web 2.0 | Social Signal

This is a spectacular presentation from Clay Shirky at last month's Web 2.0 Expo. He makes a compelling argument that the time-sucking power of television has masked a huge pool of creative and collaborative energy out there... and that social media are all about unleashing that energy – at TV's expense:

You're looking at how an online community can work, and save you a lot of aggravation.

This is a traffic jam curing itself: an entire block of downtown Vancouver traffic a few days ago, with every car, van and truck in reverse. They're inching their way backwards, in concert, away from a stopped truck that had jammed Hamilton Street from Davie to Helmcken. (The Google Map's right here.) And all without police intervention.

Social Signal has worked with many different non-profit organizations, of varying size and means, to create a variety of social media sites, of varying scale and ambition. One thing that just about every non-profit client (and most for-profit clients) ask is about the return on investment. How can non-profits assess the financial value of their social media investments? And perhaps even more fundamentally, how can they find the money to pay for sites that can be costly to build, and just as costly to run?