How Can a Facebook Group Complement Your Current Community? A Real-Time Case Study

I attended an industry meeting recently where we discussed the ridiculous popularity and ubiquity of Facebook.  In particular, one individual (shout out to Max from redengine) asked me, "Why doesn’t One Degree have a Facebook group"?
And I said, "Because I don’t know what we’d do with a Facebook group". 
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now, and I still don’t know.  People like Maggie, Mitch and Michael all have Facebook groups for their podcasts – why shouldn’t One Degree have one?

And then the black hat come out: Who has time to check and nurture the group; you can’t get updates via RSS and who wants to spend MORE time in Facebook; isn’t it really just a way to show off how many people pay attention to you; is anyone going to participate; what does participation look like anyway; omg, can we just all get over Facebook?!?

After the martini kicked in, I wondered if there could be some positives to a Facebook group.  Maybe One Degree is like the conference … where you go to hear specific people say something interesting, but it’s a little more formal.  And a Facebook group is more like the unconference … where interesting insights come from unexpected places and  often stay with you even longer than a keynote speaker’s talk.

So, I set up a Facebook group for One Degree.  I didn’t announce it (except for a small cryptic reference in my Facebook status update) and sat back and watched.  We have 58 members at last check.  And one post about an event in Manhattan that I haven’t deleted because I didn’t want to censor anyone (yet 🙂 ).  I visit the group page and I can *feel* the anticipation – what is going to happen here?  What will this space become?

I would like to invite you to join the One Degree, the Community on Facebook.  I don’t know what it will become; I hope you’ll tell me!  Story ideas?  Little snippets that you don’t want to write an article about but you would feel comfortable posting to Facebook?  Networking?  Let’s find out.  I encourage my clients to experiment – let’s experiment together here.  And let’s see what happens!