Last week my boss went to some conference interstate to do with human services and IT stuff and returned a convert. Prior to this enlightenment she viewed Facebook and similar social networking services with cynical distrust, convinced that it would forge unhealthy relationships between staff outside of work and breed counter-productive gossip mills. Or something. Anyway, now she's extolling the possible benefits of business related forums where clients can have open and productive discussions while also feeding us, um, feedback without having to resort to the far less reliable process of rusting suggestion boxes and posting out evaluation forms that rarely get posted back. The Gen Y's of Headspace must have made a pretty good impression because she also told us about the potential of peer to peer, 'word of mouth' online promotion of our services that would spread as a result of client stories.
Millions of businesses and causes promote their sites through FB, and their popularity are, indeed, as result of P2P viral marketing. This is not a bad thing, because it relies on self-formed, self-regulating online communities to spread the word rather than traditional advertisng. I mentioned that the other appeal about offering such a forum is that it gave people the confidence to speak publically (under optional anonymity) without actually having to speak in public. A form of virtual empowerment with the added bonus of seeing one's words in virtual print.
After the boss's evangelical spiel, I caught up with our IT guy who also happens to be my best mate. He had attended the same conference. His views on the subject were characteristically more cynical and tempered. He explained the the two girls who held the Headspace promo session had achieved great things with the nation-wide site, but also had to be on 24 hour call to moderate and vet any client stories, blogging or articles as they were submitted. The site was devoted to mental health, so any material that might, say, evoke suicidal ideation or unhealthy coping mechanisms had to be wiped asap. Such a site required constant attention to security and content. It would be a lot of hard work, and he already had a lot of hard work to do as it was.
Promoting such a site via FB was also fraught with peril, he continued. More than a few staff have FB accounts (including me) and while our internet-capable clients might welcome the chance to join our buisness group they may also mistakenly feel entitled to then try to befriend any staff linked to that business. I can see the potential problems there, but I can also see that they could be curtailed by sensibly advising staff not to 'become a fan' or 'friend' of their own workplace business FB page in the first place. Hell, we could even treat them like functional adults and let them make up their own mind. I mean, who would want to anyway, seriously?
I had a search on FB for Headspace (found the Freemantle branch) and then added it as a friend. Not because I'm a suicidal adolescent, but because this is one way to assess just how effective such a move is. At the time of me joining there were 181 friends there. I'll monitor it over the coming weeks and see what sort of growth occurs.
UPDATE (5 May 2010): Headspace now has 1278 'friends' on FB. That's a huge improvement on 181, but it's still pretty low in the greater scheme of things.
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