Archive for Facebook
by Sean McClowry
February 7, 2008 at 4:25 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking
Facebook and MySpace are the world’s most popular Social Networking sites, but are they the best model for bringing these web 2.0 concepts into the enterprise?
My view is trustedplaces is perhaps a better model to use as a reference. Its a collaborative site primarily for reviewing restaurants, clubs and pubs. The community effectively has jobs, and their social network forms as a by-product of the work that they do. It can still be a social network on its own, but you probably wouldn’t go there unless you were interested in the outcome.
Building the “bottom up approach”
Trusted Places does some particularly interesting things:
- Featuring contributors on the front page
- Providing “award points” for contributions
- You can interactively build your tastes
- Providing recommendations for new connections based on common interests
Combined with a great UI, I’m a big fan of what this team is doing.
Yes, Facebook has Applications
The lines are, of course, a bit greyer than I have painted them. Facebook applications can be used to find other people with common interests and help people build new connections. The Facebook platform can be used to build any functionality that TrustedPlaces has, and more. But since Facebook is so large and completely open in scope, I find it more difficult to relate to a work context. Facebook and MySpace may be more fun, but work, alas, is not always fun. And while there are plenty of focused product review sites, I’ve yet to see any that form social networks better than trustedplaces.
What public site do you think provides a good model for explaining Enterprise 2.0?
by Jon Husband
January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising
A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence - Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.
Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.
There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.
We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?
David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.
He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew. Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.
It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.
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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted. But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.
It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment. I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people). While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression.
That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.
But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.
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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook
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by Joe McKendrick
January 20, 2008 at 6:31 pm · Filed under
Business Intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Facebook, Information Management, Interview, SAP, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Webinars, enterprise software
Web 2.0 — as glorified by Time Magazine when the publication named “You” as the Person of the Year — has moved from entertainment and social networking medium to strategic corporate weapon.
That’s the view of best-selling author and digital society guru Don Tapscott, who recently declared that Web 2.0 “is no longer about hooking up online or creating a gardening community of putting a video onto YouTube… The new Web, so-called Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture are really becoming a new mode of production, and changing the ways that we innovate, the ways that we make decisions, the ways that we collaborate, and the ways that companies engage with the rest of the world.”
Don is a featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward ‘08, to be held February 18-20 in Orlando, Florida.
I recently moderated an ebizQ Webinar in which Don discussed how Web 2.0 technologies and approaches are dramatically changing the way businesses manage and analyze information. (Audio replay available here - registration required.)
Don Tapscott broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence. His latest book is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, co-authored with Anthony Williams.
In our Webcast, Don described how he sees the Web 2.0 world — with its high degree of collaboration — changing the face of business intelligence to “collaborative intelligence.” Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had “been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence.”
Now, he continued, “for the first time, this is all being supplemented by massive quantities of additional data that is created through new models of collaboration, as consumers and employees use the new tools of collaboration — wikis, blogs and social networks.”
“The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace.”
The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. “Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that — which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically.”
The merging of Web 2.0 and business intelligence has become an enormous opportunity for growth, Don said. “For starters, we’re seeing the integration of business intelligence, which has historically has been about numbers, with content and knowledge management, which has been historically about words.” For example, Don foresees the rise of of 3-D visualization of BI data.
“The mother of all opportunities is people across an organization being able to collaborate more effectively around data.” He calls this collective intelligence the holy grail, in which “minds across an organization can come together around information and data that they believe and is relevant and timely and pertinent to them.”
(An audio replay of our recent Webcast is available here - registration required.)
by Paula Thornton
December 26, 2007 at 2:07 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking, barriers
This is in response to a comment from my colleague, Bill Ives, who asked for my thoughts as to the potential shakeout of social networking tools in the Enterprise. Bill has previously reported both on a major software developer, Serena, which has adopted Facebook to REPLACE their intranet (supporting 800 employees — the numbers can matter here) and WorkBook.
There are a number of factors at play here. Which of these are most relevant, depends on the circumstances.
1. Size/Effort/Culture
These are so closely tied together it’s hard to unravel them from one another. The success of social networking technologies depends on adoption and buy-in. The culture of 800 employees can be far more readily influenced, as a collective – particularly when replacing an intranet in total — than situations with the following:
- Thousands of employees. Likelihood of a ‘cohesive’ culture diminishes and increases the effort to implement/adopt, unless it fills a void, or replaces and enhances the value of something already in use (e.g. the results of a people lookup).
