The online social networking phenomenon has been documented to death, at least at the 30,000-foot level, there it is usually described in glowing revolutionary terms. Codenames such as Web 2.0 are tossed around by the initiated -- those who "get it" -- but such terms are not useful to those of us down in the trenches who are trying to manage, or facilitate the management of, our communities online.

So what is the impact of social networking for existing groups and communities such as professional associations, non-profits, and other such organizations?

Simply put, social networking flattens an organization and makes lateral communication easier. Instead of the top-down, one-way, command-and-control communications that are found in rigid hierarchies, social networking emphasizes lateral communications among peers. Isn't that what your online community, club or association is supposed to be for?

Every revolution, whether political, economic, scientific, or technological, is followed by a long period of adaptation in which the players learn to cope with new ways. Online communities existed long before the advent of social networking, but now they are finding new ways to interact, and those of us who are facilitating these interactions need to find and implement the appropriate tools.

Adapt to New Tools, or Adapt Existing Tools to New Needs?

There is no lack of websites offering online community and social networking tools. Some are rudimentary and cumbersome, some are cool and addictive, some are slow to catch on, others are quick to propagate - and quick to fizzle out. People use these tools in many different ways and contexts, and no single tool is ideal for every situation (even if MySpace and Facebook are trying hard to do that - I simply don't think it's possible).

You can approach this problem from the top down, using generic tools that will never be perfect for all contexts, or from the bottom up, adapting context-specific tools to the new social networking reality. The first approach is typical at the beginning of technological revolutions. The second approach is key to the adaptive period that follows the revolution.

I have been doing a lot of thinking around these topics lately. Our product - a membership software called Wild Apricot - was originally invisioned as a tool for administrators and webmasters of various communities - associations, clubs, non-profits, activist groups, sorrorities and the like. The question we addressed was "How do we make the best tool to automate membership management, registration and related administrative tasks?". We have made significant progress in this area over the past couple of years -- with a release every few weeks, we have added features, polished and removed rough edges, and learned a lot – simply by carefully listening to the feedback from people using it.

In fact, the feedback is now driving the process of adapting our membership database management solution to new social networking realities. Our focus was good, and we answered the question well, but now we realize the question has changed.

Yes, administrators, volunteers and webmasters have been using our automation features and website services and giving us lots of positive feedback. However, they kept asking us questions such as:Can our members maintain public profiles? Can they connect to each other?

• Can people share pictures in your software?

• When will you add discussion forums? (which we actually did)

• Do you have blogs? (we do)

• How can you enable our members to contact each other online?

• Can you add online presence indicators?

In other words, not only were they looking for website and membership administration tools, but also for tools to let their supporters and members connect and interact online. Seems pretty obvious in retrospect. However, it took us a while to realize that these questions were not just about nice features, but about adapting to a new reality, so we kept pushing those requests to the end of the development queue. That's just the way it is, until the light goes on.

The New Question for Online Communities and Their Facilitators

Our new question is "How can we help existing communities such as associations, clubs, non-profits and interest groups to communicate and collaborate more effectively?"

It's easy to come up with a high-level answer to this question: "Integrate and contextualize the best of social networking tools so they empower the membership to communicate and collaborate effectively, while continuing to support the initial objective of simplifying the lives of administrators and webmasters trying to manage membership databases." It's also easy to see that the new objective is completely in line with the old objective.

What followed was a reallocation of our resources to bolster the social networking capabilities of our software. We already had some good basics in place already -- member profiles, member directory, blog module, members-only website section, and a discussion forum module. But we

Choosing, Prioritizing

We needed to drill down to the detailed answers to our question, and figure out what aspects of social networking are most important, and how we could adapt them to the needs of our user community. To do that, we needed once more to turn to the experts -- our users.

My question to all of our customers:

" In your experience, which online community, social networking and collaboration features have you found of most practical use? Which ones do you consider to be gimmicks and which ones are really useful?"

Here is how our users prioritized social networking features:

1. Messaging -- Contact other community members while maintaining privacy.

2. Members directory -- Customize to reflect the needs of the community. Reduce the amount of information recorded and displayed in the directory to enable easy scanning. If more information is necessary, put it in the profile displays.

3. Member profiles -- Make them attractive and easy to use:

• Put the Name section at the top of the profile.

• Allow profiles with photos to display the photos next to the members name.

• Allow buddy lists in the profile, to create communities within your community.

4. Forum -- expand and enhance online discussion forums:

• Establish moderators.

• Enable admin/moderator email notifications of postings.

• Create a "badwords" list (prevent profanity). - Rate and vote in the forum.

5. Avatars -- The ability to display avatar graphics for forum postings provides another means for members to express themselves.

6. "Who's online" module -- Seeing who is online and logged in to the site in real time would greatly facilitate interaction. Many members would probably make this the landing page for login, so they know immediately who is logged in.

The feedback we got from our users validated some of our own thinking, and introduced some other issues we had not considered, but as you can see, it's all about basic communication capabilities, finding friends, and projecting individual presences -- that's social networking.

An important part of the social networking phenomenon has been the development of multi-directional communication between service providers and the users they serve. Not only are users pushing back, but they are communicating with each other, bestowing both credit and blame where they are due. It's not just a dialogue, but a multi-party conversation, and it is up to the service providers to seize the opportunity, listen to their users, and improve their services. Indeed, the Wild Apricot blog is an excellent source of information and a way for you to participate in this discussion. We hope you'll join in.