with how organizations have worked in the past.

The other camp says that measuring the ROI of social media is the right thing to do. Adhering to a plan or social media strategy requires measurement and analysis. The people who argue against this approach often argue that the two are mutually exclusive, that a quantifiable mindset kills the qualitative spirit. It is this assumption that is creating the problems.

I think we are getting caught up in semantics. The whole ROI debate is riddled with controversy because people are using the language and mindset of a previous paradigm. When at the beginning of a shift, as we are, the old paradigm’s language and mindset remain predominant while the new paradigm has to find a way to express itself. Often the new paradigm has to use the language of the old paradigm to gain attention. Entitling this topic as “How to ensure you are engaging in an effective social media strategy” will not grab the attention of marketers in the same way as using the term ROI. Yet using this term brings with it a whole history, one that has traditionally been about control, admin and justification.

Absolutely. You cannot measure the effectiveness of every social conversation. Yes it is difficult to quantify the good that comes from real customer engagement. But this does not mean you should not use analytics and measurement.

Measurement is not to be approached as justification and measurement should never inhibit the flow of social conversations and connections. But in order to be effective for business, a social media campaign has to be built on a strategy. Part of that strategy is all about engagement, participation and openness. It is about starting the conversation and seeing where it goes. Yes we should encourage people within our organization to participate freely, with no expectation or obligation. The other part has to include measurement and metrics. There is little point in having these conversations if they are not going to inform you. Here ROI is measured in relation to goals and objectives rather than in terms of money.

If you are integrating social media and social software into the very fabric of your organization, incorporating your CMS and your LMS and using analytics and measurement can turn your website or web presence into powerful tools. Not at the expense of your fluid and open social conversation and interactions, but in conjunction with it.

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A consistent mistake many online commentators are making is equating ROI to money. As a CEO, I understand the link. Marketing dollars, especially now, are precious and it is responsible and prudent to ensure that every dollar you commit to marketing shows a measurable and positive return on your bottom line. As a CEO who runs a Social Media company it is imperative we have simple case studies to help our clients understand the importance of relevant social media strategies and implementation. In addition, we also use Social Media to promote our company. Like most CEOs, I do want to find out if I commit x dollars towards my marketing what return I am going to see on my bottom line and how I am going to measure that. By the way, I want to see this information efficiently too.

This current economic climate leaves little room for experimentation. No company can afford to gamble on something that might bring huge rewards, but might just as equally fail.

In my research for this post I came across a blog post that I think sums up where many people are going wrong. Jay Deragon suggests that you cannot look at social media as having an ROI. You can’t quantify it in monetary terms, and if you are trying to do so then you are approaching it incorrectly. Jay argues that trying to establish a definitive ROI for social media is wrong, and he suggests that you spend your energy on ensuring you are participating and engaging with your customers.

While I appreciate what he is trying to get at, I disagree with his argument. Measurement and analysis are key to any social media strategy. ROI refers to Return On Investment, and this return does not necessarily have to be measured in money.

Take, for example, the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Obama, as part of his comprehensive marketing campaign invested heavily in social media for his campaign and his return on the investment was winning the election. Another example can be found in the increase in social media around sustainability. The return on investments here can be identified as the change in people’s behavior and the rise in their level of awareness.

If achieving your goal is the ROI, then start off by understanding your objectives and setting your goals. Understanding how you will define your ROI has to be the starting point.

I teamed up with Alasdair Munn to create this checklist on how to get the most out of your social media campaigns, in short, the best bang for your buck. Every situation is different and requires a different approach. The following serves to illustrate how a typical campaign might be approached.

