Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook Friend Grouping – Finally!

I’ve said previously that grouping of friends within Facebook was an inevitable new feature because of the very logic of the service, and that this would substantially aid Facebook’s effort to edge out LinkedIn as the place for both professional and personal networking. If Facebook wants to accurately represent the “social graph” it needs to enable users to account for the fact that some friends are closer than others.

Facebook users got some great news just before Christmas (and in my family time off, with three straight days of Christmas visitors I haven’t been blogging, so I’m just getting around to writing about it.) Facebook has implemented the first phase of friend grouping, and it’s really well done.

Applications like “Top Friends” and “Circle of Friends” are fine, but the problem is they are out there for everyone to see. So if you add someone to a group using one of those applications, everyone who has access to your profile can see who is in what groups.

The best thing about the new baked-in friend grouping in Facebook is that it’s private. I’ve created five new friend groups, for example, but they’re only visible to me. So I can organize my Facebook friends in a way that makes sense to me, which enables me to have various spheres that reflect the reality of how close we are.

The other neat new part of the Facebook friend grouping is the ability to send a group message to everyone in the group. Here’s a message I sent earlier today to my Family friends.

I found through sending this message that when you send a message to a group, every recipient sees the name of every other recipient. They don’t necessarily find out the name of the group list you’ve created, but they can “reply all” to all of the other members.

So, in essence, this is a great way to create a messaging distribution list, to take advantage of the spam-fighting features of Facebook. It makes it more realistic to rely on Facebook as a messaging alternative to email.

The even better news about this development of variable friend grouping in Facebook is that now we know there will be further enhancements related to these groups. As Mark Slee concluded his post in the Facebook blog:

This is just a start. Expect to see lots of new Friend Lists features in 2008 that will give you more control over the information you share on Facebook and who you share it with.

When this becomes reality, and when we can truly segregate the personal from the professional within Facebook so that professional friends won’t have complete access to our personal lives, then we will see Facebook achieve its goal of being the one-stop social utility. Then, as Nick says, sites like LinkedIn will find the competition much more difficult.

10 Facebook Assignments for Association Executives

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Note: This post is now part of the structured curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG). It has been designated Facebook 102.

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What would a Knowledge Lab be without some take-home assignments that let participants get hands-on experience?Here are 10 steps I’m suggesting for people who attended my part of the Knowledge Lab at the Association Forum of Chicagoland Holiday Showcase 2007.

Join Facebook and “friend” me. I’ll add you right away, and you can check out my profile and some of the groups I’ve joined or created. Check out groups like this one (which I created for my daughter’s high school basketball team) that use video and photo sharing, or the Web Strategy Group or the New Media group. These are just some examples of how groups can be used in Facebook.
Join the Association Forum of Chicagoland group.
Invite your staff or leadership team to join Facebook, too. You can be “friends” if it’s mutually agreeable, but as you will see, that’s not necessary for you to interact in Facebook.
Form a “secret” Facebook group, not necessarily as a crisis communications “dark” site, but to experiment with some of Facebook’s group features without anyone seeing it. Invite your work colleagues from step #3 above to join the group and experiment with you.
Have some fun. Challenge me to a game of Scrabulous if you’d like. Part of the reason Facebook is so potentially powerful is that people like to go there. With 58 million active users (visiting at least once a month), half of whom visit every day and spend an average of 20 minutes a day, it has a level of user engagement that makes it practical for communicating.
Upload some photos that include your Facebook friends, and “tag” yourself and your friends. Then you’ll start to see some of the viral potential as your photo shows up in your friends’ mini-feeds. You also can upload photos to groups, like the Association Forum group.
Check out Facebook pages, which could at least be the equivalent of a free Yellow Pages ad for your non-profit organization.
Explore Facebook’s demographically targeted social ads program. You can use either a pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-for-impressions (CPM) model. Here’s an explanatory post. You can advertise things that aren’t on Facebook (like your association’s web site) just to try it. I recommend PPC, because you only pay for clicks. Because the click-through rate is quite low, you won’t be spending a ton to try this. But you’ll at least get a sense for the possibilities.
Add an application like Simply RSS to your profile or Page. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s an RSS feed (Just copy and paste this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LinesFromLee) you could make one of the three that Simply RSS updates for you. (OK, maybe I’m a little bit ashamed.) Then as I write new posts (lots of them are about Facebook), you can continue your education.
Join my 12-step social media program. (You know the drill, first you have to admit you have a problem.) This covers more than just Facebook, but it’s a good way to get a feel for the broader subject of social media. My program was originally intended for PR professionals, but then Lisa Junker asked if she could modify it for Association Executives (which I’m sure had something to do with me being asked to participate in the Knowledge Lab.) You can read that version here. I recently got a request to reprint it for an association of veterinarians, too.

These steps will be a good, practical, hands-on way for you to learn about the potential of social media, particularly Facebook, in a low-risk environment. I look forward to continued interaction.Technorati: Facebook, Social media, Association Forum, social ads, groups, pages, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, Scrabulous

Facebook and Associations

I’m at the gate at the Rochester airport waiting for my flight to Chicago for Holiday Showcase 2007, sponsored by the Association Forum of Chicagoland. Apparently Chicago is home to the national headquarters for many national organizations.

I guess it makes sense for organizations like the American Medical Association to locate in Chicago, since you can probably fly nearly anywhere in the lower 48 from there in less than three hours, with no connecting flights. Assuming my flight works out today, I’ll probably get a first-hand experience with the reasons for this. My 5:25 flight to Chicago was canceled and I was rebooked on the 6:55. Now we’re told it will be 7:30 before we leave. Still, I should be in my hotel room by 10 if all goes well.

(My seatmate here at the airport isn’t so lucky; he was going to Buffalo, but has already missed his connecting flight. We’ll both be staying in Chicago tonight.)

I’m glad I don’t have to catch a connecting flight. Traveling to Chicago involves fewer moving parts in our hub-and-spoke airline world, so locating there means fewer meetings foiled by travel SNAFUs. Probably a big selling point for the Association Forum.

I’m looking forward to participating in the Forum’s Knowledge Lab tomorrow morning. I’ve been asked to be the resource presenting on the implications of Facebook for organizations and associations. I understand this will be something like a science fair, with some brief presentations of core material punctuated by a highly interactive Q&A environment. I expect I will meet a lot of interesting people from diverse organizations, and that’s part of the fun.

If Necessity is Invention’s mom, free tools like Facebook may claim its paternity.

Facebook is so versatile, and because its platform offers opportunities for programming and customization, organizations may find it meets their long-term social networking needs.

At a minimum, associations should explore Facebook because they can create pilot social networks quickly and easily. They can experiment and learn what they like about it, and then if they decide to move to a so-called “white label” solution they can apply what they’ve learned through Facebook in their next iteration. And while a social networking site can’t completely replace face-to-face, it can powerfully supplement what organizations do with their conferences, creating stronger and longer-lasting relationships among participants.

I expect the discussion tomorrow to be stimulating as I meet people looking to accomplish various goals through social networking sites.

Technorati: Facebook, Association Forum, Chicago, AMA, social media, social networking