Hey Social Networks, Let's Be Friends.

I like to think that Facebook isn’t really that applicable to businesses or organizations. To me, it’s more of a social network that allows me to reunite with old classmates (er look at what they’re up to, without actually talking to them) or discover what a person’s all about before pursuing them as a friend or love interest. Really it exists to ease awkward social interactions by making them virtual instead of actual. Why be bold, when I can obtain the same info meekly?

This thought gets tested on a weekly basis. Last week was a first for me. Last week my opinion on Facebook was tested outside of our Online Marketing class discussions. Shocking, right? It wasn’t just tested once, not twice, but thrice. (Ok, I admit it, I made thrice by including the guest speaker presentation.)

The conversation about the Writers’ Dojo Wednesday was the precursor. This was an insightful discussion, because it clarified that although Facebook business, writer, and book pages aren’t the be all end all to publishing success, they are part of the plan as a whole. The plan being to sell or market yourself as a charming performer, but also keep it real. While I don’t fully understand how to do this, I do understand that selling yourself is a crucial aspect of selling your product. Even when we create personal Facebook profiles we are creating an image of ourselves that we wish to project to our friends, and acquaintances, both old and new.

For this reason alone, Facebook can be a pretty depressing place to visit; it makes me believe that everyone is doing better than me. Everyone seems so successful and happy with about 400 (!) friends. What’s my deal?

Thursday the KBOO radio news director asked me to come in to write a grant for them that is due March 1(!). While writing a grant in a weekend is especially daunting, what added to the drama was that we had to create a program idea to get the grant. Our program idea is to create a show of news stories that listeners post to their Facebook page, website, blog, or text in.

The success of this show depends entirely on the amount of traffic to their website and Facebook! They currently don’t tweet a lot, or get a substantial amount of Facebook comments. The task at hand is to figure out how to get people to post.

The ideas that we came up with were to create a team of news volunteers to post so many comments per day, present the idea to high school and college journalism classes, ask them to participate, and credit the people whose stories we use on air.

If the program gets funded, it will be interesting to see how effective this strategy will be on getting posts generated.

On Friday I had an interview for an Editorial internship. The editor asked me about my classes and I proceeded to talk about social networks, and online marketing. Obviously, a topic that concerns them, they were excited by my interest in this area, as well as all the blogging I had been doing, and I got the internship (!).

So, no social networks aren’t necessarily the key to success, but keep the conversation going because everyone’s looking for a solution, and talking about it creates the illusion that you may just have the answer.