I’m exploring so many social media tools that I’m not sure what discrete benefits there are to becoming active in Tumblr, but here goes.
A member of the Linked IN Community Organizers group asked that I stop spamming him. All I’ve been doing is posting discussion topics connected to my blog and including a request that they invite me to connect with them as individuals. I didn’t realize that this was spamming. There are several ironies;
1. Even though community organizers tend to have very judgemental and puritanistic views of who is a valid grass-roots organizers, most of the 37 members of that group have joined because they have some interest in marketing their skills for money so there are very few bona-fide grass roots organizers in the group.
2. I am not in the least interested in looking for a job, a customer nor am I selling my organizations services even though we work with many grass roots organizations on policy issues in education. My primary reason for being in Linked In is to connect with others interested in advocacy for public education, which happens to be an important and challenging grass roots need.
3. My 35 year-old non-profit advocacy organization, run and manned by Chicanos and people of color, has had periodic encounters with IAF type organizers who come with a holier-than-thou grass-roots credential and consider us not grass roots enough because we are an intermediary organization. The strong hand-slapping I received by the leader of this group reminded me of how narrow, impratical and ultimately self-defeating some of the current iterations of Alinsky’s mantras. It was reminiscent of the no-permanent-friends/no-permanent-enemies dicta.
4. I get notices from every new entry submitted to each Linked In group and most are not of any interest to me. I just erase them, but these are not spam in the sense of the mindless flow of unrequested bids to encourage me to enhance my physical attributes, make large amounts of money overnight with little effort or to find a suitable mate or sex partner. I feel not compunction to send a note to the Linked In group members that invite me to connect, or to joing some business deal.
