Importance of Social Tools and Where the Handmade Community would be Without them. SOCS 300

Social Media has now been around for nearly a decade and it has evolved and morphed at a wicked rate. Social tools such as Myspace, Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, and Twitter have helped us organize and create groups, discussions, friends, and even antiwar protests. Without these, the Iranians would have had a hard time fighting back and showing the rest of the world what was going with them and their government most recently. We would have never known. They tweeted streets of where things were, pictures from cell phones, and organized demonstrations with 140 characters. Not only can these simple tools for organizing events, they can be used to discuss with others in your interest on an international scale, be used to find others and their ideas of your interest, and be used to organize and promote events. As you know, the handmade artist community has been doing that. We've been broadcasting ourselves on YouTube, on our blogs, on our Facebook Fanpages, on the Etsy Promotions forum, on Craftgawker, and on Twitter. It has been amazing for the majority of us because without these platforms, where would we be? What would we be doing right now? With a full time job, it's hard to live at craft fairs... Luckily for us, a group organized Etsy and aloud us to create a tight, possitive community with one theme where we could sell our work. It would have been hard to create Etsy... really, we are lucky it happened. We all know how hard it is to get followers for our blogs, imagine trying to get a handmade social site off the ground. As Clay Shirky says in his book Here Comes Everybody, "the group is the user, so you need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective but that others will find it so as well..." "As a result, users of social tools are making two related judgements: Will I like using this tool or participating in this group? Will enough other people feel as I do to make it take off?/ The larger the number of users required, the harder the group is to get going, because the potential users will (rightly) be more skeptical that enough users will join to make it worth their while."
Now didn't we all have those thoughts upon creating any of our social media accounts? Or our blogs? Do you know how many times I think each day if you guys enjoy this or want to participate in reading my blog? How many times I wonder if it is worth all my time and money? I promote my blog and Etsy shop for hours... It's a lot of work. But as I do have followers I do continue my work. But this blog, and Etsy itself would only be as good as the people who go on it. It is our feedback and nagging for new tools and changes that make social media better. These sites change constantly as we tell admin what works and what doesn't. It is important for us to complain. That's how Wikipedia went form .com to .org, how come Digg didn't change (it wanted users to change everything a couple years back) and so on. These communities wouldn't be anything without the user. Think about, what would Twitter be if no one told the world they ate a sandwhich?

Love it, Hate it, Use it!

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Yours Truly,
Kathleen McGiveron