- A technology culture with security phobias. Many enterprises would never consider the Facebook path Serena embraced, simply because of firewall/security policies (based on sound rationale or not).
- A social culture that may have pre-conceived notions that the technologies might be non-productive, threatening, or fill-in-the-blank-challenge (we’ve seen this with all 2.0 technologies — because of the perceived ‘control’ factor). This list would also include outright apathy (which is fairly significant in many cultures, both on the ‘permission’ and the adoption side).
2. Degree of Interconnectivity
You can’t really use the term ‘online’ any more to cover all aspects of being ‘connected’. Regardless of device or means of interaction, the value of social networking goes up the more resources are enabled to contact and interact with one another. There are many business models that provide limited means for employees to connect to the company, let alone one another. For a technology company like Serena, nearly everyone is likely ‘connected’ to do their work. But being connected isn’t the same as being interconnected.
Using a computer for mostly ‘offline’ activities (stand-alone applications), is not the same as doing ’shared’ work that is constantly showing updates, where individuals are connected to the ‘pulse’ of the business and can ’see’ exchanges of activities going on. The further away an employee is from a ‘live’ pulse of the company, the less likely a social networking technology will add value, unless it is being leveraged in an intentional effort to connect employees. Connecting people to have conversations and/or debates when they have limited facts is counterproductive.
Many companies are not strategically leveraging their intranets as ‘the face of work’ within their organizations. Employees go there on a ‘have to’ or ‘as needed’ basis. Such environments can reinvent themselves either by replacing or adding a social networking dimension, but then, this was often the justification for many companies implementing portals (aka. collaboration). Such strategies have to be brought together — they’re pieces of the same story (or should be).
3. Interface Saturation
We’ve lived a long history where every application has its own interface. Even though internet browsers brought some degree of continuity to an online experience, its influence over the total experience is limited. Adding another interface is not the goal here; adding a capability is. Exactly how would employees’ ability to network among themselves be increased?
Serena was on the right track replacing their intranet for Facebook because:
- They weren’t competing against themselves for attention, or asking employees to choose an allegiance (what’s set as your ‘home’ page at work?)
- They enhanced Facebook to better meet their own needs (expanding its purpose reinforced their commitment to it)
- [There are a lot more…add yours.]
What about something like Worklight’s WorkBook? My first question would be, what will it replace and/or what will it bring together? Then, how is it different than anything else already in place that offers access to friends, news, groups, or applications, including email? If I can look up the current status of my colleagues today in Outlook, or grab their phone number, why wouldn’t I expect the same interface to give me direct access to ‘more’ about that individual? Or, how will the social networking solution ‘play’ with the conversations already going on via email? How will it replace or divert email exchanges?
Why do I need to have all these competing interfaces asking for my attention, diverting me from my work? Remind me again, what was I doing?
STEP AWAY FROM THE INTERFACE. What are the functions being delivered and how do they fit with all other existing functions?
Let me simply ask companies some very serious questions.
- Social networking is not a technology, although the label can be used to identify unique technology solutions. What do you know about how employees are already interacting with each other (IM, email, phone, text messaging, etc.)?
- How would a ‘new’ function/interface enhance existing social networking and what specific value would/should it add?
- What role does social networking already play to contribute to increased productivity? Where does the ability to connect to one another break down and how does this impact productivity? Will a new technology address this?
- Where does corporate/enterprise social networking end and industry social networking begin? [I existed before I joined my current employer and will exist afterward…my identity is not unique to my employer. My incentive is not to maintain my corporate identity but my industry identity, which may be separate from my alter-ego
]
If you don’t know, you’ve got bigger issues to deal with than making decisions about social networking technology.
And yes, some 2.0 junkies might insist that it should just evolve. There should be an element of evolution balanced with insightful decision. Evolution has a premise: survival of the fittest. ‘Fit’ is not something that happens randomly. Evolution is not equal to random. There are already far too many careful, restricted decisions made that are still quite random (e.g. forced by process, culture, power, naivety, time constraints and combinations thereof).
P.S. To put the value of my opinion in perspective, I advised my husband in the late ’90s that ERPs were not a good stock investment — they ended up being the high-flyers of the market at that time. The problem was that I tied my opinion of the technologies (their lack of robustness/completeness, and/or solid design) to their market potential. I failed to factor in the absence of alternatives to address a serious ‘perceived’ problem at hand. I also failed to adjust for the afore-mentioned randomness factors that drive major technology contracts – not tied to outcome.
by Paula Thornton
December 20, 2007 at 8:51 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking
Respected colleague, Tony Byrne (editor of CMS Watch, which often does deep industry reports) took an interesting look at Facebook in his piece, Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?
