Archive for the 'facebook' Category

Introduction to Facebook for Companies and Organizations

Published
by
Dawn
on September 25, 2008
in facebook
. 3 Comments

Facebook is probably the social network that has the broadest audience and the most community functionality of any of the big services right now. You can find large numbers of college students, people working in the technology industry, and many people in the 20 – 40 year old range; however, I am starting to see anecdotal evidence of some people in the older age ranges starting to join Facebook.

There are several ways to engage with people on Facebook.

  • Individuals. Make sure that some people in your company are on Facebook as individuals. This is the best way to learn how people use Facebook if you haven’t already used it. I would start by getting a personal account, entering your personal profile information, and friending a few people that you know. It’s a great way to learn more about how people use Facebook, and it will help you better understand how to use it for your company.
  • Company page. After you are comfortable using Facebook as an individual, you should create a company page. Do not create a personal profile on Facebook for your company. Those look artificial and weird in addition to being outside of what people expect to see on Facebook. A company page lets you provide information about your company along with an event calendar, video, photos, discussion board, and much more. People can then choose to become “fans” of your company, and you can use this page as a lightweight community effort.
  • Groups. You can create a group on Facebook around any imaginable topic. I’ve seen groups used fairly successfully for lightweight community activities, especially when they also involve an in person element. The Online Community Roundtable events in San Francisco are organized using a Facebook group.
  • Applications. It might also make sense for your company to create an application that people can use on Facebook, but this would only be relevant to a small number of technology companies. The application could interface with your existing technologies the way that applications for Upcoming, Twitter, and others make it easy to update Facebook with information from those services. Another option is to make something purely for fun that people can use on Facebook.

There are certainly other ways to use Facebook, but this covers the basic ways that most companies will want to use it. In general, remember to participate as a person first and a company second, and remember that the guiding principles that I have talked about so many times before on this blog still apply to using Facebook.

Please feel free to add comments with other ways that you like to see companies engage with people on Facebook.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

The Facebook Scrabulous Controversy

Published
by
Dawn
on January 16, 2008
in facebook
. 0 Comments

Facebook has been asked to pull the famous Scrabulous application from the site at the request of Hasbro and Mattel. While I am not surprised by this move, I am saddened by it. I love to play Scrabble on Facebook with friends in other locations that I rarely get the chance to hang out with in person.

You can join the Save Scrabulous Facebook group to show your support.

If Hasbro and Mattel were smart, they would be negotiating licensing deals and cross marketing arrangements with Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla (the makers of the Scrabulous application). I’ve heard more about Scrabble in the past few months as a result of the Scrabulous app, than ever before, so it is definitely generating buzz around the game. They should be focused on how to best use and build on this buzz to increase sales, instead of squashing something that could be really beneficial for them.

This is yet another example of big companies not “getting it”.

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Google, Facebook and Plaxo Join the DataPortability.org Party

Published
by
Dawn
on January 8, 2008
in OpenID, facebook, google and identity
. 0 Comments

The DataPortability Workgroup dropped a bombshell this morning by announcing:

the inclusion of Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook) to the DataPortability Workgroup.

Quoted from: Chris Saad (one of the drivers behind dataportability.org) on the Particls.Blog

Marshall Kirkpatrick added some additional insight into this announcement on ReadWriteWeb:

The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history - what’s being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data.

…

If these industry titans can put aside their rivalry and work together - magic could happen. Hopefully they can work appropriately with the other members of the working group, bleeding edge consultants and representatives of smaller and in many cases more user-centric companies. If so, perhaps we can move appropriately into a future of powerful personalization and logically augmented activity online - while avoiding Minority Report-style dystopian scenarios.

Innovation on the internet is in its early, early days. The participation of representatives from Google and Facebook in this initiative could prove key in the continued development of what’s possible, instead of the early suffocation of what could have been.

