Social Networking

I can guarantee you that this won’t be as useful as How to Manage Twitter, but then, I’m telling you so that you have an understanding of what I’m doing with my personal time on Facebook. I’ll admit right up front that I was quite a Facebook hater for many years, but that I turned around in the last few months, due to two changes: the improvement of fan pages, and my personal discovery of lists. If I didn’t have these two things, I’d not be able to function.
I should also state that I don’t use very many tools. I know that Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop allow for FB updates, and I’ve sent one or two from there, but that’s not where I think the meat of Facebook is, and so I don’t use those tools in that way.

How I Manage Facebook

First, I should apologize. I probably can’t friend you in Facebook. I’m right up at the 5000 people limit (I removed about 600 and so I’m hovering around 4751). It’s not you, it’s Facebook. I’m sure you’re wonderful and I like you just as much, even though we can’t be friends. Now, on to the info.
I have three main areas I sit on, and I keep them open in 3 browser tabs. The first is my list called “Short List.”

This is approximately 185 people and it’s only for people I know personally and that I want to stay closely updated on. I read that voraciously. If I run out of updates, I drop into the general population and see what’s going on there. It’s changed how I see the world and what I know about people who matter to me. (It’s probably closer to how you use your Facebook).
From a “push” perspective, I update Facebook separately than Twitter. I talk much more personally on Facebook, and I’m not out to win any friends. I just say what’s on my mind there. My blog also imports there, as do my photos, as do my Google Reader Shared Items, as do my FriendFeed actions, and a few other things. I use Facebook to collect a lot of info from a lot of places, so you get a fuller view of me.
The second place I camp is on my own Profile, to chat with people in the comment stream:

I have enjoyed chatting with folks in the comments section, though again, it’s not in any kind of business perspective. It’s just me being people. What I feel is that Facebook is like the afterparty from the big performance, and I’m just chilling backstage.
The third place I camp is on the Trust Agents community, which is a Facebook fan page.

As of this writing, we have 2190 people, of which about 30 or 40 are actively talking about Trust Agents and ideas around the book. That’s been the most rewarding. You might recall that I deleted my fan page a while back. I still stand by that. But the passion of talking about ideas instead of “having fans,” is a really good thing.

I also love the birthdays feature. My secret is that I don’t wish people happy birthday in Facebook. I send a personal email and/or a tweet. It makes it more lovely, in my eyes.

What It All Means to Me

I don’t use Facebook for business. I tried buying a Facebook ad to test out how well it would convert new people to the Trust Agents community. I spent $500 and got hundreds of thousands of impressions and only a handful of new members. I tweeted once and got another hundred. In fact, I wouldn’t think of Facebook much for business, except that Louise Rasho of Microsoft Office Live showed me some great examples of fan pages that do seem effective and useful. Beyond that, I haven’t seen tons of great success on Facebook as a direct business conversion tool.
Where it shines, however, is as a relationship tool for business people in two areas: sales and customer service. In sales, it’s a relationship tool, not a marketing funnel driver. You use it to get to know more about your prospects, and to keep your customers warm. As service, it’s another outpost to talk with your customer base, and a place to share some extra information, should that be useful.
On sum, I use it mostly for personal, and it’s worked out well as a great augmentation to my LinkedIn presence. You might see it differently. I’d love to know.

And You?

How are YOU using Facebook? What do you like about it? What’s not so useful? What would you change, if you had the ear of the team?

