I'm besotted with Facebook. I can see it becoming the primary way that I — and many other people — interact online. So if you aren't on Facebook already, join now. Now.
Still here? Don't tell me, you need actual reasons to join. Fine, here goes:
- It's huge, and it's growing. While Facebook started as a network for college students, it opened up to anyone who wanted to join in September 2006, and grew more than 75% — to almost 25 million users — by February. I haven't found numbers more recent than that, but I can say that between 1-3 people in my own personal address book (1500 email addresses) are joining every day.
- Your friends are already there. If you import/connect to your address book when you sign up , you'll discover all the folks you know who are already on Facebook. This is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can even find out who in your universe is already on Facebook, before you sign up yourself.
- It mixes business with pleasure. Unlike LinkedIn, which feels like some sort of massive résumé swap, Facebook brings a personal side to its user interactions. More than half of my Facebook friends are colleagues or professional acquaintances, and now I'm finding out about their personal passions as well as their professional pursuits.
- It's one-stop shopping. Facebook offers blogging, photo sharing, messaging, web-to-mobile communications, social networking, and groups.
- It's a window on your world. Once you've added your contacts to your list of Facebook friends, your Facebook home page will be the best place on the web for you to find out what's going on with the folks you know. My favourite part of Facebook — the thing that makes it truly addictive — is checking in to see what's going on with all my friends and groups. I can see my friends' latest status reports, their latest new friends and groups, their notes, their photos….all in one place. The best way to get how cool this is is to take a look, but I don't think I can really share a screenshot because that would mean sharing details on my friends' activities. And that underlines what is so great about the Facebook feed: it feels far more personal than what you'd normally see on the wide open web.
- It's pretty. God knows, I've fallen in love with my share of social media tools, but most of them have required me to look past a barebones or even downright ugly interface in order to appreciate the inner beauty of content sharing, social networking, or whatever. In contrast, Facebook has a very polished interface.
- It can help you connect with your community. Facebook has now got an API — application programming interface — that lets people extend Facebook with all sorts of little applications and enhancements. (Check out some of the options so far.) And that API is going to see Facebook integrated into more and more 3rd party sites. If you find it easier to connect with your members, supporters, customers or friends on Facebook than to lure them into registering on your own site (and for most organizations, it will be MUCH easier to connect via Facebook) you need to start thinking now about how you can integrate Facebook's community and functionality into your own site.
I'll have more to say about Facebook — and especially about the options for integrating Facebook with external web communities — in the coming weeks. But if you want to understand why this matters, you need to join Facebook now. And once you do, be sure to add me as a friend!
I’ve just discovered that Dreamhost, which we use to host all of our personal sites, is carbon neutral. They’re buying carbon credits so that their users can proudly note that they have carbon neutral sites. Bravo, Dreamhost.
I’m having a little trouble with the difference between notes and posted items. I’m trying to set up my external blog (
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com) to aggregate in my Facebook existence, and I’m not sure whether to aggregate Notes (pros: don’t have to post each note to my profile, so less work; cons: excludes bookmarks and photos) or Posted Items (pros: can include any content I want; con: I’m not sure I want to add every note/photo to my posted items.)
I’d love input from other folks on how they use posted items.
UPDATE: OK, I think the solution is to NEVER post a note. That way I can set my blog to aggregate both my Notes (i.e. my Facebook blog) and my Posted items (i.e. links/photos I’ve shared).
And I’m tagging “facebook” as a friend in this note, so I can see how my aggregator handles that inbound tag.
I’m now looking for a Facebook status updater that’s as convenient as Twitterbar (which lets me type my status directly into my browser’s address bar, then press a little + sign to post.)
Richard Smith alerted me to the fact that Facebook mobile is now available for Canadian cell phone users. And holy cow! did they ever do a smart job setting it up. You can customize what kinds of messages you get (friend requests vs pokes vs wall posts etc), how many messages a day (to cap messaging costs), turn off messages when you’re logged into the website (smart!), send status updates from your phone, lookup numbers in profiles…on and on. I think I have to clear my schedule for the next 3 days while I figure out all the crazy ways to use this for fun and social agitation.
