When people ask me how I had the foresight to dive into Facebook before it started appearing on the covers of magazines, I’m always left wishing I had some profoundly impressive answer to give them. But the truth involved much less foresight on my part: the new co-host of my podcast was colleg-age and she decided I should be on Facebook, so she signed me up for it. Not only can I not take credit for having the foresight to see the impending value in doing so, I can’t even take credit for picking out my original profile picture. So I’m the last person who should be giving advice on Facebook, right?
Half a year later and I still feel like something of a Facebook newbie. But in these past six months I’ve found a number of ways to make Facebook both an interesting activity and a valuable tool…even for a thirty year old college dropout like me. I’ve learned a lot about what to do to make your Facebook experience a rewarding one, as well as some of what not to do, and so despite my relative newbie status I thought I’d go ahead and share what I’ve learned. Because I know of no other way of doing so, my advice comes in story form.
I’d spent a lot of time trying to like MySpace but never could take it seriously. You already know why. So when first presented with the idea of Facebook, which back in March was just a few months removed from its college-only status, I thought “great, it’s another MySpace but even more juvenile.” What I found, though, was that despite the overwhelming youth of most of its members at the time, Facebook was actually a more mature environment. I might actually like it, I thought, if I could just manage to find anyone on there I actually knew.
You see, unlike MySpace where you can see a good deal of information about most members without having any connection to them, Facebook is more like a game of “Match” where all the cards start off face-down and you have to work to gradually uncover bits and pieces of the playing field which relate to each other until you can see enough of it to begin to know what you’re looking at.
The first thing I did was to find the rest of the iProng Staff, or at least the college-age ones who were already on there, by sending them friend invites. Then, at the behest of my co-host, I created an “iProng” group and invited the rest of the staff to join it. And at that point in the game that was about all I could do. Missing from the Facebook community were any real-world friends my own age, any business acquaintances, or even any of the people I had met earlier that day at PodCamp Atlanta. But if nothing else, I thought that perhaps Facebook would serve as a tool for keeping in more regular contact with the rest of the iProng Staff, as we do tend to be spread out across the country.
It wasn’t until three weeks later that I had my first Facebook revelation. When I finished up the day at PodCamp NYC and headed back to the hotel, the very first thing I did was to check my stack of newly acquired business cards against the Facebook search tool. And what do you know, a few of them (four of five perhaps) were actually on there. It came as no surprise that they were generally the youngest people I’d met that day, but nonetheless I’d found a more substantial way of keeping in touch with my newfound friends and acquaintances than the typical “it was nice meeting you too” email exchanges which too often peter out before any lasting bond can be established.
Now that I’d managed to find a few people on Facebook outside of my own staff, I felt emboldened with the prospects of finding more such people and making something happen with it. So I dusted off my stack of business cards from last year’s Podcast Expo and, sure enough, found that some of my fellow podcasters were indeed on Facebook. Many of them were in the same boat as me, with just a few friends and a fairly sparse profile. But some others had apparently been on there for quite awhile and had already carved out their Facebook identity quite nicely. Clearly they’d been at it longer than I had, and that gave me a sense of confidence about pushing forward. If it was working for them, then I could make it work for me.
Once I’d finished friending all the new media-types on Facebook whom I’d already met in real life, I invited them all to join the iProng group. And to my surprise, most of them accepted. That left me with the dilemma of figuring out what to do with this group. No longer comprised of just my own staff, the group now included some iProng readers and listeners as well as a whole lot of people who were neither. My initial instinct was to try to use the group, whose membership was now pushing fifty people, to boost listenership of my podcast.
So every time we released an episode of iProng Radio, I’d send out a message to the entire group announcing the new episode. But as the weeks went on, I noticed that with every new message we’d lose a few group members. And in a group of fifty, losing two or three of them each week is bad news. After getting past wanting to take it personally, a few rather obvious things occurred to me. Anyone who had joined the iProng group was likely already aware of the podcast, and turning such a small group of people into listeners wasn’t the point anyway. Instead, it was about staying connected to these people and being able to reach them when there was actually something worth engaging them over, not just anytime we had happened to publish new content.
Once I stopped sending out weekly messages, the group stopped shrinking. Around this time I also noticed that most of the other groups I’d joined which were sending out weekly messages had ceased doing so as well. Maybe we all figured it out at the same time. In any case I turned my attention instead to making the group more worthy of these people’s membership by adding lots of relevant photos from events such as Podcast Expo, Macworld Expo, and various PodCamps. I learned sort of by accident that by tagging the other Facebook members who happened to appear in those photos, they received an automatic ping letting them know that they had been tagged. Finally, I’d found a way of letting people know about the group that was at once less invasive than mass-messaging and also more relevant to those individuals.
