What The New Facebook Groups Mean For Community

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Scott Gould

Yesterday Facebook released a new version of Groups. So what?

Well firstly, phew!, finally Groups and Pages are different again and groups appear to have functionality that would make you want to use them! I don’t know about you but as a marketer and community builder, I struggled between knowing which to use for what, based on the benefits of both.

However now these new Groups have been built from the ground up with a new resolution to facilitate real world groups and communities that already exist, something that gets back to the core of Facebook’s early mission of ‘helping you connect with the people you know.’ And within this, I think there is not only opportuniy, but also it acts as a confirmation about what we’re now thinking about communities in general.

Communities are made of micro-communities

Let me take church as an example, seeing as I used it recently already to illustrate community. A church meets every Sunday for their service, which is the macro community, where all the people come together, no matter what age, demographic, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. But it isn’t the virtue of Sunday in itself that brings this community together nor holds it together. In actual fact, we find subsets of communities within this community, micro community if you will, where people exchange life on a more frequent and deeper level.

Therefore, macro community is the product of micro communities. The strength of this macro community is the strength of these micro communities – the strength of the bonds between the people in them, and the strength of the bonds that link these micro communities together.

This isn’t just a church thing. Take #LikeMinds and you’ll find we have micro communities within our macro community. Take your school, your family, your friendship groups, and so on.

What this reminds me of is this slide below from “The Real Social Network“, an exquisite and mind-shifting, a-ha moment presentation from Paul Adams at Google. It basically says that we can’t approach social networks from the point of view that we have one community, because we don’t. We have different sets of friends who we might say totally different things to. In other words, micro communities that make up our own personal macro community.

Facebook isn’t a single community

Whilst Facebook isn’t a single community, we currently have to treat it like it is. I have to send my Church updates to everyone, and my work updates to everyone. It’s just one community. And when I do share any of this content, it is quite clearly owned by me, not by anyone else.

What Facebook now appear to be doing is giving us a way to groupalise content. Remove my made up word and you’d have ‘co-owned content’ or something similar. The groups allow you to have group photos, group tags, group emails, group documents – a space where no one is really the owner but where everything is shared.

This means, it I use the image above, I could now form a group for each of those 4 communities above, and govern or guide it accordingly.

Groups in the status feed

From my early testing, these new Groups insert the updates into the news feed for those who are following them, meaning I have a new way to keep track of information that relates to an area of my life. Previously, it was this ability that gave Facebook Pages a competitive advantage over Facebook groups. Facebook Social Plugins, however are currently still only with Pages or customised content, so Groups don’t have a weigh in there yet.

Groups are like contact groups in your email client

When I use Mail to send an email to certain teams, I can type the name of that group. Now, I can do the same with the new Facebook Groups, as well as see it in the news feed. This is a powerful move towards what The Real Social Network was talking about when it said that we don’t have one single community.

The way that I plan to use them is like I’d use this email contact group, a place to foster micro community through curation of people (not so much content.) The difference over the old format of groups is that I get notifications on all the activity. This is really lacking when it comes to Pages, but now means I can track everything in that group. Considering that for many Facebook has replaced email, and is their top communication method other than talking, it makes sense for me now to conduct work through a Facebook group that will automatically keep me up-to-date on all the activity.

The bigger changes

Facebook making this change tells me a lot about how we are changing in our knowledge economy. Facebook has become strikingly powerful at both reflecting and shaping how we think and interact. I’m interested to see how this changes us. ‘Friend’ was their first big thing, then ‘wall’, and then most powerfully with ‘like’. Whats the new verb or noun going to be now?

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you see a use for Facebook groups? Or is it effort that you just don’t have time or interest for?
Do you observe my same observations about macro and micro community? What has Facebook taught us about how we really approach community?

