How to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change

SOCIAL MEDIA. Nobody really understands it, but we know it’s important. How can we use it to influence others? How can we use it to do some good? The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, is a playbook on how to use social media to achieve a single, focused, concrete goal.

They use the metaphor of the dragonfly—“the only insect able to propel itself in any direction—with tremendous speed and force—when its four wings are working in concert.” The Dragonfly Effect relies on four distinct wings that when working together, achieve remarkable results. They are:

Focus: Identify a single concrete and measurable goal. Goals must be humanistic or based on an understanding of your audience, actionable, testable, clear and meaningful.

Striking the right balance between visionary and realistic goals is key to maintaining focus….To achieve balance, break the goal down into parts: a single long-term macro goal and a number of short-term process goals, or micro goals.

Grab Attention: Make someone look. Cut through the noise of social media with something personal, unexpected, visceral, and visual.

What is the most important message you want to leave your audience with—and why should they care?

Engage: Create a personal connection, accessing higher emotions through deep empathy, authenticity, and telling a story. Engaging is about empowering the audience to care enough to want to do something themselves.

Engage is arguably the most challenging of the four wings, because love occurs infrequently, and engaging others is more of an art than a science….If you can’t engage them emotionally, they won’t be swayed.

Take Action: Enable and empower others to take action. To make action easy, you must prototype, deploy, and continuously tweak tools, templates, and programs designed to move audience members from being customers to becoming team members—in other words, furthering the cause and the change beyond themselves. What you’re asking people to do must be easy, fun, tailored and open.

What you are asking of people must be highly focused, absolutely specific, and oriented to action, so as to avoid overwhelming your audience.

The final goal is not just to get 100,000 people into your group; rather, now that you have the attention of 100,000 members, your goal is to inspire and enable your group to take action. In moving forward, you must be cognizant of where the true power of social technology lies: not in the technology itself but in the people who use it. Movements that begin online must be backed by real-life action; otherwise, there is no point.

The Dragonfly Effect is a good model to show how technology can support real-world missions. The Dragonfly Effect shouldn’t be thought of as just a social media framework; the specific and practical principles behind the model will not only help you make an impact through social media but in the real world too.

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The Dragonfly Effect Model Review:

• One Goal / Single Outcome
• What is Your Headline?
• What is Your Story?
• What Can Someone Do?

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:53 AM
Permalink | Comments (0) | This post is about Change , General Business