1. Start with a full analysis of your current position.
   1. What are you trying to sell? To whom/who cares?
   2. What marketing is working for you?
   3. How are you measuring the success?
   4. What is not working?
   5. What is your , 1, 3, 6 month, 1 year or 5-year plan?
   6. Do a SWOT analysis.
   7. How strong is your brand? How are you measuring it’s strength and weakness?
   8. Is using social media the right decision for your company?
2. Look at what your competitors are doing.
   1. What is your positioning statement?
   2. What are they doing right?
   3. What are they doing wrong?
   4. What is your USP?
   5. How can you leverage that?
   6. Where are the gaps? And/or how are you going to go about identifying the gaps?
3. Understand your audience, their learning styles and how they are/are not using social media.
4. Set goals and objectives. What do you hope to achieve from your social media campaign? Do you understand social media? It’s a good question to look at.
5. Engage an agency or person to create a social media strategy. There are few entities/individuals who can truly do this well: Your strategy needs to align to your social media goals and objectives, your organization’s 5-year plan and all other marketing initiatives. Your strategy will also need to assign roles and responsibilities as well as set budgets and action steps. Elements of your strategy might include:
   1. Understand which social media tools are best for your goals and objectives. These may take the form of social networking (Facebook and LinkedIn), sites that allow people to discover and share content (Digg, Magnolia, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Newsvine, Reddit, etc.), video clips or photos on YouTube or Flickr, branded software, images, blogs, forums, user comments, and much more.
   2. Who is responsible for executing the strategy? What resources can you afford to dedicate to your strategy?
   3. Understand which measurement and analytical tools work with those chosen social media tools. For example, Google Analytics, AideRSS, Xinu, and Feedburner are useful, helping companies leverage SEO efforts.
   4. Integrate the social media campaign into your entire organization (get buy in). Terry Starbucker has written a good blog post about the effectiveness of social media in a business context. His view concentrates on SMO (Social Media Optimization) and how, among other things, it has to be relevant to the organization and how the people within the company need to truly understand social media and how to “speak in it”.
6. Integrate your social media strategy into your CMS and/or LMS. This is not appropriate to all social media strategies and companies; however, through integrating social media tools into your CMS and your LMS you can create effective communication tools, both external and internal, that have measurement, analysis and functionality built in.
7. Start by listening and understanding the rules. Different social media sites and tools have different rules of engagement. They have their own norms, rules and protocols. Jumping straight in without understanding these, or without first gaining trust can be costly.
8. Engage your audience. Catch their attention and provide compelling content that fits your message, goals and objectives.
9. Measure
10. Participate/build relationships. Allow users to fully engage with your brand identity and spend time fostering new and established relationships to expand your user base.
11. Measure again.
12. Analyze. It is no use gathering all this information and measuring it if you are not going to let it inform and guide you.
13. Adapt strategy to reflect customer attitudes and responses.
14. Measure once more. Your new strategy and direction needs to be measured against your old strategy. Is the new strategy working? Are you achieving the results you had hoped to? Do you need to refocus?
15. Re-engage, measure, analyze, and re-focus. Continuing to engage, measure, analyze and refocus are key to any lasting social media strategy. It is a dynamic process that never sits still.

Jacob Morgan’s blog post entitled, “Why Social Media is More Measurable Than Traditional Media” is a good read for people who want a simple understanding of why you should be measuring your social media campaigns and how you can go about it.

In closing I do wish to offer a few thoughts. Setting goals and objectives, measuring against those goals and objectives, analyzing results and revisiting strategies are all important. However, do not lose sight of the following:

• ROI is a trailing indicator, not a leading indicator. ROI focuses on historical data. This helps us make sense of where we have been and allows us to make informed decisions as to its historical effectiveness. Any future direction cannot be made solely on historical data, especially when you consider the pace of change within social media and its qualitative nature.
• Do not overanalyze. With social media, over analyzing each individual part will make you lose sight of the whole. There are too many variables to consider. We do need to remember that we are dealing with people and people do not always make sense. They say one thing and do another and their emotions come into play. The Pepsi Taste Challenge leading to the introduction of New Coke, followed hastily by the reintroduction of the old Coke under the name Classic Coke, is a testament to the fact that pure data and research does not take into account loyalty, perceptions and human behavior.

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I am not going to venture into a definition of Web 2.0. It is not my term to tamper with. Besides, it would be difficult to reduce the definition to a few words and phrases, not to mention the possibility of misinterpretation if it is read by someone who doesn’t truly appreciate the phenomenon that it is.

