Last week I gave a presentation to our president’s council about new communication tools and how we are using them to engage and involve students. I have posted in the past about Studying Students Social Network Usage and Our Twitter Initiative, since then we have been actively pursuing the popular social networks. Just recently I was quoted in University Business – Should You Twitter?, it seems our work is starting to get noticed.

In the presentation I introduced what I call the Social Degrees of Participation. I wanted to give a little more explanation since the presentation was just headings and I talked in depth about pretty much everything.

Social Degrees of Participation

1. Observing – The first degree of participation is meant for people who know about the social networks and their tools from their friends or main stream media. They know they exist but have not ventured to interact on the sites.
2. Searching – The second degree is meant for people who are signed up for a few social networks and actively search out their interests or mentions of their self/business. They would like to know more about what people are talking about but do not take part in sharing content.
3. Conversing – The third degree is for people who see something on a network and respond to the comment/post. They actively seek and respond to questions or comments.
4. Connecting – The fourth degree is all about remixing content. Taking content posted externally and either reposting or remixing to post to get conversations started.
5. Creating – The fifth degree consists of people who are the originators or creators of content for the networks. They contribute content that is their own and people are actively responding to it.
6. Controlling – The last and most involved level is where you are contributing original content and people are actively looking for your content and connecting with you, making you the center of information and an expert in your field on that network.

What is your degree of social participation?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under initiatives, presentation, social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.