Alexandra Samuel, longtime friend of NetSquared, talks to us about aligning the interests of businesses and NGOs, designing for participation, and how learning to have meaningful conversations online will save the world.

Jed Sundwall: What does Social Signal do?

Alexandra Samuel: We help people answer the question "how do I get people to join our conversation?" There are plenty of companies and groups out there who have awesome ideas for communities and want to use social media tools to create those communities, but designing for participation is not an instinct—particularly for people who are used to a traditional broadcast style of communication. Trying to invite people into a conversation is really challenging to people who are used to simply pushing their message out. What we help people do is help groups frame that invitation.

We start by helping people figure out what their project is going to be. What are they going to offer people that will make them want to participate? Once we've helped an organization figure that out, we often work with them to translate that concept into specific requirements for developers. Sometimes we stay involved with the development process, and have a number of developers who we contract to do the work, but we usually try and hand the development work to companies that really focus on whatever tool we've concluded is the best for the client. We work best as the interface between the group who has the vision and the developers who get to implement it.

We do a bit more work with our clients that makes us a bit unusual. A lot of consultancies will leave a project as it enters the development phase, but that's really where our work begins. A lot of sites are built with a Field of Dreams philosophy that "If we build it, they will come." That's not true, and it's increasingly less true as more social networks spring up competing for people's time. So, we help clients figure out how to bring the community to life.

We help them put staff in place to manage their community. We help them figure out community activities and themes. We do content creation. We help arrange contests or come up with incentive programs to keep people active. We work super hands on for typically 3 to 6 months after a site launches to help it become a thriving community. We do this because a lot of the focus on social networks is more on the network than on the social, and at the end of the day, the network is just the beginning.

There's a real art to bringing a community to life. We've all been to parties that are totally dead and you can't wait to leave, but we've also all been to parties where you can hear the music thumping from down the block, and people are hanging out on the porch, and you never want to leave. A party's success is rarely about who has the most booze or nicest house; it's about people's ability to create an environment that helps people feel comfortable enough to participate and be themselves. Just like people read Martha Stewart to learn how to throw great parties, they need to learn how to do the same thing on the internet. Basically, I'm like Martha Stewart for the Internet. (laughs)

How are you able to do this for social change organizations?

We're interested in working with explicitly social benefit organizations like non-profits, government agencies, and businesses that are designed to be socially responsible. But we're equally interested in working on social benefit projects within organizations that are new to the idea of working for sustainability or working for the good of the community.

Working in social media with both social change organizations and for-profit businesses is extremely interesting because social media creates a space in which it becomes not just socially beneficial for profit seeking organizations to undertake community projects, but also financially profitable.

Social media is very well disposed to bringing people together on issues they're passionate about. Really, it's very hard to bring people together on issues they're not passionate about, and most people are way more passionate about social issues or creative endeavors than they are about most brands. There are very few brands that people are so passionate about that they just want to come together to talk about the brand.

We often use the example of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty as an example of how a business benefits from promoting social change. A personal example, is a project we did for VanCity (a Vancouver area credit union) called Change Everything which was based on the idea that a company can market itself very effectively by connecting its brand to a mission its customers care about.

We've also been doing a lot of work with BC Hydro, which is the public energy utility in British Columbia. They're an amazing organization to work with because it's very rare that you encounter a business whose mission is to get people to buy less of their product, and BC Hydro is really committed to reducing energy consumption in British Columbia. We've been working with them to use different kinds of social media tools to raise awareness about conservation in terms of forms of conservation and opportunities for conservation. We created a Facebook application called Green Gifts which allows people to exchange gifts with one another that come with conservation tips.

We call this kind of work "reflective glory marketing." You say to for-profits, "Unless people care so much about your brand that they pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, they won't care enough about your brand to be part of an online community to discuss it." Help bring people together around something they care about, and it will reflect positively on your brand. Our favorite counter example of this is a site called 1000 Uses that is designed for people to talk about Glad plastic wrap. Honestly, at the end of the day, who wants to talk about plastic wrap?

Everyone and their dog is trying to get on the social media bandwagon, every company out there is really hot to get into some kind of social network, whether it's doing something on Facebook or trying to create something viral on YouTube. They're all obsessed with it, but it's actually non governmental organizations (NGOs) that are in a far better position to use these tools because an NGO's core message issue all about getting people where their passion is.

NGOs have spent years learning to mobilize people around issues. What's happening now is that businesses are playing catchup and having to learn to go to the psychological and emotional space where people actually live. What we haven't seen yet, but I'm hoping we'll start to see, are partnerships where business who want to do social media projects sponsor NGOs to build community efforts that actually resonate with people. I think that would be a fantastic partnership for a lot of companies, and the NGOs would greatly benefit from that kind of sponsorship.

How did you get started?

Our company has grown up with NetSquared because NetSquared was basically our second project as Social Signal. My partner, Rob, and I had been thinking for a long time about the social application of technology. I had done a PhD examining the creative frontiers of online participation, and I also wrote a research program called Governing for the Digital Economy for Don Tapscott who wrote Wikinomics. Rob had been doing a lot of online campaigning for progressive organizations, and when we started Social Signal it really grew out of the exploration we'd been doing personally with Web 2.0 tools. People started calling us to get our advice on how they could be using social media tools in their organization.

When we helped launch the NetSquared site, we were really in the early days of figuring out as a company how we could support different kinds of organizations in using social media. One of the really cool things about working with NetSquared is that in a lot of ways, NetSquared's mission is a really direct mirror of our own—which is to help people use social media tools for social benefit. What's fun about doing that as a consulting company is that we're able to do some of the kinds of things that happen on NetSquared too, like we do a lot of blogging about different social media tools and ideas on how to use the social web. But we're also able to go in deeper and work on particular project in some depth and really explore the potential of these tools to help people work and relate to each other in new ways.

