Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

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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.

1. 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.
2. Join the Association Forum of Chicagoland group.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Check out Facebook pages, which could at least be the equivalent of a free Yellow Pages ad for your non-profit organization.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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

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

This is huge.

I noticed it when I got a Facebook message today on my Blackberry, and the actual text of the message was there, instead of a link that forced me to log in to Facebook to see the message content.

Then I saw the news confirmed in a couple of blogs tonight. As Michael Arrington says, this makes Facebook much more useful for messaging. And AllFacebook points out that the text of Wall posts also now is included in email messages.

Which suggests that Cory Doctorow’s comments from last week, as I said last week, overestimated Facebook’s venality:

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling — you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages, they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!”

Facebook will likely see a short-term drop in page views because of this change, but this makes it a much more useful service that will lead to long-term growth.

If, as Doctorow said, Facebook was a “pump-and-dump” service, Zuckerberg would have sold for a billion-plus last year. He and his gang certainly made mistakes with Beacon, but they’ve come around and offered the global opt-out. And I thought Mark’s apology hit all the right notes.

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon….

It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

I’ve been impressed that the people working at Facebook really are in it to change the way people communicate. I’m glad to see that they seem to have come back to their senses.

Technorati: Facebook, email, Beacon, opt-out, privacy, Zuckerberg, Doctorow, Arrington, social networking