Motivating the stragglers: How to get them to sign up for Facebook?

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This Sunday I was out to lunch with four friends. All but one were on Facebook, and of us four “Facebookies,” three of us had added the My Aquarium application and were actively sending fish to each other along with funny notes. So, what did we do? We talked about the last couple days’ activity. I felt awkward though that one person was left out, so I said to my friend “Mary,” “you really should get on Facebook.”

She replied that she just didn’t get into “those things,” (by that she meant social networks like Facebook and MySpace). While I can see why someone wouldn’t get into MySpace (heh heh), Facebook has really helped me stay connected to (and reconnect with) people I would have lost track of over the years. It’s really enhanced my social life, and it’s easy to use to boot.

So why isn’t Mary (and others who share her disinterest) on Facebook? I’ve boiled down peoples responses to two categories:

  1. People who don’t get into social networking for one reason or another (I think my friend fits this category)
  2. People who are intimidated by computers and/or the Internet

So, why do I care? Does it really matter? (Short answer: to me it does)

I want an easier way to coordinate social activities with my primary social group, the twenty-somethings at my church. The primary way we let everyone know what’s going on is via email to our group. Since my church is low-tech as a whole (they grasp email), people are always getting left off of group activity email blasts. We’re a fairly active and tight-knit bunch, so when people get left out multiple times in a row, it becomes an issue and feelings get hurt, even though there was no ill intent.

I’d say 80% of us are Facebook friends with each other. It would be very easy to create a Facebook group called “Young Adult Lifegroup” and broadcast events there. If you want the updates, join the Facebook group (and here’s instructions how and an invite). This prevents people being left out on the email CC and gives one central, easy to use location for group “stuff.”

I floated the idea a month ago and it was shot down. I’ll probably float it again soon. It looks like I’m an early adopter getting frustrated waiting for the late adopters :-)

For people who just aren’t into social networks, it would be great if Facebook had a feature that let you subscribe to a group via email; news items, events, photo gallery notifications, etc. This feature would go beyond the “invite people not on Facebook via email” feature when creating events, instead someone could sign up for email updates from a group if they received an invitation code. That would be cool, and it would let the 80% use a centralized site to manage their events and meta-discussion with the group.

The idea of social networking among real-life contacts is a very attractive proposition. It documents and makes it easy to communicate a shared culture, and it provides a one-stop place to get the word out about activities and events. But, some people haven’t taken the plunge yet and aren’t on Facebook (by far the most useable and attractive social network right now). Pretty soon, I see a new form of “digital divide,” those who are connected to their in-person friends via social networks, and those who are not. Call it the “social network divide” or “social OS divide.”

The questions I’m left with in the case of my friends are:

  1. What is keeping the stragglers from signing on board?
  2. If they’re intimidated, what can be done to make them feel more confident?
  3. If they’re just not into it, where’s the motivation to get them into it?

Posted on 26 July '07 by Tim Courtney, under Social Networking, Web 2.0.

3 Comments to “Motivating the stragglers: How to get them to sign up for Facebook?”

#1 Posted by Dan Byler (27.07.07 at 09:59 )

Interesting post, Tim. I like your idea of expanding group membership to non-Facebook users. The fact that you can’t do this gets at the heart of my problem with Facebook and the other social networks: they are exclusive by nature. It’s always “pay-before-you-play”. The cost? Signing away your last vestiges of privacy in the digital age. The benefits? Well, they’re obvious.

The reality is that I do play; the confluence of real and online networks is making opting out seem like an increasingly luddite approach. However, I am bothered to no end that Facebook wants me to log in to *their* space to see a message from a friend. I would much rather have a local Facebook app wherein I could retain the same information (search offline, back up and manipulate data, etc). (As a side note, that’s why I haven’t responded to your Facebook message.)

As a possible solution, I imagine it would be relatively straightforward to create a Facebook app or bot that would provide email or RSS notifications. Because of the nature of the system, you’d need an active Facebook member to have access to said group. Perhaps this could be done from a single point person who could control email distribution lists for each group.

Just some thoughts.

Dan

#2 Posted by Tim Courtney (28.07.07 at 14:51 )

I see Facebook messaging as easy, plus, some people are more accessible that way, as they put higher priority on FB messages than email. You make a good point on privacy, but I’m not super alarmed–yet. I know people who are too paranoid to use Salesforce.com; I’m not because I know the ramifications of them misusing any data they are storing would be huge. Or Gmail, same thing. Maybe I’m naive, but just because there’s potential for abuse doesn’t mean there will be abuse.

Having a way to interact with a Facebook group via email by way of an application would be great. My only doubt to your suggestion is the implication that one person could act as a bridge. The way you phrase it makes me think ‘manual work.’ It’s so rare you find a person willing to manually pass things through consistently, so I think any solution there needs to be software-driven.

I’m looking for low-tech solutions that anyone can grasp to get more people I know IRL to connect virtually. I also want to increasingly aggregate my communications–which is why Facebook looks really really cool to me right now. I’m struggling to see how it will all play out with the fragmenting of features on duplicate applications, but I think we’re going to see some really cool stuff in the next couple years.

#3 Posted by Dan Byler (08.08.07 at 13:56 )

Tim,

Good points all around. I don’t consider myself a privacy alarmist, but caution is still well advised when outsourcing one’s personal life to a commercial website under someone else’s control. To that end, I believe very strongly that individuals should not be *compelled* to participate in a virtual network in order to maintain real-life relationships. When participation becomes compulsory, it is authoritarian — regardless of the benefits.

On an anecdotal note, your Facebook experience reminds me of an experience in the winter of 1997, when a few friends had just gotten their first email addresses. Someone decided it would be a good idea to coordinate a snowy day get-together via email; but in the days of dial-up modems and limited email access, a process that could have easily been organized in a few minutes via telephone turned into a several-hour-long exchange between a few “early adopters”… and eventually fell apart. Email simply had not reached market saturation yet in our circle.

Lesson: adopt early, by all means — but until the networks reach true market saturation, they’re going to leave people out.

In the meantime:
- Add value to “motivate the stragglers”
- Provide some level of backwards compatibility for those who wait
- Wait

Dan