Rage Against The Machine: The Case Study In Spreadability vs Reach

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Scott Gould

In case you didn’t know, the UK is experiencing, right now, one of the greatest Social Media case studies ever. The headline and subtext from the BBC is this: “Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts: Rock band Rage Against the Machine have won the most competitive battle in years for the Christmas number one”

But the real headline here is this: that 3 months of prime time television marketing and audience engagement are beaten by Social Media. Continue reading →

Cast Your Bread On The Social Media Waters

Posted on August 18, 2009 by Scott Gould

Image courtesy of Kıvanç Niş

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.” That’s from the Bible, believe it or not. A seemingly contradictory statement, I have indeed found on many occasions that when I have put something ‘out there’, it has unexpectedly come back to me. Today I want to look at social media in the light of this principle, because as many of us no doubt have found, what we have said on Facebook, tweeted, or posted on our blog, has often yielded unexpected results.

Yesterday I wrote this comment on Jeremy Epstein‘s blog. I’ll quote some below, but to set the scene, Jeremy was talking about influencers vs fans, and the fact that very often you do not know who your influencers are, but you do know who your vocal fans are, and therefore, you should put more eggs into what he calls the “Raving Fans basket”.

Stop. For anyone who isn’t a digitall, let me clarify the language. A influencer is a certain type of person who influences other people to partake of your brand / idea / organisation / party / friendship. Notice this isn’t just about business – influencers are active in every area of life – brands and businesses are just trying to work out who the influencers are in order to gain from their influence. Jeremy makes the point that, as I have said above, very often we don’t know who these people are because they might not be too vocal, unlike the “raving fans”, who are very vocal about their support of a brand / idea / organisation / party / friend, even if they are not as influential.

In other words, an influencer is The Fonz – cool, calm and collected, but not in your face all the time. Whereas a raving fan is comparable to any girl who adores the latest boy band.

Ok. So, my comment went, in part, like this:

There is something to be said, as well, for your fans that you don’t know of. My blog is fed to my Facebook notes, as is the case with many bloggers. On Friday I didn’t post an new entry, and had an outcry from Facebook friends – none of them what I call ‘Digitalls’ (i.e., using digital technology like most of use savvy social media users). I had never even had so much as even a comment or ‘like’ on Facebook from them before, yet they were loyal readers with an expectation for a daily read from me.

My point is this: in life, and also in social media, we are continually ‘putting stuff out there’. We sow seeds of effort, energy, finance, time, etc, into people, and are sometimes unsure whether we are actually adding value or not. But just like casting your bread on the waters, the effort does indeed return to you, and very often it is when you don’t expect it, that you discover just where you have been adding value.

But I’m Just Using Facebook For Fun

No doubt many of my readers are. Textbook Digicools. But consider that Facebook, whether you like it or not, is an online extension of your social self, and can and does yield a similar return as your friendships do offline.

Getting in touch with your very first friend, finding out about people who otherwise you wouldn’t know, unexpectedly learning something new about someone – these are just some basic cases of your bread returning to you on the water.

So, enough concept. What are my examples? I’ve made business contacts from across the atlantic who’ve become friends. I’ve rekindled old relationships. I’ve made friendships with people in Exeter I never would’ve otherwise. People have come to my church because they saw me on Facebook. I’ve connected with like minded people from the other side of the world, as well as earning new clients.

The number of people who tell me weeks or months after I’ve tweeted or blogged to say ‘that really helped me’, or ‘that hooked me up with another person’, or ‘that off the cuff video had one line that has rung true with me’, is astounding. There are more people who don’t comment or this blog, don’t comment on Facebook, yet receive a lot of value from my thoughts, than those who do comment and respond. And that isn’t just me, I’m convinced all of us are unaware of the difference we are making in different places with different people.

The Act Of Casting My Bread

So enough talk and now some action. How do we practically cast our bread?

Be on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The world is only going to become more connected, not less, so it is a wise decision to invest your time into them now. Start by following these people. Then, Spend a small amount of time on each of them, maybe 10 to 15 minutes a day at least. Get to know how things work, and listen to people, so that when you speak, you’ll know what to say.
Develop a 160-character summary of yourself and use it across all your social networks. This isn’t about making some super brand for yourself, it’s about helping people understand roughly who you are quite quickly. You can include life goals, values, humour, etc. Mine is: “Creator and marketer of today’s currency: experience. Husband to a hottie, but not a father yet. Christian and love revival.”
Realise that it is all about accumulation. Social media is like building with Lego bricks. One brick is worthless, but many bricks create a building that others see.
Be open. Our fake-overloaded society desires authenticity. Be you, share your scars as well as your successes.
Treat each person who comments, responds and retweets with due respect. Because you don’t know which one is carrying your bread back to you.

