Social Media Strategy: Community building – the News Feed

Remember the uproar Facebook created when its News Feed function went live? Suddenly we could see in one place what our friends were writing on each other’s walls, when they were breaking off their relationships, and whom they were becoming friends with. It was different than anything we’d seen before and while a select few embraced this new feature, most users reacted in a very negative nature causing a News Feed revolt of Titanic size. Facebook in turn created the ability for users to disable the News Feed – offering users choice.

Fast forward to now and look at all of the sites that have latched on to this oh-so-upsetting News Feed idea. Myspace picked up the very same concept without a hitch. FriendFeed was developed taking the Feed idea to the next level, allowing you to be constantly updated in one place of what your friends are doing all over the web. Firefox created My Social 24x7 to publish your FriendFeed in a sidebar on your browser giving you even easier access to your contacts’ actions.

The majority of my contacts on Facebook have their News Feeds enabled. After the original uproar why is there now such an easy acceptance for these feature?

I think that we in the Social Media sector get so excited about each new development in the field that we forget that others may need a little more convincing to see the benefits of these new ideas. Our internet marketing strategies will be more convincing if we start small and gradually build on those ideas as they are warmed to.

Social Media is here to stay and Firebelly is constantly brainstorming ways to decrease the anxiety that comes from the idea of all the facebooking, flickring, blogging, and tweeting, and instead display the excitement and sense of community that those of us already experiencing these things feel.

What do you think? What do you do to help newbies feel comfortable with actively maintaining a Web 2.0 presence?

-Julia Yoder

Comments

[TC Lofton]

Very interesting how this has all developed... Not even 3 years ago, one of the best perks of having a web presence was the ANONYMITY that it provided... a chance to put only the persona you desired out there in cyberspace (is it still cool to use that term?) However, now it seems that the initial "You mean my BOSS can find those pictures on Facebook???" shock has transformed into taking one's webpresence one step closer to almost digital tracking.

For the user, this provides an opportunity to really make their world a little smaller, more closely knit. For those who are wishing to use this to their business's advantage, this provides an opportunity to provide customers and clients with what could easily be referred to as transparency... a business presents itself with the same open attitude that a college sophomore would, so to speak. At long last, perhaps the internet is going to become a true, open global village like Bill Gates promised us it would be back in '95. Wowzers. Good job, Jules.