This week, I watched Siobhan Bulfin birth a new tribe around her. ( I’ll use Seth’s word for it, though I go back and forth on the analogy I prefer.) The seeds planted at Marketing Now will surely bloom into a small community of people who care about each other and who will help each other develop new voices in the new media and marketing spaces.
She has started a tribe. What I’m excited about is how some new technologies (and some that we’ve already been using) will enable even more useful interactions. I’m particularly excited by what Nine Inch Nails have done (more below).
Last week, I saw community building in Detroit. The week before, I was at the heart of it in Southern California. In all of these places, little tribes formed around thoughtful leaders. They are intentional communities. Seth taught me a bit about the leader’s role in all this. In fact, while reading the advanced copy of Tribes on the side of a lake while my daughter took swim lessons, I read the part where Seth told us that all tribes needed a leader. It was the subtitle of the book, actually: “we need you to lead us.”
True story: when the point Seth was making sank in, I emailed him and said something very much like, “You bastard. You’ve just explained several of my own personal failures of the last few years.” He did.
The thing was, I was trying to build autonomous communities, where I felt they could run themselves. I tried it with several of my projects starting in 2006. I’d build something, get a bunch of people excited, and try to let it go to the wild. Every time, it would falter almost at once, no matter how passionate people were. Transferring ownership was never the same as finding a leader. (Again, nothing bad about the people involved, and everything bad about my inability to understand this point).

What’s Next: nin:access

I am blown away by nin:access, the iPhone application for Nine Inch Nails fans. On the surface, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s sexy. Here’s what they say about it:

• Exchange messages and photos with other NIN fans in your neighborhood and around the world
• Access NIN news, photos, custom wallpapers, and your nin.com inbox

Here’s a few screen captures:

Look at that second one. Location-based. It is a listing (opt-in) of fans of Nine Inch Nails geographically, so that you can, should you wish, connect up with other fans in an area. (Yes, I know that the example text isn’t all that enlightened, but think beyond what you see.)

You Can Have It All

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have it figured out. Empower fan-to-fan interaction. They’ve had that with their message boards, with their nin.com mail service, with all their other actions over the last years. But with the location-enabled iPhone app, it just feels even more super powered.
You can do this, too. There’s not a lot of super high end tech in what they did (not dissing NIN). It’s just good marketing for a great community. Not ready to plunk down some money on an iPhone app that will do this? You could always use BrightKite as a starting point to understanding what it’ll do for you. (If you want to build an iPhone app that does this, I could get that done for you.)
Location plus peer-to-peer interactions = a huge win.

A Quick Community Checklist

What if you’re Siobhan Bulfin or someone else looking to empower a little community of intent? What would be a way to do it? Here’s a quick little roadmap that might be useful:

• Name the Community Something Inclusive. (In the case of Nine Inch Nails, they’ve self-selected to gather around the band. Sometimes, it’s not as easy to make it about a product or company. Find a name that folks feel like they can own, something they can put on a flag of their own and hoist high (if that makes sense).
• Buy the URL for that name or something close.
• Make sure you understand the value to your prospective members for joining the community. Are you an information-sharing site, a business networking group, a creativity group? What are the ways in which everyone will be able to participate and contribute? What’s the “fire” that you’re gathering around? ( This is the “Channels vs. Communities argument that Stephen Saber makes.)
• Start with a simple Ning community, if you expect your group to be fairly small and if you don’t need high end power community tools.
• Put up a Flickr group so that there’s a place to put community photos.
• Think up a few meaningful tags that people can apply to any media, should they want to write about your group, the events, whatever as it relates.
• Start an email list by asking folks to opt in. Email marketing is still very successful in building community and driving relations. If you want everyone to have the ability to mail the group, consider using a simple service like YahooGroups for people to opt into to receive messages.
• Would a location-based tool like BrightKite be useful?
• Should you hold Tweetups?
• Do people want to publish a shared list of users on other social services, like Twitter and/or LinkedIn?
• Find ways to deliver value.
• Find ways to deliver more value.
• Find ways to encourage participation (another blog post in its own right).
• Find ways to gather the tribe around your various issues of interest.
• Find ways to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing, as well as member-driven media making.
• Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m encouraged by the “nin:access” application released by Nine Inch Nails. It points towards another way to enable communities of passion. I think there’s great value in building around these ideas, and that there’s much more to be done here in this space.
What’s your take? Does the above list help? What other elements have you built into your community building?