Why Facebook sucks to manage communities…
While Facebook is a great place to bring like-minded people together and engage with them, it is also an extremely painful environment for community moderators to manage their communities.
As some of you may know, I started a Marketing 2.0 community on Facebook, intended for marketers to discuss the future of marketing. The group took off rather nicely and we were able to conduct many interesting open mic discussions with industry thought leaders. As the group became larger a couple of things happened:
- I no longer had the opportunity to communicate with the community members (after 1,000 members or so, some bright Facebook person decided that you should no longer be able to communicate directly with your community members)
- The group slowly became overtaken with spammers – and with the lack of tools to manage spammers, it became unmanageable to clean up the space without spending an incredible amount of time on the task.
Since I still wanted to create a space for marketers to talk about the future of marketing, I created a new group at www.marketingtwo.net with a companion thought leadership blog at www.marketingtwo.com – both of which are taking off nicely, another proofpoint that there is a need for this kind of community/conversation.
That left me pondering on what to do with the Facebook group. On the one hand it was becoming too time consuming to keep it clean and on the other hand I did not want to give up on a community of 9,500+ members without at least trying. But I also did not want to have it become a public spam pit. So as a first step I closed down the group and invited some other volunteers to help me manage the space. That worked…and for people who requested to join the group I would send them a nice note explaining what we were doing and how they should/should not engage. After sending out 10 or 20 of those notes, I got a warning message from Facebook that I was spamming members and that they would shut me down.
So some other brilliant community person at Facebook now decided that I should not be able to communicate with people who request to join a community which I set up and manage… WTF????
The laws of increasing returns associated with communities is what will make people stick with Facebook in the long run, even if some other and better mousetrap appears on the horizon in the near future. Doing everything possible to make communities NOT work within Facebook is one of the biggest mistakes that Facebook is making.
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July 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Indeed, I don’t think Facebook appreciates that really, truly the best aspect that they have is their personal-economy of subgroups and sub-communities within the overall community. The fact that you can find communities related to, or peripheral to, your main focus of interest is a primary driver of the goodness that is facebook. They would be wise to enhance, not diminish, these subgroups and sub-communities within the larger Facebook environment. There is much they could to do further them!
But I doubt if they fully recognize the extent of this aspect of what they’ve created, because not much is happening on this front.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
I haven’t got into Facebook inspite of all the hype & following in US.
I am more an Orkut guy, been so nearly since its inception. Google’s networking site big in India & I am now owning a community of more than 14750 members there.
http://www.orkut.co.in/Community.aspx?cmm=55950
It is an unofficial group for my employer that I started off to keep in touch with some of my friends & old colleagues who had left the org. But over time, it became a hot spot for freshers from colleges, who would frequent the community to clear various doubts regarding the org, the joining formalities, the various options for training, dept.s, benefits, etc.
I faced the same problems of spam & vagabond youngsters. So first I put up “Ten Commandments” for the community [http://www.orkut.co.in/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=55950&tid=2508947966782649152]
Then I collated all the various threads that were recurring very year with new batches of college graduates joining us. This I put up as a Freshers’ Guide [http://www.orkut.co.in/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=55950&tid=2510010365598020416]
Then I request a few of the frequent participants to help me manage the spam. I roped in a guy who works out of one of our US offices to make it a 24 hour job. It worked!!!
And then came the best … Google started implementing their spam tech from GMail in Orkut. And now we don’t have to bother with SPAM at all!!! Orkut now moves the potential spams as well as the ones reported as spam by the members into a separate folder, which I can then later go through to remove the false positives.
Orkut is really shaping up as a great tool to entice our talent market – college graduates.
Best part is that the top guns in my org are still oblivious to this community, except one of our SVPs, the CKO. And the campus recruitment head vehemently disagrees that venturing into Orkut makes a good business sense! In the face of solid proof denouncing his claims at that!
July 12th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
True.. very true…
I feel that Facebook is designed to focus and serve individuals rather than communities. That’s why it doesn’t offer an easy way for group updates to get into your news feed!
I have so many groups that I can’t track its wall or other staff due to this reason.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
i never had a problem with facebook till now,i mean i use to get annoyed with the fact that you make your pictures private to just friends ,but if a friend posts a comment about your picture even if you are not my friend you’ll see da picture and comment can can see all my pictues by simply clicking that picture.
what did it for me was i tried to add mt nickname, but facebook would would not let me,fine i message them,they asked what i wanted to change it to,and i told them ,next thing i know my account is deactivated, and i get a letter asking me for a copy of my social and id,lololol these people must be crazy or smoking crack or something…i am speechless……no more fackbook for me..and that is why facebook sucks…..
August 1st, 2008 at 2:40 pm
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