November, 2008 | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook 104: Intro to Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are a great way to gather people with a common interest, and have a common space for them to interact.

There are three basic kinds of groups in Facebook:

Open Groups – Anyone can join these, and they can form on a whim. In fact, as you are categorizing you group, one of the choices in the drop-down menu is “Just for fun – Totally Pointless.” Later in the curriculum (Facebook 120) I will show you just how easy it is to create a group. That doesn’t mean it will have any members, but starting the group is simple. And of course if you’re a SMUGgle you really should join the SMUG Facebook group.

Closed Groups – A limited portion of these groups can be seen by non-members, and they can request to join, but group administrators have to invite new members or approve those requesting access. This, for example, was the group type we used to share video and photos of my new granddaughter, Evelyn Grace. So if you want a moderate level of privacy, a closed group is a good option.

Secret Groups – These are quite private, and are not displayed on any of their members’ profiles. As I said here, don’t store bank account numbers or nuclear launch codes in a secret group, but for a fairly secure way of interacting with a defined group of Facebook users, a secret group can work. These are a little harder to form, in that you have to invite Facebook friends; they can’t request to join because they won’t be able to even have access to make the request. A good way around this is to form the group as closed, but then change it to secret once everyone has joined.

Members of groups don’t need to be “friends” in Facebook, so a group can be a way of allowing people with a common interest to interact. So I established Facebook groups for my daughter’s basketball team last year and her volleyball team this year. We’ll do this again for basketball season. So we can share links to news stories and upload video and photos, all without a bunch of high school students needing to be my “friends.”

If the people who are part of your “target population” are already in Facebook, a group can be a great way to bring them together, as we did for this Mayo Clinic Career Festival group, where we added about 350 members in a single day.

If you’re forming a group entirely made up of people from your workplace, a Yammer Group is a much better option than a Facebook group. But if you need to mix people from your workplace with others outside your company, a Facebook group can be a good solution.

Yammer 108: More Yammer GTD

The David Allen Getting Things Done (GTD) workflow is an excellent model for maintaining your sanity in the midst of the daily onslaught of “stuff” that comes your way, demanding your attention.

The five basic steps of GTD are:

Collect
Process
Organize
Review
Do

Yammer, or a tool like it, can be particularly helpful in implementing GTD because it can eliminate some of the “stuff” before it gets to you, and because it can make collecting, processing and organizing your information more automatic, not just for you but for all of the people with whom you work.

As a tool for Collection and Processing, Yammer can be great, particularly if you and your colleagues use it for your regular communication with each other. The GTD principle is that you should have as few collection buckets for your “stuff” as you can, but as many as you need. Yammer ties in extremely well with email, and lets you easily share and store information and links to Internet or intranet resources.

To the extent your work unit’s conversations can start in a posting to a Yammer group (a minor change to your habits that is actually easier, once you get used to it) and be continued through email (no change required), I believe you can make significant gains in productivity.

In the Processing phase of the GTD workflow, you go through your email Inbox and decide whether messages require action by you or others, now or in the future (Do, Delegate or Defer). If it’s not actionable, your choices are to Delete it or file for future reference.

We’ll get into the Delegate or Defer actions in a future post, but one of the beauties of handling the non-actionable items in your Yammer email inbox is that Deleting and Filing in general reference are exactly the same action.

Why? Because if the email has been generated through Yammer, the content already has been archived.

So instead of having to move the message into a General Reference folder in your email client (such as Outlook, Entourage or Apple Mail), you can just quickly read and delete all of your Yammer messages, knowing that you can find the content later if you need it.

When you read a Yammer message, all you have to do is ask whether it is actionable: Should I do anything with this? If it isn’t, just delete it.

I also recommend setting your email client so that it has a preview pane, so you can quickly scan through your emails (including those from Yammer) and go through the read-and-delete cycle. That way you don’t have to double-click to open messages, and wait for them to pop up.

Effective use of Yammer groups and tags can help ensure that the email messages you get are more relevant to you. And as more of your colleagues use Yammer for more of their messages, the value will increase.

In a future post, I will examine how Yammer groups can help you create a personal GTD system, even if your colleagues aren’t yammering.