Facebook Public Profile Pages - Chaos! by Don Philabaum

Date: To: From: Subject:

April 6th, 2009 College web administrators, communications and public relations professionals Don Philabaum Facebook Public Profile Pages and Groups! Bringing Organization to the Chaos

I’m hoping you can join an effort to bring organization to a chaotic situation. In working with colleges around the globe to help them develop a comprehensive – campus wide Internet strategy, one issue keeps coming up, “how to solve issues Facebook Public Profile Pages and Groups create”. For example, when you do a search for your college or university name on Facebook it’s likely that you will have over 500 groups and organizations displayed in on the results page. Some of the groups and pages will have as little as one member and others will have thousands. Making the matter worse, those that do have thousands may not be pages set up by students, faculty, administrators or alumni but by companies who are using the pages to accumulate “friends” they can market their products and services to. We need a strategy that brings organization from this chaos. I’ve done my best to present the problem and draft a framework of ideas that you can add to in order to develop the best solution for all campuses. Jump in and share your thoughts and ideas so we can bring order to a chaotic situation. Please keep the comments and ideas focused on providing a better way to organize and identify official college Facebook group and Public Profile pages. Thanks for your help in getting us all on the same page! (pun intended!) Sincerely,

Don Philabaum Internet Strategies Group don@internetstrategiesgroup.com P.S. We are interesting in wrapping up this white paper by May first. In the next 30 days talk with your colleagues and friends and share your ideas and solutions so the entire community doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel! 1

Facebook Public Profile Pages and Groups! Bringing Organization to the Chaos

A publicly written whitepaper

Coordinated by Don Philabaum &, President of Internet Strategies Group

Index • Introduction • Background • Organizing Pages • What Facebook needs to organize the chaos • Things the college needs to do to organize the chaos • Discussions needed on campus • Summary • Contributors

Introduction

This white paper is a collective effort by administrators, staff, consultants and organizations who are interested in helping colleges and universities create a strategy to better use Facebook Public Profiles and Groups. A little background

Facebook started out as a way to show what events were happening on the Harvard campus and a way to meet people. Today, Facebook has become a platform for businesses, organizations, nonprofit and even government agencies to communicate with and engage constituents. While the rest of the world is learning how to live, love and communicate on Facebook, graduates since 2005 have known the addictiveness of living a virtual life within Facebook. They have updated a lifetime of data, personal information and information. Assuming the typical student spent an average of 15 minutes per day for the four years they were in college, they would have spent 365 hours or the equivalent of 15.2 days updating Facebook. As Facebook added functionality and tools registrations and sharing of information has increased significantly. Now reaching 200 million users worldwide, the behaviors of users are changing and there is a significant increase in the amount of information and data that is being updated and shared. Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook was recently quoted as predicting: “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before … that means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.” Facebook has continually innovated and copied successful strategies of other sites to give users the ability to share content and information. Flickr was at one time one of the largest photo sharing sites on the web and within a relatively short period of time, following their introduction of easy techniques to upload photos, Facebook has become the largest website sharing photos. Facebook has done such an effective job of building a closed community that it sucks users in and keep them there that students find it easier to communicate with their friends through the multiple channels Facebook provides. Email has lost it’s effectiveness for students who find it easier to communicate with friends through Facebook.

Gaetan Giannini, an assistant professor at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pa., has spotted this trend. "Today I can't reach students by e-mail because they don't read their e-mail," he says. "But if I contact them on Facebook they respond immediately." One of the other changes introduced early on was the ability for anyone to create a group around anything. This has resulting in hundreds of thousands of groups or Public Profile Pages being created on Facebook. These can have as little as a couple members or tens of thousands of members. Barack Obama’s public profile page has over 6 million friends which gives the president his own TV, radio, newspaper and magazine to continually communicate to his supporters. So the problem starts when you try to organize all of the pages. Group pages and Public Profile pages are now being created by business organizations, non profits and organizations world wide. There are so many groups it’s nearly impossible at times to drill down to what you are looking for. Facebook offers limited solutions. There are two ways to find groups and pages. The first is simply to search for them and the second is to click on Facebook pages which directs you to a page that categorizes the pages. Options provided include places, products, services, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, organizations, politicians, government officials, non- profits, TV shows, films, games, sport teams, celebrity/public figures, music and websites. Nowhere in this list were colleges! If you search for an organization group or Public Profile page you have to weed through the hundreds if not thousands of pages to find the group you want to join. This incredibly time consuming and prevents “official” groups and Public Profile pages from increasing participation and members. Worse when you search, the results include groups or pages from all of the following areas: • • • • • • • • • •

Organizations Departments/Office Class (incoming) Faculty Clubs Fraternal Sports Student Alumni (breaks out in department, major, sport, minor, club, ethnicity, etc) Squatters

So what can we do about this? The following pages offer a series of ideas and suggestions that will help your college bring organization to this chaos. 5

Three areas that can help solve this There are three areas where your college can begin discussions to help solve this problem. We’ll go into a more detail discussion of each of the following: 1. Things Facebook needs to do to organize the chaos 2. Things the college needs to do to organize the chaos 3. Discussions you need to have on campus

Things Facebook needs to do to organize the chaos: 1. Give official organization’s groups and Public Profile pages priority results listing 2. Force Squatters to give up their pages and transfer “fans” 3. Ban organizations who “imitate” organizations Let’s drill into details.

