Further to my last blog post, Valuing Online Communities in the K-12 educational arena, I have been reflecting on the many possibilities of using social media tools to an advantage.
Mitch Joel discusses the five C’s of Entrepreneurship 2.0 in his book Six Pixels of Separation, and identifies them as follows:
- Connecting
- Connecting to Consumers
- Building loyalty
- Nurturing those connections to make more connections
- Making money and growing
- Creating
- Conversations
- Community
- Commerce
He goes on to discuss strategies to use social media tools to achieve specific business goal(s). These tools have certainly leveled the playing field in terms of the potential to connect and get your message out.
What happens if we take out ‘business’ and replace it with ‘education’?
The goals of building strong connections between members like groups (administrators, teachers, support staff etc.) is key within an organization. Building a strong culture of learning and sharing is also important for the long term success of the organization. Furthermore, I believe building a community between these strategic groups to maximize learning and sharing with a focus on the ‘big picture collective goal(s)’ is also important.
It seems to me, the strategy of using the five C’s of Entrepreneurship 2.0 should be just as effective in the educational environment. Perhaps with the exception of making money, in my opinion, the other points are in strong alignment. If you were going to promote some new resource for example, I wonder what the impact would be of using social media tools as part of the promotion and marketing strategies would be?
After all, don’ t we want to
- connect to our customers (internal, e.g. teachers)
- build loyalty (return customers to continually use provided resources)
- nurture these connections, and make new connections (connect more teachers & share)
- grow (and engage)
I would say yes to all four points. This is, after all, part of the culture of a successful education organization too. IN addition to system announcements, posters etc., why not use social media tools to enhance these strategies?
Now, all that I need is a great project to give this a try!
~ Mark
~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca 
Have you thought about a pilot project for course delivery software such as Moodle?
I think part of the process needs to involve listening to those “customers”, perhaps in the “Connection, Conversations, Community” phases of this model. I think that in order to get “buy in” from all stakeholders, there has to be a collaborative aspect to any organizational change initiative. Without it, the initiative will be dismissed as another top-down project without any relevance to the ground-level stakeholder… i think this particularly relevant in Education.
Thanks for the comment Dan. We have looked at this from an ITS point of view, and providing access to a tool such as Moodle is definitely a ‘doable’ project, especially now that our student account management has been centralized. I have had some preliminary discussions with Learning Services about using this product. Nothing firm has been agreed upon at this point in time.
Perhaps we can explore this further with an online video conference with Skype/Adobe Connect or a F2F meeting.
~ Mark