Facebook and Grass Roots Mobilization
Filed under: Social Marketing on Monday, September 10th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine“Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.”
Since Facebook opened its doors to non-students, the site has had rapid growth. From late May to late August they had an increase in registered users of 62.5% to 39 million, which is a great growth number. Facebook is easy to use, and has many plug and play applications that are simple to install on your Facebook page. You can easily find and add friends, and message back and forth between each other.
One feature that’s getting a lot of use these days is the groups feature. Anyone can set up a group, and send out invites to their friends, who send out invites to their friends and so on. These groups range from the bizarre – “I’m tired of getting shocked every time I touch anything” – to the industry specific – “SEO by the Sea” – to activist groups. Facebook has really proven itself to be an easy way to gather like minded people together and push for a specific cause. A recent example of using Facebook groups in such a way is “Students against Interest on Overdrafts as HSBC“, which actually succeeded in forcing HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation) to forgo charging students interest on overdraft loans upon graduation, after over 5,000 students signed up for the group.
Facebook, itself, is not immune from their own groups, in fact one that has recently generated some publicity is a group of over 7,000 breast feeding mothers (lactivists) that is rallying against the facebook photo policy, whereby pictures of breast feeding have been removed due to obscenity rules, and some users have been banned due to contravening these rules. The chances are, that with the publicity that is currently being generated by this group, Facebook is going to sit up and take notice and work with this group to come up with a workable solution for both parties.
So if you have a cause that you feel that people may want to rally behind, setting up a Facebook group is a good way to get the word out, and pull people in to support it.
I agree that a Facebook group can be a way to gather people together, but it is important to remember it isn’t a “build it and they will come” system.
Just like any way you are looking to tell your organization’s story, using Facebook takes diligent work. All of the groups Simon mentions started with one person and had to be nurtured to the thousands.
↓ Quote | Posted September 10, 2007, 7:15 amIndeed, for one the group has to have some reason to pull people in, then you actually have to work to get knowledge about the group out there. Firstly you’ll push it to your friends that are interested, and hope that they like it and push it out to their friends, and so on. Then, you’ll have to market the group if you want it to grow, especially if you have a specific target audience that you want to reach.
↓ Quote | Posted September 10, 2007, 7:42 am