Since Tony is one my top respected resource for all-things-content, I know he is not one to take this subject lightly. I consider his attention to this topic as a call to take serious note. He shares:
“At CMS Watch we’ve been experimenting with Facebook as a collaboration platform internally and with external partners, and we like it. There are some definite limitations to Facebook as a portal. The inconsistent behavior and security profiles of different Facebook applications will be familiar to any portal developer struggling with third-party portlets or Web Parts. Facebook applications seem to revolve principally around people rather than groups, which can be inconvenient for professional collaboration (where typically micro-applications are applied selectively to workspaces). Facebook doesn’t have real document management — although arguably you wouldn’t want it seated there anyway — and Alfresco and others have developed hooks into Facebook from their repositories.”
Then he cautions:
“But when does Facebook-behind-the-firewall stop being Facebook? I think the minute a central authority gets behind it — and instinctively mandates some available MOBIG (Microsoft/Oracle/BEA/IBM/Google) software because it happened to be familiar or free — is the minute the system will lose its appeal to rank-and-file employees.”
In comparing the use of Facebook to the simplicity of SharePoint, Tony notes:
“…the problem with SharePoint is that there is no native way to manage multiple instances of it. “
I ‘m particularly supportive of his recommendations to IT:
“I suggest offering (or just allowing) a set of collaboration alternatives. Then step back, keep lifecycle management as unobtrusive as possible, and see what takes off. This may mean allowing multiple collaboration solutions — including hosted solutions — to compete internally. May the best one win. I’m not suggesting this will be easy; in fact, it may take hard work to retrofit suitable retention and security services onto a newfangled collaboration package that was not explicitly designed for enterprise-wide deployment — but became popular across your enterprise nonetheless. “
Here’s my only caveat to the latter…I fundamentally believe in the principle of evolution, but when not having a ’standard’ creates islands of identities then there’s a problem. If you can ‘architect’ a cross-offering so that people can search for an individual based on attributes and be able to find them, then I’m ok. Maybe someone at FAST can weigh in on meaningful architectural/governance approaches here?
In the end, the result should accomplish what I normally champion, but Tony did a great job:
Start by institutionalizing an attitude that says, “how can we help our employees be more effective?” Specifically, “how can we support them in the way they really want to work (as opposed to the way we think they want to work)?”
21 Dec 2007 UPDATE
Tony shared with me directly: “And btw, I quite agree with your caveat about silos. We are seeing the lack of standards come home to roost here (though it’s not anybody’s fault). It’s really more of an intuitive feel that product selection for collaboration/networking tools has to be bottom-up, rather than top-down, and the price we’ll pay in the short run is a proliferation of repositories until a standard is set….“
Somehow colleagues in Europe were on the same wavelength as today they forwarded this “Social networking ‘white elephant’ warning“. This piece reminded me of my insistence on a ’synthesized’ profile for individuals, which should provide for internal ‘confidential’ content/references and yet leverage the public profiles/identities individuals may already have and maintain (i.e. don’t recreate reality), including blogs. Besides, in this faster-paced, rapidly changing work environment, resources can and should have public identities separate from the company/entity they happen work for at this moment in time.
I’m reminded of the time where I was so struck by the backwardness of accepted thinking around work relationships, when I had to go to considerable lengths to explain to my daughters why I was up at 5:30 on my computer the week after I’d been laid off from a job (never mind I should have been working to land my next relationship). I said: “I do what I do regardless of who I work for. I just sometimes happen to do what I do for a specific company.”
The one observation from the warning that I totally disagree with: “There is also little evidence that social networking will be as beneficial for businesses as other web-based communications tech such as instant messaging and VoIP.” Good grief. The PRIMARY justification for social networking from an enterprise perspective is to connect resources TO each other, by way of the context their profiles provide. You can’t leverage instant messaging and VoIP, until you’re aware of the other resource’s existence. It’s a matter of ACCESS (findability). So yes, “Ultimately, Gartner suggests, the value of social networking tech comes from content rather than the product itself.“
by Joe McKendrick
December 1, 2007 at 6:07 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, IT Department, Information Management, Messy World, Social Computing, Web 2.0, barriers, enterprise software
Nick Carr may be down on IT, but he’s hot on social networking software. The author of IT Doesn’t Matter has sparred frequently with Harvard colleague Andrew McAfee on the value of Enterprise 2.0, but makes the following admission in one of his latest posts:
“It seems increasingly clear to me that the social networking phenomenon will, in some yet-to-be-determined form, invade corporations.”
