SMUG Social Media University Global

Social Network Options for Organizations

Organizations interested in creating social networks for employees, customers or other outside constituents (vendors, business partners, etc.) have three options:
1. Don’t. Create one, that is. Find an existing social networking site that already serves your industry, and participate there. This has several benefits:

You don’t need IT support or budget
A crowd of similarly interested people is already gathered so you don’t need to build a group
If you participate intelligently, you and your organization can be seen as having worthwhile contributions for the community

Among the downsides are that you have no ability to influence the structure and direction of the site. You may be contributing to the conversation, but you are a thought follower rather than a thought leader. That’s fine; the world needs followers, too; without them, so-called “leaders” are just taking a stroll by themselves. And the reality may be that others have taken the lead in forming an online community, so instead of starting another party you should knock on the door and join the one next door. If there isn’t a network like the one you want to build, you could move on to consider options 2 or 3.
2. Create a new standalone social networking site. With numerous so-called “white label” software products available (Jeremiah has a list here) that can carry your organization’s visual identity, creating a networking space is relatively quick and easy. Advantages include:

Complete control over the site’s look, including what features it offers and whether any outside advertising is included.
If you are the “first mover” in your area of interest to create such a space, and if your organization is big enough to have the gravitational pull to draw others in, your site could reinforce your organization’s thought leadership.

Downsides:

It’s not free, and you and your IT department are responsible for it. Anything less than 100 percent uptime reflects poorly on your organization. Some white label vendors also offer hosting services, but you pay for them, and your organization’s reputation is at risk if the site malfunctions.
Building a social networking space is different from building a social network. As compared to option 3, a standalone site creates barriers to adoption that can hinder your network’s growth. Your members need usernames and passwords for your site. They need to remember to come back to the site, or you need to remind them through email or RSS feeds. Given its modest penetration to date, RSS will likely not be sufficient for these reminders.

3. Create a group within one of the existing social networking sites. Leading candidates for this are MySpace and Facebook. I have a MySpace profile I almost never visit. I focus on Facebook in this post because I am most familiar with it and I think it’s the most powerful, especially given its open platform that encourages outside developers to create applications to build upon its framework. If someone wants to make the argument that a group within MySpace is as good an option as a Facebook group for an organization looking to form a network, please let me know and I will edit this post and link to you.

Advantages of Facebook groups:

They are free, and easy to create. In fact, I created a new Facebook group called “Social Network Options for Organizations” in exactly 7 minutes after I finished drafting this post, including pasting in this post as the first discussion topic.
No IT support is needed, and Facebook is responsible for maintaining the servers.
You can have your organization’s logo (see this one from the AAAS) emblazoned on your group site. In the case of the “Social Network Options for Organizations” site, I just added a photo of me. Assuming you have a logo already created, putting it on your group site adds another 45 seconds or so to your build time.
They are easy to join compared with white label sites. If your potential members aren’t in Facebook yet, the sign-up time is roughly equivalent to a white label site. But for the 31 million current Facebook members (growing by 1.2 million a week), they can join your group in about 5 seconds. They just go there and click the “Join this Group” link.
Your organization can form a network of networks. Say you want to have one network of customers or constituents and another of vendors, business partners or allies and still another of employees. In Facebook you can create all of those groups in less than an hour, and people can join whichever groups are appropriate for them.

Disadvantages:

The site has advertising. This is much less intrusive in Facebook than in MySpace; just one ad per page at the most, in the left-hand navigation or on the bottom of the page. But it’s a free service, someone has to pay. Facebook offers sponsored groups, so if advertising is a big problem for your organization I think you could likely pay to not have ads.
The feature set is basic. You can upload photos and videos and have a discussion board, as well as the Wall. You can choose not to have any of those features. The white label products likely offer more customization, but the Facebook interface is elegant and pleasing and the feature set is expanding. For example, I believe videos for groups is a new function; previously I think you could only add videos to personal profiles. And with outside companies developing applications for the Facebook platform, undoubtedly some of them will extend functionality for groups. If there is some feature you particularly need, I believe you could get a programmer to develop an application to add it for your group.

These are some of the factors to consider as you are exploring how your organization can become active in online social networking. Even if you do decide to use a white label product, you also should have a Facebook group, if for no other reason than to serve as an outpost with a link to your organization’s white-label site. If you don’t create a Facebook group for your organization, someone else likely will.

Technorati: Social networking, white label, Facebook, MySpace

Putting “Relations” into Media Relations

No, I’m not advocating nepotism. It’s about “friend”ship.

Facebook friends. And Groups.

In previous posts I discussed why organizations should form Facebook groups, and gave examples of some of the open, closed and sponsored groups.

My work is in news media relations, so I have been thinking of how these tools could make life better for journalists and for public information officers, and how they could help us work together.

The online newsroom is one particular application for a so-called “secret” group in Facebook, because it would enable organizations to distribute news announcements, particularly embargoed news, to journalists who want to receive them. Media relations staff also could use the direct messaging function to communicate directly with particular reporters, if they are pitching a potential exclusive story.

