A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.2

When you use social media for community collaboration as a matter of course, when it’s the way you operate, when challenges or opportunities arise and "Would a community be a better way to deal with this?" always gets asked – yours has become a social organization. Per Gartner, you’ve reached the FUSING stage, the topmost rung on its SIX F attitude-toward-social-media ladder. THE place to aspire to be. 

An organization on the bottommost rung, on the other hand, views social media as a source of entertainment with insufficient or no business value. It has a FOLLY attitude. Which is NO place to be. (Or truer to the Gartner spirit, no place to stay if you hope to become great at what you do.)

On which rung or rungs do Red Treehouse and UCP stand? Where are they in terms of their development? How sophisticated are they in their understanding of social media?

These are the kinds of things I’ve been trying to zero in on with the help of my borrowed Gartnerscope: a precision instrument, to be sure -- though its usefulness and my views through it have been limited by the fact that I'm on the outside looking in. Unfortunate. But you have to start somewhere. 

RED TREEHOUSE:

So, based on what I’ve seen and not on what may be comin’ down the pike...

I’d peg the social media attitude at Red Treehouse near the lower end of Gartner’s ladder, somewhere in the FOLLY—FEARFUL—FLIPPANT range. The organization as a whole appears either to have a limited interest in, or a limited understanding of, social media and the management tools needed to realize its potential. 

Flipped around and restated: Red Treehouse seems to have lots of room for growth in this regard. Lots of room for adding new organizational competencies. 

A couple of things that've informed my view: 

• Red Treehouse is a relative non-user of social media. It did join a social Web community known as Facebook (heard of it?) in October of last year – but that's the last time anyone from the organization shared anything there. My recommendation would be to disable the account in the interest of "doing no harm" to RT's reputation, if only for the time being.

• This may come as a surprise given the organization’s mission to be a vibrant gathering place, but I don’t see www.redtreehouse.org as an online community in the Gartner sense. 

 I aim to elaborate in the next post. 

UCP:

The ideal of Internet-connected and hyper-empowered people has been near ‘n’ dear to the Life Without Limits initiative from the start. UCP saw the potential of social media enabled communities back then and it's been exploring ever since. (Sometimes very imaginatively. Before we address UCP circa today, let me point out that Ruby’s Bequest [2009] was a crowd-sourced immersive scenario game that’s well worth looking into if you’re not already familiar with it.)

Fast forward to the present. 

I’m puzzled why there are no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube badges or links on the homepage at www.ucp.org (or throughout the site, for that matter). Nevertheless, I can look beyond that. And when I do --

It becomes clear, first of all, that UCP has one foot squarely on Gartner’s fourth rung. It easily meets the criteria for having a FORMULATING attitude toward social media in that it: treats social media as more than technologies, funds multiple social media platforms, and integrates community collaboration in a variety of ways. 

What’s harder to tell from the outside is whether or not UCP's other foot is firmly on the fifth, a.k.a. FORGING rung. By definition, organizations at this stage have “developed the capabilities needed for consistent, repeatable success with social media across the enterprise.” Has UCP been building the right kinds of managerial capabilities behind the scenes? I'm not sure.

On one hand, I have some doubts. I’ll express why in an upcoming post. (For now, even the fact that telltale social media signs at www.ucp.org are so few and far between makes me wonder.) More detective work is needed. 

On the other hand, there's a UCP community -- I have in mind the forum at www.mychildwithoutlimits.org -- that seems to be making all the right moves. There's also LIFE LABS: an online R&D center for creating technology-based solutions to problems facing people with disabilities. It looks to be a collaborative community in the truest sense. It features social networks and other Web 2.0 projects (including, for example a wiki for submitting assistive technology ideas and potential projects, i.e., things “to build upon and improve”)...

I’ll elaborate on all of the above and go more specifically into what Gartner may have to offer Red Treehouse and UCP, individually and separately, in the next few posts.