Nick says that social networking applications will occupy a very different place within enterprises than traditional enterprise software, however. Social networking applications will be part of the informal organization (collaborative and non-hierarchical), versus the way software has traditionally been applied within the formal organization (very hierarchical, procedure oriented, highly political).
Here’s the challenge: The informal organization has the greatest impact on companies, since this “governs the real flow of information and influence in a company, that defines who’s in the loop and who’s not, what’s important and what can safely be ignored.”
However, the catch is “most corporate IT systems, unfortunately, are geared to the needs of the formal organization and ignore the informal one. Designed through elaborate, top-down processes, these so-called enterprise applications usually end up as rigid, cumbersome systems that are disconnected from the everyday jobs of workers.”
Ultimately, the future of corporate computing may actually lie with online services such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Nick Carr predicts. “It’s easy to make fun of these sites. Used mainly by kids and students, they often resemble the junkyards of popular culture – crude, silly, and disposable. But don’t be fooled by the garish surface. Social networks are popular – and powerful - because they are constructed in response to, and through, the actions and conversations of their members. In stark contrast to corporate IT systems, social networks shape themselves to their users rather than forcing the users to adapt to preset specifications.”
The proof is already here. FastFoward blogging colleague Bill Ives recently surfaced the role Facebook is playing as a corporate intranet.
As Bill reports, Serena, a software company, is replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall:
The 800-employee firm “is going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition. They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.”
Using Facebook, Serena enjoys far more collaboration between internal groups, as well as with external constituencies, than they would with a far more expensive and maintenance-heavy traditional intranet.
Nick Carr observes that social computing services “do what corporate systems so often fail to do: they make the codification and sharing of valuable information easy.” This is certainly the case with Serena. However, ever the skeptic, Nick also cautions that such services face hurdles in enterprises — “matters of data security need to be worked out, as do protocols for sharing sensitive information within and between organizations.”
He also predicts headwinds of resistance from many within management ranks. “Just imagine what will happen when the informal organization suddenly becomes as visible as the formal one. I suspect that some people at the top of the org chart will be less than pleased.”
Back in my days as director and editor of AMS, the management association, the mantra for greater productivity and peak performance was “invert the pyramid, flatten the hierarchy.” Perhaps social computing will make that a reality.
by Rob Paterson
November 29, 2007 at 7:44 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Culture, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Messy World, Nato, Public Media, Secretary Gates, Social Computing, Social Media, Taliban, Terror, User Revolution, War, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, videos
Secretary Gates made this statement in a recent speech:
It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?” Speed, agility, and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications (My post at Fast Forward yesterday)
I am starting to see something here. War has been the agency that accelerates the development of key new technology.
In the 1860’s the civil war put the train on the map. Post the war, an enormous track laying boom exploded around the world. The military made the train the backbone of the industrial approach to war.The same with flight. In Europe, the military saw the potential of flight immediately. But the US did not - that is why Rickenbaker flew a Spad.
The Wright Company in particular and American airplane companies in general continue to lose their technological edge to the Europeans. This is due in part to the U.S. Government’s failure to support the fledgling airplane industry. While the governments of England, France, and Germany are buying hundreds of airplanes for their armed forces and supporting aviation research, the United States is spending roughly the same amount of money as Bulgaria. (First to Fly)
By 1918, the future of flight was assured. There were no doubters - and like the adoption of the train, this new way of connecting people has transformed our world.
So back to social software. As impressive as Facebook is, as impressive the growth of blogging - this is all personal. Organizational life and how we all live has not been changed yet. There is immense resistance in the key institutions of our time to its introduction. Leaders in business, education, healthcare etc all fear the outcome of adoption.
The big money is all based in an advertising model. If you can form a large group, you get rewarded. But the true potential of the tool set is not being invested in.
The true potential of social software is that it allows many to many to meet in real time at low to no cost. This means that you can see what is really going on - the business intelligence aspects are immense and transform research as it is conducted today. It enables you to get your message out in a real time and precise way - will transform marketing. Most of all it enables people to have very different relationships. Large, central capital based organizations are no longer needed. So everything that we do now such as how we educate, provide healthcare, provide services will be radically transformed.