Soon I found that people were joining the iProng group that I’d never met nor in some cases even heard of. Whether they were iProng readers who’d found their way to the group, or people who happened to be searching for iPod and iPhone related groups, didn’t matter. What did matter was that I now had a choice: did I want to start friending these people? On the one hand I didn’t know who they were. On the other hand, they’d joined my group. Since there were just a few of them at that point, I figured I’d go ahead and reach out to them. It turns out it was the right call. To date I’ve never had an iProng group member decline my friend request, and I’ve come to know some rather interesting people as a result of taking this backdoor approach to meeting them.
Then summertime came and everything changed. People started finding me on Facebook. Lots of them! Had I suddenly become that much of a celebrity? Hardly. As it turns out, the world was finding Facebook, or I should say that the portion of the world older than age twenty-two was waking up to the idea that Facebook could indeed be a worthwhile activity. People I’d met at previous new media events, who weren’t on Facebook at the time I met them, were now seeking me out because they’d just signed up. And it occurred to me that there had to be plenty more friends and associates who were just now finding their way onto Facebook but who didn’t know I was on there. What to do about this?
I resolved that the best way to proceed was that anytime I made Facebook contact with someone I already knew, I would then go through their list of friends and look for other people I already knew. This “mutual friends” theory allowed me to uncover many real-world friends that I had somehow missed in my earlier attempts. I found, however, that I had to avoid the temptation to go “friend shopping” while doing so, which is the term I’ve applied to the practice of sending a friend request to people just because they happen to be a friend of a friend, live in the same town, or have a name which vaguely resembles someone else you know, even though you have absolutely no idea who they are and no actual interest in them. That’s cheating, and it’s unproductive anyway. Let’s not forget why MySpace sucks so much.
What I’ve found, however, and I picked up this tip from Jeff Pulver’s blog, is that you have to keep going back and checking for real-world friends who’ve just now found their way onto Facebook, as they’re still filing in through the door in a rather irregular fashion. It’s easy to just say that the newbies can come find you when they’re ready, but when I think back to how clueless I was about finding my real-world contacts on Facebook when I first started out, I’m left to conclude that it’s better for me to go find these folks than wait until they finally figure out how to find me.
But in my continued search for existing real-world friends on Facebook, I encountered another dilemma. What should I do when I came across someone like the aforementioned Jeff Pulver? I’d never met him or even been in a room while he was speaking, but I knew of his role in the creation of the VoIP industry, and through (friend and occasional columnist for iProng) Chris Brogan’s blog references to his boss Jeff Pulver, I felt like I sorta kinda knew the guy. So I sent him a friend request, which to my relief, he quickly approved. As a result of my Facebook friendship with Jeff I found links to posts on his blog, which I’ve now started reading.
I’ll probably never meet Jeff in real life, and may never even have so much as an email exchange with him, but thanks to my little leap of faith on Facebook I found my way to a wealth of content on his blog (which it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go read if I hadn’t seen the links he posted). Then again, if not for the fact that I knew he was a friend of a friend and a public figure who was probably used to receiving friend requests from people he’d never heard of, I might not have taken that leap in the first place. I’m still struggling with whether, or to what extent, I should be friending people on Facebook simply because I know who they are, when I know that the converse is not true.
While that dilemma goes unresolved for me, my big breakthrough came earlier this month when someone invited me to join the event that Emile Bourquin had created for his Podcast and New Media Expo. Until that point the only “events” I’d seen posted on Facebook typically involved college keg parties, but here was the CTO of the biggest annual event in the podcasting community using Facebook to promote his event. Since iProng is both an exhibitor and a media partner in this year’s Podcast Expo, I didn’t need a Facebook invitation to help me decide to attend. But it did give me an idea.
If the Expo itself qualified as a Facebook event, then perhaps our booth at the Expo was worthy of being turned into an event on Facebook as well. So I created an “iProng booth at Podcast Expo” event and then proceeded to invite everyone in the iProng group (which by this time was more than a hundred people) as well as my friends who weren’t part of the group. After the initial few minutes of “is anyone actually going to take this seriously?” anxiety, I found that most invitees were in fact replying with a yes, no, or maybe. This was great. Suddenly I knew which of my Facebook friends I could look forward to seeing at this year’s Expo, which ones were on the fence, and which ones I needn’t bother with Expo-related stuff.
It was at that point that I had perhaps my biggest Facebook dilemma of all. There were people, plenty of them, who had RSVP’d for the Podcast Expo event but whom I’d never met nor heard of. What should I do about them? Here was my logic: my primary goal at this year’s Expo, as it was last year, is to make as many new friends and acquaintances as I can. Sure, our reason for exhibiting is to boost readership, but in this kind of community event you don’t do that by sales pitch-ing them. You do it by getting to know them, and letting them get to know you, and if and when they need what your publication has to offer, they’ll know how to find you.
So if I’m going to try to meet every Expo attendee I can while I’m there, and if as soon as the Expo is over I’m going to sit down and send a Facebook friend request to every single person who gave me their business card, and if I’m staring at a list of people who have publicly announced their plans to attend the Expo, shouldn’t I take the proactive step of sending them friend requests now? That way I can match a name to a face ahead of time and find out something about what they do in this industry, and hopefully have a more rewarding conversation when I do finally meet them in person next month.