This is how O’Rilley defines Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.(This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”)

In one of Tim O’Reilly’s latest blogs Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm, his vision of Web 2.0 is clearly laid out.

It is important that people get this because it really puts the term social media into perspective. The word ‘social’ often throws us off. We immediately think of outward facing dialogue, collaboration and social connections as being at the forefront of social media. However, it is often the product of the dialogue, collaboration and connections that provide the real added value of social media. Just like Tim O’Reilly’s Google example in his blog where google’s intelligence is only made possible through the way in which it organizes and uses content that is produced by the collective.

A bit of poetic license here as I attempt my own example. Imagine a computer reseller who allows customers to build their own specs online. To facilitate this they have some social media elements on the site that allow users to discuss the merits of various components. They can debate, discuss, and ask advice from each other. The data (conversations) are then monitored with key words and phrases, actively searched so as to provide the individual users with immediate information about the components they are talking about. This can include descriptions, user reviews, costs and options to select, add to your basket, add to your build, etc. Conversations about which graphics card works best with which processor for example can result in bundled deals, further reviews, alternative suggestions, etc.

Beyond this, users movements can be tracked and their search behavior monitored so to allow the computer reseller to understand real customer preferences versus their assumptions about customer preferences. Tracking could help with their supply chain management, trend watching and configurations for the standardized commodity boxes they sell to computer stores, allowing for real time adjustments to product offerings and market understanding in an industry where constant changes do not have the luxury of quarterly marketing reviews.

It is with this understanding and vision that we have built SocMe^TM Through integrating social media elements with CMS, LMS, analytics and measurement tools, websites are turned into intelligent business tools that are applied in relation to a company’s unique business rules, goals and needs.

Conversations, collaboration and gathering data are all vital, but so too are how we handle and use that data. The trend is to be fixated on the well-known external facing social media properties out there, rather than thinking how social media tools and applications can bring us a competitive advantage.

For example, people talk about using twitter as a business tool rather than thinking about creating a searchable organizational database of collaborative conversations. Yet it goes beyond this. How we organize, manage, analyze and use that database of collective conversations is key.

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I would first like to thank Max Gladwell for his blog entitled, Ten Ways that Social Media and Sustainability Align, which sparked the idea for this blog post.

At face value, social media and sustainability are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Social media is inherently intangible and lives online, while sustainability is concerned with the very real and tangible environment and earth. Yet when we drill down and examine these as human concepts, we get a sense that they are both involved in the same paradigm shift.

Most definitions for social media focus on its technologies; however this is a very static and limited view. At tcg we acknowledge that social media is a growing phenomenon enabled through adaptable technology; however, it is also about connecting people and facilitating collaboration, engagement, learning and the progression of ideas.

When it comes to defining sustainability, there are a number of definitions out there, which widely vary depending on who is talking and what their objectives are.

The World Commission on Environment and Development suggests that sustainability is defined as forms of progress that meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

I rather like the definition of environmental sustainability by Griffith University:

“Environmental sustainability refers to the environmental actions or impacts of what we do. In moving towards sustainability, we are attempting to reduce our ecological footprint or to tread more lightly on the Earth. This equates to reducing the amount of resources we use (and buy), the waste we produce and the emissions we produce. With every action impacting on the planets ecosystems, from the local to the global, the world is changing and it is not just the climate.”

Here are 10 ways in which we believe that social media and sustainability within organizations are aligned:

1. Shifting in the way we do things

• We are in the process of a global paradigm shift. The way in which we think about and approach business is changing. As with any paradigm shift, the process is gradual involving conflict between the new paradigm thinkers and the holdouts of the old paradigm.
• The rapid growth and change of social media has opened it up to scepticism, with protagonists suspicious of the technologies and the idea of open collaboration and the sharing of thoughts. This is a far cry from the closed, exclusionary and suspicious practices from the last century.
• The sustainability movement  is gaining in momentum, yet it does not make sense to individuals or institutions that are heavily invested and ensconced in their industrial mindset.