Quoted from ReadWriteWeb

I have blogged here many times about the idea of online identity, but the potential for data portability that has been more of hope than a reality until now. I already use ClaimID as my primary OpenID provider. Ideally, I would love to manage my identity through an OpenID provider of my choice, but with more options to carry some of my data around the internet along with this identity. I hope to eventually be able to have a centrally managed picture, bio, profile information, and more that I can choose to share with online social networking sites (like Facebook) allowing me to maintain better control over my information and manage changes. Changing basic information (job change, phone number, etc.) can be a really labor intensive task for me. I remember going through this recently when I joined Jive in May. I would be willing to bet that you can still find old profiles on web 2.0 sites that still have me listed as working at Compiere or even Intel!

Data portability is one of the biggest problems that web 2.0 companies and users face, and I have been following dataportability.org with interest, but a healthy amount of skepticism. With the addition of Google and Facebook, I have much more confidence that we will start to see this hope move closer to the reality of data portability over time.

Jive has been focused for years on building our products using existing standards, and we are excited about what this might mean for Clearspace and other products. You can read Sam Lawrence’s perspective on this discussion and what it might mean to Jive over on the Jive Talks blog.

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It’s Complicated on Facebook

Published
by
Dawn
on December 14, 2007
in facebook, fun, humor and social networking
. 0 Comments

A little social networking humor.


Courtesy of xkcd.

Communities as Games

Published
by
admin
on December 9, 2007
in collaboration, community, digg, facebook, reputation, social networking, social software and technology
. 0 Comments

Social networking sites (Digg, Facebook, and YouTube) can be thought of as games with goals, actions, play, strategies, and rewards. This idea comes from C. Weng’s free e-book, The Web: Hidden Games. On Read/WriteWeb yesterday, Richard MacManus talked about these Social Websites as Games:

The e-book goes on to tell you how to “win” at Digg and notes that “like all games, Digg’s system can be cheated.” It also compares YouTube to chess: “there are an infinite number of ways to win in YouTube but it only occurs under certain conditions. Every single method, strategy, and theory leads back to the essential factor: getting people to view your videos.” And as for Facebook, it is compared to The Sims: “The object of the game is more to monitor or to guide characters in daily life rather than to win at something. There’s no simple goal in sight but it is all about the process of playing.”

(Quoted from by Richard MacManus on Read/WriteWeb)

I think this idea extends past social websites and into communities as well. I recently blogged about using reputation systems in communities with a discussion about people can game community reputation systems. The important thing to recognize is whether people are gaming the system in a productive manner that helps the community or in a destructive way that serves only to clutter the community with worthless chatter that annoys other members.

Thinking about the community as a game where you can accumulate points and status can help the community when members use the points as incentives to post productive content and answer questions from other members. This productive gaming serves to improve the content within the community.

The danger with reputation systems (and social networking sites, like Digg) is when the gaming becomes destructive. In communities, people can post worthless one-line responses to discussions that add nothing to the conversations, but act only to accumulate points. In Digg, people can get together to Digg worthless stories to the home page solely to generate advertising revenue for the owner of the site.

The key, as I’ve mentioned before, is transparency and proactive adjustments. Community reputation systems can be adjusted to help prevent people from accumulating any significant amount of points just for responding to discussions without meaningful content. Digg has continually adjusted their algorithms to help prevent gaming. It is also important to recognize that no technical solution can entirely prevent gaming of reputation systems or social websites. Because you cannot entirely prevent it, transparency is the key to making sure that other people can see which members are gaming the system. As a community member, if I can see that all of Joe’s posts are one line responses of the “great post” or “thanks for the info” variety, I will start to ignore his responses, and if the system lets me block him from my view, I may chose to exclude his responses. On a site like Digg, I may also chose to block stories submitted by a user who always submits stories from a couple of sites (probably his sites).

I like reputation systems and think that they can be used productively in communities if monitored carefully. People are motivated in many different ways. While some community members will contribute freely without any reward for their effort, others will contribute more often if they can see some tangible rewards for their contribution.

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