Meet Simon Berry who is the CEO of Ruralnet in the UK. I met Paul Henderson, who works with Ruralnet last year when I attended the LASA Conference in Birmingham with David Wilcox last January. He shared some thoughts about an organisational presence on Facebook in the comments on a post I wrote last week on Facebook pages/ads and wanted to elevate it from comments so we might reflect a bit further.
The crucial thing is that the presence created must be good, up to date and interesting. However, we don't have unlimited resources (as a charity) and so its maintenance has to fit in with everything else we do and mustn't be a separate process stuck on the side. This means that a crucial element of the Facebook presence must be the ability to 'pull in' content from elsewhere using RSS.
He goes to describe how this is hard to do with a Facebook group. He has also tried to set up a Facebook page for his organization, but discovered there are some bugs with adding applications that are installed on his personal profile. He goes to muse about setting up RuralNet as an individual on Facebook. (Don't do it, it is against the Facebook TOS and you risk having it be deleted like Ranger Rick)
Some observations:
- This gets to the tension points between you as an individual representing your organization in Facebook via your personal profile versus using groups, causes, or pages that have less than adequate features for efficiency and community building.
- There are some applications that let you automatically cross-post content using RSS or API - but it is a hit or miss as to what works. Also, it's a mystery because when you install different apps some others stop working.
- For efficiency, I've experimented and tried some of the following but haven't found great solutions
- Flickr to Facebook - Let's me auto publish my flickr photos, but has some problems. I've tried two other Flickr to Facebook apps but they are glitchy and also don't integrate with your Facebook photos album
- Share on Facebook bookmarklet I use this to share web pages while I'm browsing. I was using to share blog posts, but not totally automatic.
- I've switched over the typepad auto posting to Facebook which worked great, but now seems to have crapped out.
- Blog Friends - takes your RSS feed and your friends on Facebook feeds and republishes to your profile. You can adjust which friends and the look.
- I tried endlessly to synch my twitter account with my profile, but it requires that you let anyone read your tweets. I prefer not to do that.
- Delicious -- I use del.icio.us for links quite a bit and that apps great. It auto posts to my Facebook profile.
So, I'd love to know some specific aps on Facebook that people have used that allow you to stream RSS onto your individual profile (if you go the individual representing your .org route or that work with Facebook pages)
Hat tip to Steve Bridger - the famous Buzz Director.
Thanks for help and encouragement Beth. It's reassuring that others have problems getting things to work. I thought it was me!
Key things I've learnt today:
- to add a 'page' for your organisation go to www.facebook.com/business - thanks to Steve Bridger for this
- pages are tied to you as an individual (I thought you'd log on as the organisation to edit pages but when you set up a new page you get a new application appear in your apps list and you manage it from there)
- that not all apps work with pages - when you want to add an app to your page make sure you click the 'Add to page' button. If that button's not there then the app will be added to your individual profile and not your 'page'
- if you're a NFP then don't choose 'store' as the type of organisation (pretty obvious if you think about it!)
- My Flickr doesn't seem to work with pages. When you add it to your 'page' it doesn't post pictures there, it posts them to your individual profile . . . I posted a query to the developer
And . . . I've met Beth Kanter. When I started on this mission I posted a facebook note - two of my friends dived in and pointed to me to one of Beth's blog postings and I commented . . . isn't the internet wonderful?!
Posted by: Simon | November 19, 2007 at 02:27 PM
Hi Beth (and Simon!),
I also use the 'Feed Invasion' application which you can set which feeds you want to appear in your profile. Fairly stable and reliable.
'Blog Friends' has also appeared on my profile (although don't remember adding that one myself!) which keeps me up to date with friends feeds too.
My only question in all this is how we can feed back user experiences and learning back to Facebook to make the processes and journeying easier for all in the future?
Posted by: Laura Whitehead | November 19, 2007 at 02:55 PM
Simon just messaged me this:
Hi Beth
Just got this from the My Flickr developer:
==
Simon,
My Flickr has not been fully developed for pages. I should probably turn that feature off until I get around to it.
No sillyness of yours.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
-specialk
==
And adding My Flickr to pages is no longer an option.
Posted by: Beth Kanter | November 19, 2007 at 06:41 PM
Just to round this off, it's interesting to reflect on the journey we have been on at ruralnet|uk.
We realised about 18 months ago that to be relevant we needed to get our stuff (online services) into places where people are operating online already. We cannot expect everyone to 1) know who we are 2) what we do 3) come to us . .
After nearly a year of really hard work on the part of our ICT Team mainly it is a real delight to be able to draw our existing materials from various places into facebook.
A current project of ours is supporting rural communities in the UK through the Post Office closure programme and there is loads of activity on facebook around this. Hopefully, we will be able to use our page to expose these groups to the services ruralnet|uk is able to offer these groups free of charge.
See: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6672761620
On the same theme we've just deployed our first 'online service delivery' widget here:
http://www.essexruralpartnership.org.uk/postoffice.asp
Look at the bottom left of the page.
Posted by: Simon Berry | November 20, 2007 at 03:36 AM
Hello Simon and Beth. Am currently using Typepad's auto post in Facebook....but, as you say above, this is currently going to my individual friends, rather than the SSE group. And not being able to post applications (someone has made the SSE into an app via Widget Box for example) to groups is a pain....the 'page' sounds interesting, so I will investigate.
Cheers
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2379952871
Posted by: NickTemple | November 20, 2007 at 09:21 AM
Is there any way to put the Share on Facebook bookmarklet automatically on blog posts via Typepad?
Posted by: Nick Temple | November 27, 2007 at 01:59 AM
These instructions came from Michele Martin and I'm posting them here:
Of course--glad to help!
Nick, the way that I added the Facebook option to my Typepad blog is with Feedburner. From looking at your blog, it looks like you may not have a Feeburner account set up, so if not, the first thing you'd need to do is visit their site here . You'll be able to just copy and paste the URL to your blog in the box at the bottom of the page where it says "Start Feedburning Now" and Feedburner will set up the feed for you. Then follow their steps to publicize and optimize your feed.
Under the "Optimize" tab (once your feed is set up), you'll see a link to "Feed Flare" in the right sidebar. Click on that--this is where you can select "add to Del.icio.us," "Share on Facebook," etc. Select whatever options you want by putting a check in the box next to the items. Once you've selected what you want, scroll to the bottom and click on the "save" button.
Now it's time to turn on FeedFlare and Feedburner on your Typepad blog so that all of this shows up in your blog posts and your feeds are set up. Scroll down to the bottom of the FeedFlare page again, right above the "save" button, to where it says, "Get the HTML code to put FeedFlare on Your site." Click on the drop down menu and select "Typepad." It will then open a new window that explains how you can activate Feedburner and FeedFlare on your site.
I hope this explains things--please let me know if you have any problems or questions with this. Sometimes it's hard to get everything via email.
Best,
Posted by: Beth Kanter | November 27, 2007 at 01:31 PM