So I’ve started musing about social media design lately.  I place social media design as a subset of communication design.  I’m making these terms up as I go, but I think it shold make a fair amount of sense.  Commnication design is the process by which you design your communication strategy & infrasrtucture.  Social Media obivously is much the same but focused on social media.  Social media if you wanting a definition is are technologies that connect people.  They usually involve a profile, and the ability to connect with people in some way, prototypical examples of the day are twitter, facebook, myspace, & linkedin.  You can design communications for an organization as well as an individual.

What I’m proposing is that just like any other design situation what you do should be intentional, and should serve the real human needs of those involved.  What I mean by intentional is that it is not haphazard or something that simply grew up over time.  I’m all for organic growth of systems, as long as there was some intentional starting point, and preiodic review of those systems to make sure they are still serving the needs of those using them.

So many organizations today are saying both internally and externally: we want to blog, we want to get out there and get into this whole social media thing.  I say, for the most part, that is probably a good thing, but you shouldn’t do it just because it sounds cool, you should do it to serve some purpose, whether that be to further the bottom line, open the lines of communication with your customers, enahnce your brand, or some combination of the three plus many of the other possibilities.  Blogging for blogging’s sake is silly and may be counter productive.

Here are my initial recommendations to organizations that want to get involved in social media. You need to:

1. Identify what you want to accomplish with social media
2. Identify people within your organization that already feel comfortable with social media
3. Get an understanding of what your stakeholders/clients would want via social media
4. Find some way to measure your efforts, i.e. we’ll be successful when:____
5. Make sure 1&4 align.

I’m going to write about this more, but this is a first shot.

My next step is to look at how traditional design process fit into this model.