A New Way Of Thinking
Two nights ago I was having a conversation with a friend about the strengths and weaknesses of the new Facebook groups. In the midst of conversation, I asked “How do I create a group for people I used to live with and friends of those people?” Would I call it “Nick’s DC apartment friends”? Finally it dawned on me, after a few seconds, that I could create a group called “4801 Connecticut Ave Penthouse Friends”. Essentially it’s a group for all people who were friends of the individuals who lived in the apartment at any point while me and a couple of people
This process isn’t completely obvious though. While reading through Dare Obasanjo’s blog post about Facebook groups, I found the following statement to be particularly interesting:
Facebook Groups cranks the awkwardness of dealing with this up to 11. Let’s say I create a group for “People who work on social at Microsoft who regularly have lunch” and after a few months to years some of these people leave the company, get promoted or switch roles. As the owner of the group what do I do? Do I kick them out? Do I keep blathering on in private discussions that I know are no longer relevant for half of the recipients and in some cases actually violates work ethics since some of these people have left the company? What happens when I stop working on social at Microsoft?
Dare’s missing a major point: you still share an affiliation with a group even after you’ve left it. It’s about memories. Ultimately Facebook groups is incomplete, and I’m sure there are people who will run into troubles with it, but it also just made a world of difference for myself and many other people I’ve spoken to. Let me provide a couple use cases that have been particularly relevant for me, but that I’m sure will be relevant to others.
Drunken College Stupidness
I did some stupid things in college that I’m not particularly proud about and I’m sure there are numerous other people that have done the same thing. Not all of those events were “big mistakes” though. Often times they were memories which I still cherish, yet until the new groups was created, there wasn’t an effective way to keep track of those images. To be honest, I’ve untagged every unflattering photo of myself from college, but I still want to remember it and the friends that I shared those experiences with.
Groups are an excellent way to stay up to date on those people who I once affiliated myself with, or even still do. They can even post photos to that group that may be compromising in other situations, however bring back memories of experiences we shared together, and I don’t need to fear having those images appear elsewhere on the site for my professional contacts to see. We have shared experiences with the people in that group and nobody else. This is powerful.
Continuing Dialogue With Shared Interest Groups
I love hearing what others have to say about various topics, but one of my favorite things to discuss is internet marketing strategies. By creating a group and inviting people to it who are interested in the same thing, I have the ability to discover new people who have that interest, as well as share information with people who I know will care about it. I then get alerted to any new conversation around that specific topic. While Quora provides a great mechanism for discovering new information, having the ability to limit that information to people who are part of the group can be useful sometimes, especially for fleshing out ideas.
Connect With My Family
My family is spread across the world (S.F., D.C., Florida, Belgium, Israel, …) and it’s difficult to stay up to date on everybody’s activities, however we all have shared experiences once in a while. I want a place to keep in touch with my family but I don’t want any of my other Facebook friends to be part of that experience. Facebook has now made it easy for me to set up a safe place for dialogue to take place with my family, and to notify them every time someone posts a photo, shares an article, or even an experience. Honestly, the notifications about group activities alone could be the single most significant breakthrough: I know all the updates from people who matter most (there are definitely opportunities to improve this awareness, but I’ll save that for a later post).
Engagement Levels Are Extremely High
One of the most powerful components of Facebook groups are the notifications within a product that I’m already using multiple times a day: Facebook. One of the groups I’m a member of, D.C. Technology, had a ning site a while back but nobody ever returned to the site. The main reason was that we didn’t get any notifications and any that we received in our inbox were immediately turned off. However I want notifications about those groups when I’m looking to socialize.
Everytime I visit Facebook now, I can view updates in my feed, but I also can go through the various notifications from groups that matter most to me. The result is that I can keep up to date on what those people are discussing even if they aren’t showing up in my feed. The reality is that I don’t want to know what every Dick, Jane, or Sally, that I ever friended is up to …. even if they are my Facebook friend. I really only care about 200 people at most (probably more like 50) and groups helps me to instantly segment those individuals.
In a world where the noise is overwhelming, Facebook just provided me with a tool to cut through it. Best of all, I can let my friends (and other group members) select those individuals that were also part of the group. It’s not just dictated by me, the original creator of the group. I used to have to hire virtual assistants to compile all the dialogue of people within various groups on Twitter and Facebook (I know … it’s a bit obsessive). Now, Facebook just made my life easier, right when the site was actually becoming too noisy for me.
Groups And Communities Require Leaders
There’s no doubt that segmenting groups is a time consuming process and it requires leadership. However, building an in person community is a whole heck of a lot more difficult. While there are people who will probably get it wrong (creating funny group names that have no activity, as was done previously), you are more likely to spark engagement from the people you care about most by engaging them in a place where they are already active (Facebook).
Yes, people are still figuring out how to use groups, and Facebook hasn’t even rolled it out to all users yet. However the groups product has the makings of a proper solution to the problem we’ve been facing for the past few years: finding information from the people who matter to us most. There’s no doubt that the product isn’t complete, however if Facebook continues to improve the experience that I’ve had over the past 48 hours, they may have just built a game changing product.
Source: All Facebook
Friday, October 8, 2010