Our large institutions can no longer do anything properly. The military is no exception. It is too big, too slow, too ponderous, too expensive. It cannot deal with war as it is waged today. The military are themselves full of resistance to the kind of change that social software implies.
BUT, people in the military who are losing the war of public opinion - who know now that Human Terrain is the new battlefield - are weighing the idea of loss of control with losing the war. My bet is that they will seek to win the war. This is what Gates is starting to say.
The greatest irony is that their enemy is showing them how to do this. Here is a CNN report on why NATO is now getting behind a Social Software approach to war. (Posted yesterday- sorry about the repeat but this makes sense)
CNN interviews a NATO Official in Afghanistan who echoes the Secretary and insists that we better get good at this or risk losing the real war - which is all political.
The strategy aims to counter years of propaganda video posted on the Internet showing Taliban attacks on NATO forces which fighters use to claim that NATO’s position in the Afghan war is deteriorating.
“The Taliban, who are literally cave-dwellers, are doing better than we are on a key battleground — and that’s video,” said NATO spokesman James Appathurai. “They deploy with videographers. We don’t. They have DVDs out in an hour, we don’t.”
Wielding video cameras like weapons, fighters quickly upload images of their attacks and create a valuable morale booster for their supporters.
Now, after much internal debate, NATO has begun declassifying and posting top secret combat video on YouTube and other Web platforms to try and beat the Taliban at its own game.
“We’re, in a sense, winning the tactical battles, but we’re not focusing enough on the strategic battle, which is public opinion,” said Appathurai.
The link to the excellent report and video is here.
In 1918, America could see for itself the power of flight. The nation adopted it like no other.
So here is my prediction. The first institution that will really invest in developing Social Software to radically improve how it delivers will be parts of the military. As with the train in the civil war and WWI, as with flight in WWI and WWII, how we deploy, how we fight and what victory is will be redefined.
The greatest irony will be is that the lesson for this change will have been taught by Al Qaeda.
This will not be an all or nothing adoption. Even in the 1920. and 1930’s Billy Mitchell fought an uphill battle with his superiors about the value of aviation. But the wedge was in.
The first flight was in 1903. By 1945, aviation was the new dominant military power. By 1975 aviation had captured the civilian world.
I think that history will look back at Facebook and smile.
Well done Mark - but look at what this technology really did!
by Rob Paterson
November 26, 2007 at 7:18 am · Filed under
ABC News, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, New Realities, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, barriers
ABC News are getting deeply involved with Facebook - their intent is to have a more interactive relationship with the “audience” and to allow their audience to have a relationship with each other. (NYT)
ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.
To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.
“Through this partnership, we want to extend the dialogue both before and after the debate,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for business development.
The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites. Media companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced pages for use on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join special pages that are set up to follow reporters’ political coverage. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.
“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News and a new Facebook member, said. “This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”
The collaboration between ABC News and Facebook started quietly several weeks ago, with personal pages of network reporters like Rick Klein, the author of ABC’s widely read political newsletter The Note, and Sunlen Miller, who has been covering Barack Obama.
Encouraging users to interact with reporters is a significant step for a news organization like ABC News. Until recently, a viewer wanting to respond to Mr. Klein’s daily essay could only write a comment or send an e-mail message to a generic address. Now, they can send private messages directly to reporters or can post them on the reporters’ public Facebook pages. For now, while the number of comments remains relatively small, reporters engage in dialogues with viewers.
Mr. Westin and Mr. Rose said that no money changed hands in the deal. For ABC News, the collaboration puts political content on a site with 56 million active users. For Facebook, it adds an authoritative source and fresh content for the site’s political section.
Around 250 users have signed up to follow Ms. Miller, an off-air reporter, making her the most popular to date. Ms. Miller believes her popularity is tied to the strong backing for Mr. Obama among Facebook users, with 164,000 declared supporters, more than twice as many as any other candidate.
“If you’re ABC News, your content can spread virally through all these friend networks,” said Steve Outing, an interactive media columnist for Editor & Publisher magazine.
For example, Eloise Harper, another off-air reporter, used a digital camera to record a 50-second clip of flags falling down behind Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign appearance in Iowa. The clip has been viewed over 350,000 times on ABCNews.com and Facebook.
Yes the walls between us and reporters are coming down as are the walls between us as we seek to talk about things that are important. I wonder what all of this will be like in 2 years time?
By 1999, John was publishing another best seller, 
