It’s been said by many people, but perhaps best by Clay Shirky: “The Internet lowers barriers to action,” he says. “It doesn’t make people behave differently – it just lets them do more of what they would do anyway.” (That’s paraphrased, but close.)

Shirky is a researcher and scholar on the ways people use Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, and all the other fascinating tools that allow people to come together and collaborate online. His book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is a wonderful tour of the best examples of online collaboration creating socially useful products. It’s also one of those great books that helps you to articulate something you’ve been thinking all along.

I’ve been struck, as I delve ever deeper into the world of Social Media, by the awesome democratizing power of these tools.

Take publishing, for example. The Internet has removed the old-school barrier to sharing your “content” with the world: the editor and publisher. An ebook or a blog post no longer has to get past the boss with the red pencil; just type and upload, and the whole world can read your musings. The all-powerful critic has been replaced as well. The best content is now identified by the crowd in social ranking sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com. The best videos are identified by the number of views on YouTube.com.

The impact of Social Media is also obvious in the world of politics. In winning the Presidency, Barack Obama made masterful use of text messaging both to communicate with supporters and volunteers and to collect massive amounts of small contributions, reducing (though certainly not eliminating) the disproportionate influence of large contributors. Twitter brought the moment-to-moment events of the protests in Iran to the attention of millions of people who would never have paid attention without the compelling stories it enabled. The second most popular politician on Facebook is Sarah Palin, with almost a million supporters.

Social Media are changing the face of philanthropy as well. Kiva.org and other microlending sites essentially take the nonprofit “middle-man” out of the picture, by enabling contributors to direct gifts to specific individuals all over the world. Facebook Causes are making team-fundraising easy for anyone to set up, even without a web designer. And mobile applications put a constantly-updated message in the hands of advocates and evangelists. (Okay, yeah, that last bit was a plug for my company’s mobile apps.)

What implications does this democratization have for the behavior of those of us in the nonprofit space? I can think of a few very quickly:

• Our public image is shaped as much — or more — by what individuals say about us online as by what we say about ourselves in advertisements and corporate-sponsored media.
• Our supporters increasingly expect a personal dialogue with us. We must pay attention to and participate in online discussions, even when we didn’t initiate them.
• We have a new way of putting our most ardent supporters to work, as electronic advocates — I like the word ‘evangelists’ — for our organizations. And we have the chance to easily arm them with talking points right from our corporate playbook (though no guarantee they’ll actually use them!).
• The transaction cost of gathering individual contributions is plunging toward zero, so it’s increasingly economically feasible to scoop up as many mini-contributions as we can find.
• We have an incredible opportunity to bring events, pictures, videos and stories from the field to our supporters, almost in real time. The content can be raw and unfiltered — perhaps more positively labeled as ‘authentic’ — because we no longer have to be editors and critics of our own material.

What else should we keep in mind? What opportunities — and dangers — does the democratization of Social Media deliver for nonprofits?