2. Grew from grassroots movements into having mainstream application

• Social media tools and sustainability practices both started as grassroots movements. For example, social media tools and applications, developed for social networking sites, have grown to have wider commercial uses. Think about how Facebook radically changed how organizations aggregate news stories and information through the introduction of news feed. The sustainability movement started out as a co-op for sourcing bio diesel fuel or sustainable produce and has escalated to achieving mainstream attention and buy in.

3. Real gains/viable alternatives

• In order to achieve buy in, both social media and sustainable practices have to prove they will provide real gains and provide viable alternatives. Organizations exist to achieve a return on investment (ROI), be it profit, achievement of social causes, etc. Both have the potential to achieve these objectives; however, this potential is largely misunderstood and miscommunicated.

4. Whole system thinking

• Social media strategies and corporate sustainability programs only work if there is whole system thinking. Merely adding a blog to your website does not constitute a social media strategy. Changing products’ packaging and labelling without addressing the whole value chain equally does not equate to a sustainable program. Also, for a sustainability program to work it needs to touch every aspect of a corporation. The authors of a program will be remiss if they did not take a whole system philosophy. The same applies to social media.

5. Specific problems, specific strategies, specific executions, specific resolutions

• There is no one size fits all strategy for corporations when it comes to developing a sustainability program or a social media strategy. Each organization has its own business rules, methods and objectives. Trying to reshape an organization to fit a predetermined strategy or set of tools and processes cannot lead to efficiencies or congruence.

6. Integration

• Once a strategy is put in place, all elements need to be integrated to allow for a flow of information, efficiencies of resources and a clear action path.
• Social media is a phenomenon enabled through adaptable technology. It is about connections, facilitating collaboration, engagement, learning and the progression of ideas. It also uses tools such as CMS, LMS, tagging, intelligent search, wikis, communication tools, etc. to connect and integrate all elements of an organization.

7. Internal buy in followed by external roll out

• For any social media strategy or sustainability program to work it has to be embraced internally by the entire organization before it can be rolled out externally. This includes education, discussion, participation and belief that both projects will bring real value. Once there is internal buy in, the program can be rolled out publicly with the benefit of sincerity and purpose.

8. Integrity

• Openness, transparency and a true belief and commitment are essential to both sustainability programs and social media strategies. An increasingly sceptical public are increasingly capable of spotting opportunists.

9. The future

• Both sustainability programs and social media strategies are about changing the way we do things now so that our organizations survive and flourish in the future. Adapting the way we use our resources so as to ensure we allow for the regeneration of resources for future production makes sense, as well as the way we communicate, learn, share and disseminate information so we keep up with people’s learning styles, expectations and technology usage ensures we are heard, now and in the future.

10. Mutually enabling

• Rolling out a sustainability program within a corporation takes hard work, determination, communication and commitment. Social media tools and applications help with the integration, communication, learning, participation and momentum. Once these elements are sorted out internally, the same social media tools and applications can be used to externalize the message and objectives. Adopting a social media strategy within and organization so that it truly integrates all elements only works if it follows a sustainable model. Tagging on bits of technology, or trying to participate in social media externally to the organization cannot lead to lasting or holistic results.

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You Decide describes itself as an “online devil’s advocate designed to challenge your point of view on current issues.”

The debates are centred on the issues that are facing the candidates and the American voters in the presidential race. The user is asked to answer “yes” or “no” to a question relating to current issues and debates. Whichever way the user answers they are asked to consider the other side through the presentation of facts, figures and alternative arguments. After reading and deliberating, and given the chance of going back and forth in those deliberations, the user is asked for their final vote. This is followed by an opportunity to post comments and thoughts and to participate with others in the discussion area. Sound bites from the presidential candidates are also included.

What I love about this is that it provides both sides of the argument with credible content. It is well researched and it presents actual facts and figures. It is not designed to change your mind, rather it gets you thinking about the topic, exposes the users to alternative points of view and brings together people who have different opinions to talk intelligently about them.

This is a wonderful example of how social media can be used to engage people and encourage dialogue. Too often social media is thought of as being synonymous with social networks or online communities. Collecting congruent people who share similar thoughts and experiences is not going to lead to meaningful dialogue or significant change. It is great to see a shift in the way people are thinking about and using social media.

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