With great trepidation, I did something I swore I’d never do. I sent friend requests to everyone who said they were attending the Podcast Expo event on Facebook, even if I’d never before heard their name. Now before you go crazy on me, we’re talking about a few dozen people here at most, so it’s not like I went all MySpace on them. As a precautionary measure, while I never bother to include a personal message when sending a friend request to someone I already know, in this case I explained to each of them that I was hoping to meet them at the Expo and wanted to get the process started a little early. While a few of them ignored the invite or politely wrote back and said that they prefer not to approve people they’ve never met, most folks approved my request.
This year’s Expo will have three thousand or more attendees, so it’s not as if the few dozen new “friends” I picked up in the process represent a significant portion of the overall attendance. But if these are the people who are forward-thinking enough to have RSVP’d the Expo event on Facebook, then I suspect that these are people I’ll be glad I met, particularly in light of the fact that the ever-growing size of the Expo means that I will likely in fact not get to meet every single attendee in person. The cool part now is that if I happen to walk past any of these folks at random next month, I stand a good chance or recognizing them and starting a conversation that might not have happened if I hadn’t. I’ve taken to referring to this as “predictive friending” and while you have to be careful not to overdo it, I believe there is value in establishing an online friendship with someone whom you hope to eventually meet in real life.
Although I had no intention of doing so when I started out, it then occurred to me that since these people were now my Facebook friends I could invite them to both join the iProng group and attend the “iProng booth at Podcast Expo” event. Many of them accepted on both counts, thereby creating a conduit to let them know what to expect from our Expo booth. They could easily have declined, so I’ve interpreted their acceptance as a sign that they’re indeed interested in what iProng will be doing at this year’s Expo. But, keeping in mind my earlier lesson learned about overdoing it with group messages, I have yet to send out a single message to the people who’ve RSVP’d for the event; I’ll save that until we get closer to the Expo and I’ll be sure to make it count.
Somewhere along the line I found out that Jason Tucker had created a Facebook event for the PodCamp SoCal that OC Podcasters and LA Podcasters, both of iProng’s Expo partners, are organizing the day before Podcast Expo at the same convention center (with the Expo’s full blessing, if you’re wondering). Following the logic that Expo attendees would want to at least know about PodCamp SoCal, I went through the list of people who had said yes or maybe to attending our Expo booth, and invited them to attend PodCamp as well. The last time I checked, a number of them had accepted the invite.
When the Expo arrives next month we’ll see if all of this cross-pollination across Facebook will indeed pay off in any meaningful way. Will people come up to me and thank me for letting them know about the iProng booth and PodCamp SoCal ahead of time? Or maybe they’ll come up to me and say “Hey, you’re the idiot who sent me a friend request and I don’t even know who you are!” Maybe a little of both. We’ll know soon enough.
But my most recent and perhaps most useful lesson learned on Facebook came last week when I realized that it was once again time to expand the iProng Staff. While I followed all the traditional routes as usual, it occurred to me to also attempt to leverage my presence on Facebook in order to let people know that I was looking for new blood. Since I hadn’t sent out a mass-message to the iProng group in a few months, I felt safe in sending them all a message which simply stated that who and what I was looking for.
The good news is that as best I can tell, sending out the message didn’t cause a single person to leave the iProng group. The better news is that I received replies of interest from a double-digit number of people, several of whom I believe will actually end up coming on board when it’s all said and done. Among them are friends with whom I’ve had ongoing real world contact, acquaintances I met once at a conference and then found on Facebook afterwards, and startlingly, total strangers whom I’d found through my recent “predictive friending” activities. So not only were folks not offended that I attempted to friend them based simply on the fact that they were planning on attending the Expo, some of them in fact wanted to be part of my team.
It’s way too early to know how any of this is going to work out, and my continued trepidation leaves me convinced that I’m still a newbie when it comes to Facebook. But as much as the Facebook platform and community are still continuing to evolve, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all newbies at this. In the six months I’ve been at it, I’ve gone from having no idea what the heck I was supposed to be doing on there, to connecting with my existing staff, to promoting an upcoming event, to finding new staff members – and I’ve learned some things not to do along the way. There are still moments, plenty of them in fact, where I continue to wonder what the heck I’m supposed to be doing on there, but I believe that’s the beauty of it. Like so much of the social media experiment, it’s all still new enough that there really are no rulebooks to follow, meaning that we all have to collectively try to figure out how to play, or how not to play, this game in a way which provides the most benefits for all involved.
I hope my experiences will in some way serve as a guide to help you as you find your own way through the Facebook experience. But I know that something like Facebook ends up being a vastly different experience for each participant, so it’s my hope that each of you will use the comment section below to share something you’ve learned about Facebook which might help the next person. I know I’m still seeking any advice I can find on how to make my Facebook experience a more rewarding one, and you should be too. Remember, we’re all still newbies.
You can find me on Facebook here. I look forward to receiving your friend request whether we’ve already met or not.
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