What have you found? What kind of potential are you seeing?

A big area of focus for us is how organizations can use social media to build social capital. When I first became interested in writing a dissertation on the political significance of the Internet, I got to work with Robert Putnam on the book version of Bowling Alone. I ended up doing the research on the chapter of Putnam's book that dealt with the Internet's impact on social capital. I came away with a different perspective than his, but I continue to be really interested in the question of how the Internet can actually help rebuild social capital. The Internet does have the potential to erode it, but I believe that social media has a tendency to actually strengthen relationships and rebuild relationships among people.

We're concerned with how social capital helps support the economic health of communities, the political engagement of communities, and even the personal health of people who live in communities with high amounts of social capital. It's really remarkable how many positive outcomes are associated with high levels of social capital. In particular, the kind of social capital that seems to matter is social capital that's created when people build relationships of trust across differences.

For instance, if I spent all my time on Facebook talking to white chicks who have two kids and live in Vancouver, I'm probably not building much social capital, in that I'm not helping make our community more trusting and sustainable. I might feel really happy and social, but I'm probably not doing much for the world. So, we're really interested in social media projects that build relationships of trust across differences.

There are a couple of projects we're working on this this regard. The idea has been most fully realized on a site that we've been working on for the past couple of years called Tyze. It's an online community we created for the Plan Institute that is a web service for people who have any kind of social or personal challenge. It might be that they just had a baby, they might have a disabled kid, it might be that they have an elderly person in their life who needs a little bit of support.

What makes Tyze different from a lot of social networks out there for people with those kinds of needs is that a lot of those networks focus on daily strength and peer support while Tyze focuses on creating what's called social support networks. This is based on the ideology that Plan has developed over 20 years of creating social networks for people in the "real world." We help them translate that methodology into the virtual world by giving people a tool that allows people to create a network of personal support around themselves or around somebody they love during a time of challenge and possibly over a very long haul.

What Plan really has going for it with Tyze is that they already have 20 years of experience building real world social networks. Plan has been recognized all over the world for their model. They know how to help people create real meaningful relationships. This isn't like "Oh, I'm going to friend you because you friended me so why the hell not?" People who build relationships through Tyze will call each other when they're in crisis. It's a whole other level of trust and relationship building.

Tyze is now in private beta, and we're still learning how to use social media tools to strengthen and further support the networks that Plan has built face to face.

A funny thing about social networks is that despite the name, most social networks online are build by people who know a lot more about networking than they do about socializing. So, social networks that exist to a large degree reflect the pathologies and preferences of developers. If you were faced with the task of rebuilding society from the ground up, I'm not sure you'd want to put your developers in charge. I should be clear that I love developers, it's almost freaky. I'm like a developer groupie. I interviewed 50 politically motivated computer hackers from around the world for my dissertation, and I learned to love developers, but I also learned that developers do their best work when they're getting support from people who have some strategic perspective on how to communicate and mobilize the audience they're after.

I used to do a lot of policy consultation online and I moved away from that because I felt like I was more called to do direct social change work. I've since come full circle because I've concluded that, at the end of the day, meaningful change only comes from conversation. Conversation is the agent of change. What social media does beautifully is enable large scale conversations across many dimensions—across huge distances, across gaps in time (through asynchronous communication), across personal differences. Those conversations are really key to enabling change. Our challenge is fostering conversations that build social capital.

One thing to help bring me back to this perspective has been working with the Elders, which is the NGO that launched last year. The purpose of the Elders is to create a council of elders for the global village. The initial elders include Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, and Desmond Tutu—truly an extraordinary group of people to be serving. Their approach is all about listening and conversation. It's a wonderful testament to the importance of conversation that this organization is made up entirely of people who, almost more than anybody in the world, can speak from a position of authority with true clarity, integrity, and moral authority, but they're not doing that. They're saying "We're here to listen. Listening is the most important act."

To me, this reaffirms the value of social media as a tool that continually drives us back to listening and storytelling, which are the oldest and most powerful social practices in the book.

Why should your clients care about social capital? Particularly the businesses you work with?

We're becoming really interested in is how social media tools can increase the sustainability of how organizations work. Conversations can help work internally. A lot of the interest in social media has been focused on marketing to and mobilizing external audiences. However, if you're going to work effectively with an external audience, you need to learn to work effectively internally with your own team. That has huge value in terms of building social capital within an organization. Learning to use social media for effective internal collaboration offers huge competitive benefits and social benefits within an organization.

All these surveys of the 100 best companies to work for are really all about the levels of social capital that exist within the companies—how they've created communities that their employees want to belong to.

Another beneficial dimension of these practices is to overcome the increasing costs of transportation. I don't expect to fly to many conferences this year. And I'm going to point some fingers here and say that we'd considered relocating to San Francisco a few years ago, but we couldn't believe how much time people spend in their cars down there. It's really unbelievable, and we didn't want to deal with it. The impact of travel costs is going to start significantly impacting companies' bottom lines, and they're going to need a way to mitigate that. They're also going to need to learn to recruit talent when people are becoming increasingly skittish about commuting long distances.

Learning to work effectively over long distances by collaborating virtually is hugely important. It's one of the most effective ways that an organization can offer higher quality of life to its employees while at the same time lowering costs and making itself more resilient in the face of rising oil prices.

If there's one thing that social media is really good at helping organizations learn is helping them transition from being organizations that depend on control to being organizations that actually flourish in the absence of control.