Notice I haven’t said ‘set your expectations’. Why? Because the whole point I’m making is it is often the unexpected return.

Otherwise, thank you for reading through what is still an infant thought of mine and I haven’t worked through into a fuller framework. So with that in mind, what would you say?

Much Ado About Something

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Scott Gould

Yesterday, Facebook bought FriendFeed. To the Digitalls, this is a thing of hot debate and plentiful discussion. But to the Digicools and Digitools, they will have read to this point and still understand nothing I’ve said because they have no idea what FriendFeed is, nor know why it even matters that Facebook has acquired them. But bear with me just a while…

Right now, famous technology evangelist Robert Scoble is talking through all the nuances and possible outcomes of this deal. The post is worth a read. For those of you who don’t know, Scoble made FriendFeed popular among the geeks, and has promoted it tirelessly and ceaselessly, whilst spending pretty much most of his working days on there for most of this year. Now, it appears, all those thousands of hours, all those ideas, all the marketing, all the effort of his life for the past year or so, will fade into time as FriendFeed gets sucked into Facebook.

The thing I find funny about all these Digeratti, as I call them – the top innovators and Digitall elite – is that they make so much noise about every big and every little thing. Reading Scoble’s article, many things that he is now saying he simply wasn’t saying early this year. One minute they are all expending energy on one thing, and now it is being expended on another. Blogging is dead, they cry, meanwhile, the mass market hardly knows they were ever alive. So, while I was reading Scoble’se article yesterday, I kept asking myself – “Does the mass market care? Does it even matter to the mass market? Will history change for it?” Because it certainly appears that all that effort is, well, much ado about nothing.

So it appears.

Fast forward a year or so and see the then half a billion Facebook users – the Digicools and Digitools of the mass market – now grappling with more changes and updates to Facebook. See 6 months after that, when all the ‘I hate the new, new Facebook’ pages have died down, and this mass market will be using Facebook in new ways with new technologies, based on what the Digitall have been using for years prior. And all that effort from all those FriendFeed users and engineers finds its place – it was thinking the way forward into the future.

That’s innovation.

Innovation – creating new ways to do things – is all about thinking way ahead of your time, and way ahead of the mass market.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering what that picture of a chair above is meant to be doing. That, my friends, is known as the ‘Wassily’, a chair designed by Marcel Breuer for Wassily Kandinksy at the Bauhaus. I have one in my living room. Want to know when he designed it? 1925. That’s 84 years ago. Can you imagine how innovative his thinking was to create something that is beyond even contemporary design? 84 years ago people were sitting on wooden chairs but Marcel was a thinking person who saw beyond even the imaginable future.

That’s the thing about innovation – it takes place years, and even decades before it makes sense.

Before it makes sense. Ah, there’s the rub.

There’s something that I do that, to some, doesn’t quite make sense. I run an Experience Agency. I talk about compelling experiences. But it’s ahead of where the mass market is right now. And when you’re ahead, what do you attract? Criticism. Misunderstanding. Just plain mockery. And you experience fear. You make mistakes. At times, you even doubt whether you’re even on to something at all. But then you reach down to the innovator’s compass inside of you. Your gut. And you know. You know that, given 5 years, it’ll be all the more relevant. Make it 10, and they’ll all be kicking themselves that they weren’t listening. Give it 20, and it’s a non issue.

Know that your innovation and your thinking is not much ado about nothing – but just like Scoble and FriendFeed – it’s much ado about something, the reward just comes later.

The decision you have, then, is to continue to innovate or imitate. Do the daring. Do something new, or line up and be the next cheap copy of a great original. But if you are doing something new, then beware that all the effort you put in will not have immediate return on investment. Understand that people will look at you and think what I was thinking about Scoble – “Will it work?” “Does it matter?” “Who even cares?” My recommendation, if you do innovate, is to buy yourself a Wassily chair. And every night when you sit in it and reflect and think things through, realise you are sitting in someone else’s innovation, and one day, others will sit in yours.

So here’s to all the innovators in the crowd. We are the future. My chair tells me so.

What are you are innovating?