It’s taken a long time for a lot of the smaller charities and community groups to cotton on to these ideas, and a few still haven’t. However, it’s at this point that social media comes into play.

Social Media is a branding exercise. Brand has stopped being something that is the domain of the multi national. It’s stopped being the tools of large organisations. It’s even stopped being a sidethought by grassroots campaigners. Brand is now truely in the domain of the individual.  Even the most open facebook user needs to recognise that they are not really sharing everything about themselves – they are sharing select information with the intention of influencing people and affecting how they are perceived.  Like the great multi-nationals, logos, reputation and crisis management are needed.  The logo is the facebook profile picture, the reputation is the groups you join, the photos you comment on or the wall posts you make and crisis management is what you do when someone posts a negative comment on your photos.

I’ve experienced personal brand myself.  At various meetings of the past six months, I’ve found people don’t know me or who I am, but do follow and know about “kevupnorth” (my twitter name).  So, kevupnorth is a user that is known beyond Kevin Campbell-Wright, someone who has his own reputation and on whom people have made their own judgements.  I can’t help but wonder, if I put particular effort into it, whether I could build up a totally inaccurate portrait of kevupnorth, or manipulate his reputation without effecting my own.

The problem is that brand management has been a skill used for decades (or possibly centuries) by incredibly clever operators who we now call “spin doctors”.  It has been honed by exchanges of practice and education.  Yet now, everyone needs to have these skills to make good use of their social networking presence.

To bring this back round to the point of this blog, how is this relevant for communities?  One of the questions in the discussion today was whether I felt every brand would one day be represented via social media.  While I said that they would, I also emphasised that brands would change.  In a world where we are all brands ourselves, it will stand to reason that every community group, every community activist and even every community problem and challenge will be a brand, which will require its own ideas around reputation management, key messages, logos and PR.   If we’re going to tackle digital literacy seriously and support communities in acheiving what they want to, we need to do more than just teach them how and why to use the net and tools for safe usage.  We have to allow them to develop their brand – and give them the skills to manage it.

I’ll let you do the reading, but, in a nutshell, it’s the report of a study that suggests young people could be damaged, emotionally, by using Twitter.  The reason being that we can process negative stories much faster than positive ones, leaving us with an overall negative impression.

The National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition looked at how volunteers responded to real-life stories chosen “to stimulate admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain.”  Volunteers we’re brain scanned and the findings suggest the volunteers could process and respond very quickly to signs of physical pain in people, but took somewhat longer to show admiration of compassion. The argument goes that the streams of news are just a bit too fast for us to process.

Another argument the report makes is that this slow processing of admiration could lead to a lack of inspiration – I’d very much argue this, as there is much inspiration to be had from “top bloggers” and “celebrity tweeters”.  However, whether people are able to identify with a tweeter who talks about the positives in their life, rather than one who cries for sympathy , remains to be seen.

As an educationalist, I cite the wikipedia argument – That Twitter as THE source could be destructive, but as A source is constructive.

However, as a community developer I think this report also has a major impact for community technology, aside from the obvious implications of having a world with a broken moral compass.  Will community relations crumble if fast moving news fails to highlight the positives?

On Easter day a lot of questions were being asked on facebook about an apparent fatal stabbing in the area I used to live in.  It turned out that no one had been stabbed, no one had died and the police had only cordoned off an area of the town after a serious assault.  The rumour mill, fuelled by a lack of news on Easter Day, had gone into overdrive and this had spread into facebook groups and statuses.  Currently, facebook groups and statuses don’t seem to have the viral impact Tweets have – but as facebook changes itself Twitterward it remains to be seen if this stays the same.

Either way, the internet became a rife ground for rumours and by the end of Easter Sunday questions were being asked on a local radio facebook group and various statuses were buzzing with comments about the dangers of living in the area.  This could be looked at as a media issue, as they were slow with an online response.  However, I see it more as a community one.  After all, any damage that was done to community safety or cohesion by the false rumours would be felt in the community.

Many will argue that when the real news came through, it would just quell those rumours.  However, this report suggests otherwise.  It also suggests that a community organisation having a tokenistic twitter feed or reassurance officers posting positive tweets won’t counter the negativity and stigma that rumours and negative tweets could cause.  However, from a PR point of view, someone to react quickly to counter the viral spread via twitter might go some way to controlling the message.  Highlighting the positives may take longer, but in the fast news culture,  shouldn’t that mean we get started now?

They’ll be many who will use these comments, and the report, to point to a Web2.0 Fuelled break in society, one that needs real people, in the real world, to fix.  The fact is that speed has become the essence and, while we may all benefit from slowing down a touch, there is little chance of that happening very soon.  There can be no doubt that there is an element of truth in their arguments for a real world fix – but there is also truth in that I found out about this report through seeing it on @jangle’s twitter feed.  How did you find this?