technology | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Face(book)less Corporations

The Peninsula employment law firm study of UK time-wasting in Facebook and other social networking sites, and its call for companies to ban employees from Facebook access during the work day, highlights the “all cost/no benefit” mindset behind many studies of social media. Not all law firms are so myopic, though.

To repeat what I said earlier, if companies have employees spending two hours a day on Facebook activities that are unrelated to their work, they have bigger problems than any social networking ban could solve.

But in this post I want to focus on the potential benefits for companies of having their employees engaged in social media, and particularly in networking sites.

The “Faceless Corporation” is a cliche, but there is a reason why cliches achieve their status: the first few times, at least, they communicated a truth in a compelling way.

By engaging in blogging, Robert Scoble helped pull back the curtain at Microsoft to reveal hard-working engineers trying to make the best products they could for their customers. At the time, Microsoft was seen as an anti-competitive monolith, personified only by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.Channel 9 helped humanize Microsoft.

Creating Facebook groups and encouraging participation by individual employees, and having them engage customers in conversation, could for some companies help create customer loyalty that can survive a low-price competitor underselling you. If you’re engaged with them, maybe your customers would also give you ideas for improving your services to gain even more business.

There are lots of other ways businesses can use Facebook positively. I have a whole section of this blog devoted to the topic.

But Ethan Kaplan says it well: if you can’t find a way to take positive business advantage of a social networking site with 40 million active members that is growing by more than a million users a week, your company has a serious lack of marketing vision.

Technorati: Facebook, Peninsula, law firm, ban, social networking, social media, employment law, employees, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer

Facebook vs. Second Life: No Contest

If you work for a major company and have even considered an outpost in Second Life, think Facebook first.

The technical novelty of Second Life has made it a favorite of the geeky set. And just as Facebook has received significant attention from mainstream media recently (e.g. Newsweek and TIME), so has Linden Labs’ virtual world over the last year or so.

Beyond the media hype — or perhaps, because of it — lots of major companies have established “in-world” presence in Second Life, from Adidas Reebok to Wells Fargo and including heavyweights like IBM, Coca Cola, Mazda, Major League Baseball, ING Group, MTV, Toyota, Disney and Dell. In the government and non-profit sectors, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the American Cancer Society have outposts.

That’s why a recently updated blog post, “Why I Gave Up on Second Life,” by Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson is a must-read for anyone consider a Second Life excursion.

I freely confess that I haven’t tried Second Life, so I’m not speaking from first-hand experience. (In some ways, I will even boast of this, because it gives me a ready response at work, where I’m perceived — correctly — as a technophile, when people ask, “Is there any technology or gadget you haven’t tried?”) I’ve seen some demos and screen shots, though, and from what I’ve read — including this Wired article — here is why I think businesses should put much more effort into Facebook (and MySpace) and forget Second Life (unless they want to consider it an educational experience for communications and marketing staff.)

Size. Second Life claims an “in-world” population of 7 million avatars, but Linden Labs says the number of real people represented is more like 4 million because many Second Lifers have multiple personality disorder. Facebook’s user base is 10 times as big, and is growing by more than a million users a week. In other words, Facebook is growing the equivalent of a Second Life population every month.
Engagement. As the Wired article pointed out, only a million Second Life users had logged in during the previous 30 days. Fully half of Facebook’s 40 million active users return at least once a day and spend an average of 20 minutes on the site.
Reality. Do we really need another place on the internet where people can abandon their inhibitions by taking on a fake personality? Don’t we already have MySpace? As the TIME article on Facebook says, one of its chief advantages is that people mostly use their real first names and last names, not a Freudian alter id.
Ease of Entry. You can get into Facebook in minutes, and don’t need any special software, just a browser. In Second Life you need to download the software client, and the hardware requirements are significant.
Scalability – Each Second Life processor can handle only 70 avatars at a time, so you’ll never draw even a virtual crowd. The Apple Students group in Facebook, by contrast, has more than 424,000 members as of this moment.

Chris Anderson is as geeky as they come, as exemplified by his infatuation with radio-controlled UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). His “checking out” of Second Life gives me comfort that it’s not a place that I need to check into, at least yet.

Maybe as technology advances and the simulators become browser-based and more scalable, places like Second Life will matter for business. And for some of the corporations investing in Second Life, even the hundreds of thousands of real American (vs. Linden) dollars they spend are barely rounding error in their overall marketing budgets. So they can count it as continuing marketing education.