This is definitely the use case for paying fido $10/mo to cover the cost of 1,000 msgs.
I’ve just started a facebook group for Oberlin Alumni in Social Technology” — either nonprofit technology specifically, or social media more generally. I have this theory that the nptech scene must include a fair number of Obies, and I’d love to connect with them. So I’m starting the hunt, and hoping I might even surface some fellow alums who will be at the upcoming NTEN conference in DC. If you’re an Obie and you’re reading this, please join the Facebook group or post a comment here.
I'm writing this from the Community 2.0 conference, which promises to be two great days of inspiration on online community building and management. It got off to a great start with a presentation by John Hagel on "What's Possible? Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities".
Here are some of the highlights of John's talk:
How do we create effective online community?Â
- What do we mean by community?
- What skill sets are needed?
- What mind shifts are needed?
- What organizational structure is needed?
1. What is community?
There's a tendency to regard anything that's interaction as community.
The emphasis of real community establish connections among people so they can participate in shared discussions over time, leading to a complex web of relationships, and to an increased identification with the overall community.
The key to real community:
- shared discussions
- shared relationships
- shared identity
There's an inexorable desire for these communities to meet in physical space as well, and over time the virtual and physical communities get woven together.
2. What skill sets (culture sets) are needed?
- Creating content.
- Structuring/catalyzing social interactions in a way that promotes enduring relationships.
- Economic business models. How to sustain over time.
- [My note: technical skills/culture is a fourth important set, and needs to be integrated with the first three.]
Communities typically start from one of these skill sets.
3. What mind shifts are needed?
- Need to be participant-centric. I often hear questions about what's the value to the company of doing this; but not about the value to participants.
- Need to think long-run. People think too short term.
- Need to move from top-down organizational perspective to bottom-up perspective. Need to give up control.
4. What organizational structure is needed?
Key issues:
- Who is responsible for community initiatives and do they have the authority to mobilize the resources needed to make community work? Do they have the appropriately broad perspective? Even if they're senior, they may be too narrowly focused on marketing or another narrow area — and that narrows community to the functional area of the person in charge?
- How do they define success? Too often there's not even a definition of success. What are the operational metrics. Are there systematic reviews to enhance performance over time?
- Who has the relevant experience in the organization and are they being mobilized into the community?
What value do businesses get from online community?
ROA: Return on Attention
Participants should ask themselves: What is the value I derive from the attention I put into and receive from this community? ALWAYS focus on ROA from participant viewpoint first. Organization can then look at the ROA for their own org. How much did it cost to catch the participants' attention, and how much value did that attention deliver to the organization AND to the participants.
A small proportion of your customers deliver the majority of your value. How do you get them more engaged? And how do you take the less profitable customers and make them more valuable thanks to their communtiy experiences?
How do I create environments to provide resources participants didn't even know existed, let alone searched for, but which are valuable and relevant to them? This is the highest value return on attention.
Recommends Peter Moorville's Ambient Findability. Powerful way to think about return on attention. While most people think about usability, usability presumes findability. Have to figure out first how they can find you. Hagel says findability=fundability.
ROI: Return on information
where information = information on participants
Look at ROI initially from participant viewpoint, then from provider/organizer viewpoint.
From participant perspective: how much info have I shared, and how much effort did it take to share it? And how much value did I receive from sharing that info?
From organizational perspective: How much info did I receive from participants, and how much value was I able to generate — for myself and for participants — from that information?
Organizations are investing a lot in collecting info but aren't thinking much about how to use it.
How can we be more helpful to participants by providing resources based on their profiles/behavior?
How can we shorten cycle between when participants provide info and when they get value back? That's key to motivating participation.
ROS: Return on skills
For participants:Â skills from participating in these communities
For organizers: am I able to attract and retain the most valuable contributors?
Distinguish between communities of interest and communities of practice.
In COPs, focus on places where people are coming together to generate work product, eg in open source software communities. Expects COIs and COPS to start converging. As we face more pressure to deepen our skills and increase value delivered from their skills, I see increased tendency for people to make their passions their professions,b/c you're more likely to develop skills where you feel passion. Likely to seek out communities where people develop their talents while engaging with their passions.
