the companionship deficit
Posted on April 23rd, 2008 in Engagement | No Comments »
We here in the sprawling ecomm nerve center toss around social media, web campaigns, 2.0, mapping apps and other buzzwords like cheerios flying across the table at breakfast with a 3 year old.
What we’re NOT trying to do is the more of the same… one way email statements that tell someone to pass on a one way message to someone else. We’ve proven we’re good a that. Very good. And it can certainly have an impact (especially when one needs to toss around big impressive numbers).
But I deeply believe that what we better do - as a movement and an organization - is simply use these tools better to have actual conversations. Two-way, three-way, whatever-way. People need a to know we’re hard at work on the stuff they don’t have time to do. But we keep asking people what they want and we keep hearing - we want to do more, really we do.
Maybe it gets at the companionship deficit… which I’m not sure is a term coined by Bill McKibben but which Spike Jones does a nice job working into a related post about social communities.
Why not engage people and build community? Why not let people build companionship with these issues?