Facebook also allows users to upload video to their groups instead of to their personal profiles. So an organization’s online newsroom in Facebook could have video of its officers or subject experts, enabling TV and radio producers to judge experts’ airworthiness. Sort of a “try before you buy” for broadcast journalists.

These online newsrooms for organizations may not need to be secret; “closed” may be secure enough to ensure that only journalists who agree to abide by news embargoes have access.
Journalists could create secret lists of their trusted sources, so when they need to get a call for experts out quickly in response to breaking news, they could send a group message to everyone on the list, simultaneously, instead of picking up the phone and calling one by one. They may still want to start calling after sending the message, but by having the general call out to key contacts, they will be more likely to identify good sources quickly. Or, if they are enterprising a long-term story, they could likewise use the direct messaging function to contact PIOs individually and confidentially.

These groups could help individual journalists and organizations accomplish their goals. A digital commons would be helpful too: a meeting place where reporters and sources could meet and interact. For medical news, I’ve written in more detail about this concept here.

It makes sense that health journalists might have their own professional Facebook group, and that PIOs also would have one. The great thing about Facebook is that all these groups could be managed with a single username and password. So you could create several groups, and join several others, without needing to log in on various sites.

Most of the real action in Facebook happens at the friend level, but groups are a place where those relationships can be formed.

Technorati: Facebook, media relations, PR, journalism, media, online newsroom

Facebook Group Organization Examples

In my last post, on Facebook Groups for Organizations, I mentioned that there are three types of free groups in Facebook. An organization may have use for all three types, depending on what it is trying to accomplish.

I thought it would be helpful to list some examples of the groups organizations have formed. After you join Facebook and “friend me” you will be able to go to these groups and see for yourself how the organizations are using them.
Note: I know the links below won’t work for you if you aren’t yet a Facebook member. I think they will work if you are already in Facebook. If I’m wrong in that, let me know in the comments. But whatever the case, if you search for the group names once you’re in Facebook, you should be able to find them.

Some of the “open” groups include:

AAAS – American Academy for the Advancement of Science

Society for New Communications Research

Journalists and Facebook (Poynter Institute)

ACC – The Atlantic Coast Conference (Not an official group)

American College of Physicians

Africans in Medicine

Closed Groups

Association of College & University Housing Officers — International

Cheers for Medical News, which was the subject of this post.

Secret Groups

Now how would I know that? They’re secret! But one good media relations use for a secret Facebook group would be for a no-cost, no-IT required online newsroom, where you place material that is for journalists only – such as embargoed news releases, photos of subject experts, videos, and after-hours contact numbers for media relations staff. That’s something I’m exploring for my work, and I’ll do a post on that soon. If you’re a health journalist and are interested in joining, leave a comment below and I’ll get in touch with you.

Sponsored Groups

Apple Students (415,000 members)
Microsoft Students (17,000 members)

Fox News Channel

Southwest Airlines

And thanks to Susan Reynolds for her kind words as she presented me one of her “big yellow cow of blogtipping day fame” awards.

Technorati: Facebook, Groups, Apple, PR, Susan Reynolds

Why Organizations Should Join Facebook Group Land Rush

Organizations of all types, whether nonprofit or not-for-profit associations or for-profit corporations (hereafter all just called “organizations”), should establish groups in Facebook right now. Jeremiah Owyang has described this as the equivalent of the domain name land rush for Facebook group formation.

Here are the top three reasons to act now:

It’s Free. Not only is membership free, but you can create a group for your organization within Facebook, for no charge. You can pay for a sponsored group, as Apple has with Apple Students (415,056 members as of this writing), and that may be a valid tactic for you. But if you can create a presence in a cyberspace community that has 31 million members, and is growing at more than a million members a week, why would you not take advantage of the opportunity?
Stake Your Claim, and prevent cyber-squatting. This is related to #1 above. You may not realize how easy it is to create a Facebook group, but a mischievous prankster could create a new group in Facebook with your organization’s name in 90 seconds or less, at no cost. If you create an “official” group for your organization, and encourage constituents to join it, the real thing will drive any impostor groups to irrelevance, sort of a Gresham’s Law in reverse.
You can create more than one group, and the second one is half price. (OK, that was a joke; see #1 again.) In reality, you can have an infinite number of groups related to your organization, each with a different purpose.
- You can have an “open” group that anyone can join, as your organization’s public face in Facebook. If you need to communicate quickly with everyone affiliated with your organization, you can use Facebook to send the message.
- You can have a “closed” group that is visible to the world, but for which people need permission to join. This is ideal for a membership organization, to create a value-added space for networking, mentoring and discussion of issues of common interest.
- You can create “secret” groups that aren’t visible to people in Facebook unless an Administrator first invites them. This could be used for a Board of Directors, for example, or for communication within an employee group or work unit…anytime you want to be able to communicate confidentially, and even keep the existence of the conversation confidential.

More to come on how organizations can use Facebook to communicate with constituents and others who share common interests.

Update: This post was written several months before Facebook developed Pages as an alternative for organizations and brands. You may want to have a page for your overall brand, and have groups that are ways for employees, customers or constituents to collaborate. See the Facebook Business page or the Facebook curriculum here on SMUG for more recent thinking.