That is the question on Chris Brogan's mind in a post he wrote earlier today. Chris suggests, "It's one thing to have a community of friends and an audience for your blog, podcast, or videoblog. It's another thing altogether to have an activated community of people who will take action and bring about actual change at your request."

In his post titled Activated Communities, Chris asks his community for help fleshing out his idea. Ironically, the exercise to understand the concept of 'activated communities' will require that Chris' community of social media people be 'activated'.

How can you 'activate' your community? We have talked about the idea of understanding your 'higher calling' for sometime. The idea is simple,

If you can determine what your company's higher calling is you can direct your communication with your clients through this new channel. By working with consumers to answer this 'higher calling' the communication is no longer adversarial, but cooperative. Building a community around a higher calling can be very effective and fruitful for both the consumer and the company. You are no longer 'company' or 'consumer' but partners working toward a positive goal you both care about.

It is hard to simply ask your community to 'Digg' something for you if they don't 'digg' it. One surefire way to 'activate' your community is to build that community around a higher calling from the very start. My question is, "can you activate any community around any idea?" My theory is that most communities will activate around the underlying interest or 'higher calling' of the group (i.e. photography for Flickr), but activation will quickly dissipate as the 'call for action' becomes less and less topical. Obviously your friends will 'Digg' almost anything for you, but will soon tire of the activity if the requests continue outside of the communities 'higher calling'. Chris compiled this neat list of 'tools' for activated communities:

• A Digg account. - Use this for promoting stories and blog posts and podcasts that want higher attention.
• A LinkedIN account. - Build your own network, link it to mine, and then we both expand our awareness and our reach. Because if I'm seeking out someone in your network, I can now ask you to help me connect to them. This builds connectivity to people you might need to reach very quickly.
• A Twitter account. - To get the word out quickly. Re-twittering helps tons.
• A Facebook account. - I think groups on Facebook are a quick way to get mail out to people easily. It's also a good opt-in / opt-out mechanism.
• A Flickr account. - What if some of our activation requires visuals? I guess you could add a YouTube account for the same purpose, just in case we want to shoot video.
• A PayPal account. Sometimes it's just about a donation to a cause. When a friend says their servers are down because of bandwidth bills, it's nice to be able to drop a few bucks in the till to help them over a hump. (Sometimes it *is* just about money).