Laurel Papworth’s social networking workshop

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to discuss ICT.

Yesterday’s all-day workshop, by Laurel Papworth, was about social networking. Laurel’s a great trainer and it was an interesting session that covered so much I can’t do justice to it here.

What’s social networking? Well, it covers a wide variety of online tools and websites that enable people to make friends, find people with similar interests, socialise, form discussion groups and share video, photos and information. For example, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs and even games such as World of Warcraft are all social networking tools.

Do you want to reach a particular demographic – it could be young people, cyclists, deaf, gay, environmentally aware, artists – to provide information or gain supporters? Social networking tools enable geographically disparate groups of like-minded people to form their own groups and contacts. Laurel’s workshop focused on how a not-for-profit can set up social networks for their employees, volunteers and supporters to use.

You could join an existing social networking website like Facebook or MySpace in which case you’ll benefit from the huge numbers of people already using those websites who might be drawn to your profile. Or, as Laura demonstrated, you could use a tool like Ning to build your own small social network; the free and open source Drupal is particularly suitable for building a larger community; and you could use this CMS Matrix to compare the features of many similar products. You need to take a long-term view and make sure that whatever you choose, it has the features you might need in future, not just now. Some of these tools are easy to implement, others will need a web professional to install them, so get advice from one or two other users before you commit to a specific tool.

Read on…

Laurel went on to discuss in very practical detail how to set up, manage and moderate an online community. The notes from her workshop are available on Slideshare. She also writes a blog about online communities.