Enterprises are also getting serious about the idea that social media is presenting pressing work place demands. New skills are needed, no denying that– social media is changing our culture after all. I thought I’d share what skills we train toward as important to operating effectively in today’s “social media” – or more accurately, “participatory culture.” I’d love your input.
Let’s define social media literacy first. It is the skills you need to operate effectively in modern digital environments. In other words, it is meeting your needs and getting stuff done in virtual places. Being literate in “social media” means having a core set of skills that transcend the “media” itself.
Concretely, it means you are able to adapt your current job skills to encompass the demands of current 21st century communication channels.
That definition actually encompasses a lot of “stuff,” so articulating exactly what those individual skills are takes a lot of work.
Thankfully, the continuing and brilliant work and research of people like the MacArthur Foundation, Henry Jenkins (USC/MIT), Danah Boyd (Microsoft), The GoodWork Project, and a whole lot of others are providing an emerging road map as they are helping define the new media literacies landscape in education.
We’re adding our own research to theirs and continually adapting it to get at the heart of the specific workforce skills professionals and organizations need to have. Below is our list of those skills. And, no it doesn't include things like "blogging," "podcasting," or "Twitter." The tools will constantly be changing. To be literate is to be able adapt - no matter what tools may come along.
The list may look daunting because we’ve been working at finely “dissecting” what goes into social media literacy so we can effectively train to it. But, like basic literacy or any social skill, social media literacy is made up of lots of different “competencies” that we as humans – and trainers – learn and interweave into a seamless whole by living it:
Basic Digital Literacy
What is it? Technical abilities for creating, manipulating, locating and mixing digital content.
- Creating, accessing, organizing digital media
- Manipulating, reproducing and mixing digital media
- Searching, locating and navigating digital media
Identity Construction and Personal Agency
What is it? Skills to convey one’s “self” through media, and the ability to influence and manage reputation for the purpose of achieving and improving personal or business circumstances through digital activities.
- Using media to “write self into being” (Danah Boyd, Jenny Suden):
- Impression management
- Personal agency: achieving and influencing personal and business outcomes through online activities
- Status: Understanding, influencing and managing status in connected spaces
- Reputation management
Building Social Capital – “Interpersonal Agency”
What is it? Abilities to build collective connections and relationships in virtual spaces for providing and receiving economic and personal value by fostering and leveraging genuine trust, understanding, shared interests, values, and behaviors.
- Understanding and leveraging individual digital “ecosystems” (how individuals create and use personal communications ecosystems)
- Understanding networks as information “places”
- Networked community participation
- Deriving value from networked communities
- Networking
- Connecting
- Learning to be heard
- Accessing and negotiating virtual group norms
- Influencing others
- Community building and management
- Differentiating, leveraging and managing participation, fame and celebrity
Transmedia Navigation / Multimedia Modality
What is it? Ability to express ideas (tell a “story”), consume, follow and synthesize them across different media types.
- Create content / express ideas across multiple types of media
- Choose appropriate media types for expression of specific content / ideas
- Consume, identify and interpret content that flows across multiple media
- Fair use and remixing of media
Evaluation and Authentication
What is it? Ability to create and identify credible information and to think critically about information.
- Evaluate credibility of information sources
- Identify fake vs. real in digital media
- Evaluating credibility context, and motivation (critical analysis)
Information Flow Management
What is it? Skills for effectively maximizing and gaining relevant value from vast amounts of information.
- Aggregation of media and content
- Filtering
- Managing real-time information streams
- Prioritizing information
- Staying focused
- Multitasking management
Sensemaking
What is it? Deriving and creating value from multiple information sources; critical thinking and analysis.
- Visualization: Presenting and combining data in effective visual formats / media
- Mashup: Mixing data and media types to express ideas or create new data / contexts
- Recognize new patterns / trends
- Interpretation and analysis (critical thinking)
- Metrics and Measurement: Choosing / applying appropriate evidence of success
Distributed Intelligence and Collaboration
What is it? Contributing to, navigating and deriving value from distributed content systems and devices.
- Sharing knowledge toward a common goal
- Team problem-solving
- Tapping remote experts and information resources
- Building, collaborating in, and managing knowledge networks and communities
Ethics
What is it? Meaningful and responsible behavior within virtual space and communities.
- Identity
Ethical considerations: identity construction, deception, role-playing
- Privacy
Ethical considerations: appropriate openness, over-sharing, searchability, and invisible audiences
- Ownership & Authorship
Ethical considerations: digital entitlement, collaborative authorship, fair use, mashups
- Credibility
Ethical considerations: transparency, truthfulness, motivation
- Participation
Yep – social media literacy isn’t a list of tools to be mastered. It is a list of modern social skills!
An upcoming MMLI whitepaper delves deeper into what organizations and individuals can be doing to achieve “the new literacies.”