As Shel Holtz says, it might be a good idea to get the experience with 3D virtual worlds now, so that when they do eventually become important, you’ll be ready. He thinks that might be five to seven years. He didn’t exactly put it this way, but one of the benefits of experimenting with Second Life now is that you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing your mistakes.

I think Second Life is currently a long way from consequential for marketers, but my main point is not anti-Second Life. My main point is a positive one, and I leave it to you in the form of a question:

If you’ve even considered a Second Life presence for your business, why wouldn’t you immediately look for practical ways to use Facebook and MySpace?

Technorati: Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, Marketing, Shel Holtz, IBM, Dell, Coca Cola, Wells Fargo, Adidas Reebok, Disney, Toyota, Linden Labs, Advertising

Facebook Tips: Free Church Directory Replacement

This Facebook tip could apply to any organization with members that publishes a directory, but my experience has been with church directories, so that’s the example I’m using for discussion.

The way these directory projects usually work is that a photography firm approaches the church with an offer of a free printed directory. Each family or individual member in the church gets a free photo sitting and an 8″ x 10″ portrait, along with a copy of the printed directory, and an opportunity to purchase additional poses and prints.

Of course, few families get just the free photo. When these firms take your pictures, they retain the copyright. You can’t even legally scan the photo and use it in your family Christmas letter. That’s why they tend to get significant sales; I remember with one of these in which our family was involved, our photo package was about $400.

I’m not begrudging Olan Mills its profit-making opportunity, but just as web 2.0 tools are disrupting other industries, Facebook could provide a better free directory for churches and other organizations. One that’s really free.

The answer is through a Facebook group formed by the church. Everyone who joins a Facebook group has his or her profile picture added to the list at the bottom (just like a church pictorial directory). You can use the messaging function to contact anyone who is a member. For those with whom you have closer relationships, you can add them as friends.

Here are some Facebook functions that might have application for an on-line church directory:

Members can upload pictures and videos (try that in a printed directory!) and can tag their friends. This would be especially good for pictures from church picnics, potlucks, youth group outings, short-term mission trips and the like. Then, when Facebook friends of your members see these things show up in their News Feeds, it may open up an opportunity for discussion if they are interested in finding out more.
Members could put prayer requests on the Wall, or the Message All Members function could be used to send requests out to everyone.
Message All Members could also be used to send alerts about weather-related cancellations to everyone’s cell phone. That’s particularly helpful in climates like Minnesota’s.
The pastor’s sermon text could be put on the discussion board, with an opportunity for members to ask questions or make comments.
Video of the pastor’s sermons could be uploaded for shut-ins to watch, or for people who were out of town on Sunday.

As I thought about this concept, I wondered whether some churches might have something like this going already, and Mars Hill Church in Seattle instantly came to mind. Mark Driscoll is the pastor there, and I’ve heard mp3s of some of his sermons that made me think, “If any church in America has a Facebook group, it would be Mars Hill.”

Sure enough, here it is. Actually, I guess there are some related groups, too, such as “Mark Driscoll is my homeboy.”

I don’t think Mars Hill is using Facebook as a replacement for the church directory; for one thing, I know they have several thousand members, while the Facebook group has several hundred. And the Facebook limit for a group to be able to message all members is 1000, I believe. For the great majority of churches, and the ones likely in the market for photo directories, that limit isn’t a real problem.

Oh, and by the way, I just checked out Olan Mills, and they now have a free on-line directory service, too. Good for them, that they’re responding to changes in the market. Here’s a sample Olan Mills on-line directory (The password is secret. No, really it is secret.)

If your church has lots of members who want professionally posed photos and prints, a service like Olan Mills is for you. (They say they do more church directories than anyone else.) But if you want your directory to be part of an interactive on-line community, a Facebook option would be better.

The other reality is printed church directories tend to get out of date fairly quickly. People die. Others move away. New children are born to current members. And hopefully, if your church is growing, new people are joining.

Broadening our discussion again to include both churches and other nonprofit or not-for-profit organizations, I think it’s better to have your multimedia on-line directory in Facebook for free, with candid and action photos of people, and to distribute photocopied text-only member listings with updated contact information more frequently. This provides a better basic information directory for everyone, and a richer experience for those who are on-line. And the money your members would spend on posed photos could instead be used to support your shared cause.

To make this kind of directory work, though, you need to have a plan for what you want to accomplish with it, and key individuals who share the vision and will keep the momentum going. But with that vision, and with a core group committed to using it, I believe Facebook can be a powerful tool for connecting a community.

Technorati: Facebook, church, directory, Olan Mills, organizations, nonprofit, not-for-profit, churches, directories, free, Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill