Social media how-to’s and primers have a shelf life of a millisecond, roughly. These blogging tips and social network tricks, while thorough, are usually manufactured by the hands of one or two people.* Quickly outdated, this single-lens content is easily trumped by evergreen collaboration. The latter of which is the calling card of We Are Media.

“Curated” by NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) and Beth Kanter, We Are Media (formerly known as Be The Media) is a wiki-housed, group effort to develop a social media curriculum for nonprofits. It’s a work in progress: the community is tackling one module per week.

According to the site, We Are Media aims to “build this wiki and community into the “go-to place” for vetted resources about social media strategies and tools for nonprofits and/or individuals who work for or with nonprofits and need practical advice about getting started or to quickly access best practices, examples, or experience from other practitioners working in nonprofits.”

The team spirit approach has the potential to torch a time-honored tradition: stale silos of self-education across nonprofit learning. It’s also going to set the bar a little higher for corporate and government brethren, too.

This initiative matters.

• It’s a “community of practice.” Learn as you teach; teach as you learn. There is no better way to learn how to move someone up the participation ladder than to dive face first into the environment yourself. Beth is compiling a series of posts on “working wikily,” a job not for the fly-by-night practitioner.
• The focus is on smarter – not universal – use of Web 2.0. In other words, if the social media shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. (Or it if does fit, what type, brand and supportive padding is worth it for your feet?)
• Tagged content, the living, breathing, searchable beauty of it all.
• Back up from a person committed to calling out patterns in discussion and content and figuring out where to throw more spaghetti. In the words of Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project, “As communities develop ever-evolving resources through tagging, blogging, adding to wikis, etc. there’s still a need for someone to comb through all that information and help make sense of it, particularly in terms of instructional design.” If only more online community managers possessed Beth’s innate ability to do so, we’d see less failures.

Major kudos are due to Beth, Holly Ross (Executive Director of NTEN), and the dozens of We Are Media participants. The contributions made today will help ensure our nation’s hands and feet - the social sector - aren’t swept away with the tidal wave of Web 2.0.

Rather, they’ll have the appropriate gear (from swimmies to wet suits to surf boards) to manuver.

[ Image credit: Surf's up? By 356bunnies ]

*Updated: The How-to’s are great, too, so keep reading them! While yes, the ways of the digital world change overnight, you’ll find valuable insight to strategic and tactical plays in such resources. Learning comes from all sides.