by Jake Wood 🙂
I just read an About.com article, under their non-profit section, about how non-profit organizations can use “social media” to help their cause. It’s called “The Young Are Wired for Social Media: Is Your Nonprofit?” I was drawn to read the article simply because of its title, containing many of the aspects of our organization. First off, “young” is an obvious keyword. Secondly, “social media” was something that caught my attention.
When I think of “social media,” I think of networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, and the many other sites available for the cause. After giving it a lot of thought, I’m wondering how FCYB and its mission to start a media outlet for high school students fit in with social media. In the About.com article, the author, Joanne Fritz, mentions a book called Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, written by Allison H. Fine. One specific aspect of Fine’s book that Fritz mentions is that generations born since 1980 “dislike and tune out traditional news media….They wish to be engaged, not talked at.”
I thought this was a very interesting statement, especially since we fall into this “net-gen” category. If the “old” way of traditional one-way communication (broadcast) is a dying cause for the “net-gen” generation, what are we doing? One may say we’re embracing the old method of communication and will get nowhere with our own generation.
However, what if we were to also accept and embrace the phrase “They wish to be engaged, not talked at.” Our organization is currently debating between pursuing podcasts, Internet radio, AM radio, FM radio, or some combination of the above. Personally, I think it’d be an incredible experience if we were to integrate the demands of the younger generation (direct engagement) with the reach and accessibility of a local broadcast medium (AM/FM), combined also with the flexibility, further reach, and tools available for use with Internet radio.
The real question is, how would we go about doing such integration? For years, radio stations are broadcasting phone numbers and saying “Call us now!” When I did my 2-hour job shadow in the morning hours at a radio station, they got one phone call. Even then, it was a simple phone call, at the most it was 45 seconds long, and was a single-question, simple-answer call.  This is not the kind of engagement I want to see happen with our station.
Today, there are so many mediums of communication (e-mail, phone, IM, even those social networking sites each have their own communication tools) that it’d be difficult to organize the information shared between them and use this information in a productive manner. However, this challenge doesn’t exist if you can’t empower your audience to participate in your attempts at creating an interactive broadcast medium.
So, my challenge for FCYB, and for myself in a sense, is to try to turn the traditional radio experience into something interactive and captivating. While this was one of our goals from the very beginning, the article gives some specific insight into how people of our generation are perceiving the media. I believe that our organization retains the insight, mind power, and spirit to do such a thing, and I can’t wait to see it happen.
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On a sidenote, here are some other interesting quotes from the article:
- “This group of young people does not like or understand hierarchy or bureaucracy. It is, indeed, spirit crushing for them. They expect transparency and honesty.”
- “Net-genners expect communication…Those who get it answer their e-mails within an hour.”
- “They do not understand ‘proprietary’ or secrecy of any kind.”
- “They make their own media.”
- “They are accustomed to being around people of all colors and persuasions.”
- “They desire not only openness but also authenticity.”
- “They will judge organizations and pass those judgments onto their massive networks.”
- “…they will be reluctant to fill out a membership application or give too much personal information to organizations”
Overall, I thought it was an interesting article. You can find it here (will open in a new window).
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