Green Tea Ice Cream

Has it really been that long?

Autumn terms in HE are skull-crushers that seldom leave you much headspace for abstract thought or blogging. Additionally, we’ve (domestic “we”) got a baby due in two or three weeks…excuses, excuses…

Meanwhile, we’re (work “we”) looking at Facebook Pages, which launched last Monday. We haven’t gone any further than claiming our organisation’s name so far but already I’m a bit concerned that part of the beauty of Facebook for us might be undermined if we whole-hearted attempt to shift the audience we have on our Facebook group over to a Page.

Issues?

• Style of communciation - groups impose an impression of directness of “speech” which derives from the fact that the group doesn’t answer - the individuals who are part of a group do.
• Following on from this,what’s the difference between an organisation’s ‘page’ and its website?  Each presents an “Official” view.
• The language is an issue for me - groups have members. People join a group. If you’re in the service business, that level of connectedness is important. Facebook groups have fans. Yuck. Why would anyone want to be a fan of a HE student services department? (I’m not the only person who hates this!)
• Smaller issues like localisation - something Facebook is very bad at is acknowledging its international audience. Hence, we’re asked to provide details of the ‘transit system’. Or whether we have ‘valet parking’. Even more annoyingly (and unlike groups), there’s no provision for free text provision of information. Or a field to put a fax (on Facebook, organizations provide valet parking but have one phone number).

Search Engine Journal argue that you need a page now on the grounds that it’s free, ever so slightly viral, open to the world (whereas your Facebook group needs a login to join) and lets you send proper updates to “fans”. Admittedly, the lack of an update or proper messaging feature on groups is an irritant but I wonder if Facebook will punish heavy users of this feature the way they’ve historically punished people (like us) who send too many group/Page messages. I also liked Jeremiah Owyang’s take on this.

Of course, the whole proposition is about advertising, what some commentators have accurately termed Facebook’s Adwords. But will the Pages proposition actually enable organisations to get by without ads altogether? Or even without a website? Stowe Boyd is experimenting with this - I’ll await the results with interest. He also comments - fairly - that

many of the Facebook groups that were formed in the past should be shuttered, and converted to Facebook business pages, since many are thinly disguised business presences.

A lot of these arguments - like Social Media Today’s question as to whether Facebook Pages will kill off the microsite - depend on whether you accept that Facebook is on the verge of effectively becoming the Web, which seems a rather extreme proposition to me. Additionally, early experiments like the Walmart Facebook page proved problematic (disastrous, according to Techdirt). Though Mashable points out that you can now add applications like Simply Feeds to your Pages which does add a whole new level of communications capacity.

Ultimately, it depends what you want your for - communicating and engaging with the people who use your service on a level playing or as a blunt instrument to leverage another incremental slice of brand equity. For latter, Pages are just what the doctor ordered. For the former, I suspect Facebook Groups are still the way to go.