This is the story of a bag of frozen peas – and microblogging.

I’m a big fan of Twitter, which is a social media tool that encourages you — in 140 characters or less — to answer the question: what are you doing right now?

People answer that question from their computers, their Blackberries, their iPhones and their PDAs. They answer that question on the TTC, on a walk, at work, at home or at conferences. They share what they had for breakfast, breaking news, broken relationships and, sometimes, updates about their health.

Just before Christmas that’s what Susan Reynolds did. She discovered a lump in her breast. After a painful biopsy early in December, she created a Twitter avatar (a small picture that shows up on your Twitter page and on your postings) for herself that showed a bag of frozen peas stuffed into her top. Her Twitter friends, and she had hundreds (including Connie Reese, the very connected founder of the Social Media Club Austin spread the news. And then, something else began to sweep Twitter. One by one, pea-themed avatars started showing up in my Twitter feed. There were avatars with pea heads, pea hairdos, pea outfits and pea hats. Social media maven Robert Scoble pictured himself with a peapod slung over his shoulder. Serial entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki had a frozen pea backdrop. Twitter was awash in green dots.

Then investment marketer and blogger Cathleen Rittereiser suggested that we all donate the cost of a bag of frozen peas to a fund to support cancer research. Which was great, except the fund hadn’t been created. Well, not until a couple of days later and other Twitter folks brought The Frozen Pea Fund and its website to life.

In the first fifteen hours it raised $3500. Susan has now had a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery and is recovering. The pea avatars are fading from Twitter, but the experience is worth paying attention to.

I don’t know Susan Reynolds, Cathleen Rittereiser, Connie Reese or the dozens of other folks who were sending best wishes, money and pea avatars in Susan’s direction. But, just before Christmas I changed my avatar to a little pea character in a farmer’s hat. I waited to hear news of Susan’s surgery and I watched as a community and a charity arose organically and diffusely in under a week. All via a communications media that only allows 140 characters at a time. Welcome to the year of the small conversation.

We are going to see more Frozen Pea Funds spring up like this, more people galvanized behind a cause, or a personal health crisis or a global issue through news of the small world. Tools like Twitter (and its video and audio doppelgangers seismic and utterz and microblogging sites like tumblr make tossing ideas, jokes, pleas and calls-to-action into the Internet cloud as easy as sneezing. And they attract interconnected communities around them. My Twitter friends are an important part of my online life now. They give me advice, point me to important news and websites and, sometimes, give me a window on an unfolding personal drama. And they make me care.

The communities of small conversations are going to be a vital part of how nonprofits get their messages out. Or, they should be. What the pot full of pea avatars showed is that even small communities can make a difference, can raise money and can be focused on causes that matter.

People on Twitter rallied behind Susan because she was an important part of the Twitter community, because breast cancer resonates with many of us and because, somehow, news of the small world, delivered in short, faint cries for help sometimes cuts through the din of the street.

Would The Frozen Pea Fund have taken off if, say, the Canadian Cancer Society had jumped into Twitter and came up with the idea? No. As far as I know, the society is not a part of the Twitterverse (though, they did get some donations to their cause thanks to the green wave of pea avatars on Twitter).

The fund rose organically with no central authority, no sponsor and no nonprofit support. And it worked because Susan Reynolds contributes to the common good that is Twitter. Perhaps, if someone from the society (or probably better still, the rethink breast cancer group) had been an active Twitterer they could have focused attention on the issue like Susan did. But, I think its better that it happened the way it did.

That doesn’t mean that nonprofits shouldn’t use Twitter and other small conversations to get the word out. It just means that when they do, it should only be after they have contributed authentically to the communities and conversations.

You don’t merely use social media. You contribute and let the peas fall as they may.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...