1. Give official organization’s groups and Public Profile pages priority results listing Officially recognized groups and Public Profile pages should be given an higher priority than other pages with the college name. This idea is to better serve the person looking for those groups as well as drill to the bottom of the search organizations created with few members and not relevant to the person search. 2. Force Squatters to give up their pages and transfer “fans” There are numerous examples of organizations who are creating groups and Public Profile pages using the college name and in many cases the logo which gives Facebook users the impression that it’s an official college page. Many of these pages have more users than official university pages because they used advertising and more effective viral marketing techniques. Facebook has to take the position that these organizations are violating the college license agreements and are misusing its brand. Instead of each college having to fight this battle, it should be Facebooks responsibility. Precedence can be found in media companies suing and YouTube when individuals put copy-righted content on YouTube. 3. Ban organizations who “imitate” organizations To prevent squatters from using the organization name and build a community around the college and universities constituents, Facebook should take a hard line on this issue and ban any organization from Facebook is they knowingly use the logo, image or imply they are a part of the college and university in order to develop a community of fans for “commercial” use.

Things the college needs to do to organize the chaos 1. Create a Dashboard that Organizations can manage their groups and Public Profile Page 2. Provide users with a hierarchy listing of all groups and Public Profile pages Lets drill into each of these: 1) Create a Dashboard that Organizations can manage their groups and Public Profile Page There needs to be a way that an organization can validate themselves to be the official organization and then have the ability to create an organizational hierarchy that best serves the colleges needs. The dash board would allow the college; identify which groups and public pages are endorsed by the college, assign ownership and password access (to accommodate changing ownership), categorize the profile page. 2) Provide users with a hierarchy listing of all groups and Public Profile pages Another view that would help the person searching is to provide a hierarchy view. The viewer would have an option to click a button that enables them to see the listing of all groups and Public Profile pages based on how the college has them organized. The view could also show which of the person’s friends are members of those groups.

Discussions needed on campus: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Create a campus wide Facebook group and Public Profile page policy Educate groups and organizations to difference of Groups and Public Profile pages Encourage the use of groups and Public Profile pages Build connections between campus groups and public profile pages

Let’s drill into each of these. 1. Create a campus wide Facebook group and Public Profile page policy The first step in bringing some organization to this chaos is to create a campus wide policy on Facebook. This is not meant to be a 6 month process. Ideally communications, public relations/marketing and representatives of colleges or departments should come together for a briefing on the issues and opportunities and a core group assembles to put the strategy together. This group can keep the others informed of their progress and bring them together for a final review of the policy. 2. Educate groups and organizations to difference of Groups and Public Profile pages Once the policy and organizational structure is in place, there has to be an infrastructure and mechanism to educate page content author’s ideas and tricks to increase the implementation of the content. Video, online courses and webinars can be used to get the message out. 3. Encourage the use of groups and Public Profile pages As we stated earlier, the Groups and Public profile pages are the foundation of capturing the news information and life of campus. They are the yearbooks of this and future generations of students. The activities, the events and will represent the life and times of the students and they will all be available at a click of a button. Your group and Public Profile pages will have videos, pictures and names of everyone identified. Knowing that is the end play, the college should encourage their use. 4. Build connections between campus groups and public profile pages Today there is no connection between official campus Facebook groups and Public Profile Pages. We need to have a way to show connections between these.

Summary We have an incredible opportunity to tap into the infrastructure Facebook has created to organize our department, clubs and organization group and Public Profile pages. Facebook grew up on the college campus and the campus is already a heavy user of the these functions. Campuses that adopt a campus wide Facebook group and Public Profile strategy will see increases in participation in student groups and it will lead to more content being share which is information and data the college can mine now and in the future. Imagine the benefits the alumni and advancement offices will receive by being able to bring together alumni who have lived in the same residence, had the same professors, attended the same events, participated in the same work study programs and yes frequented the same bars. With all of this information and data, the college will be able to make a more customized ask. The admissions office will benefit by being able to show prospective students how active their clubs and organizations are. Prospective students will be able to drill into the organizations they are interested in and effortless learn more, view videos of the games, photographs and team score. Failure to take this opportunity to bring organization out of chaos will result in our students and alumni being underserved and confused.

Contributors The following are the names of concerned higher education, consultants and others who have contributed to this public whitepaper.

About Don Philabaum Don Philabaum is an early adopter of online community and social media. He registered the URL, www.onlinecommunity.com and founded in a company in 1995 which eventually built over 300 private password protected online communities for organizations around the world. Author of 5 books, including Alumni Online Engagement and his latest books, Internet Dough and Engage Customers Online provide practical ways organizations can use the Internet to better serve their constituents.