McKinley's Blog Watchdog June 2008: The Facebook Edition

Welcome to Blog Watchdog June 2008, the Facebook edition. You can get this column and others from McKinley Marketing's expert consultants by subscribing to their monthly newsletter. As always, the full disclosure: I'm a paid freelance writer for McKinley Marketing.

Facebook is the sixth most-trafficked website in the world. There are 80 million Facebook users. More than half of them are out of college. The fastest growing segment of users is 25 years and older. Oh, by the way, they only launched a little over four years ago. What are you waiting for? Guy Kawasaki has this cool top 10 list of things you didn't know you could do in Facebook.

What if you had a whole segment of membership who used Facebook like you use Microsoft Outlook (guess what, you do!)? How would you communicate with them? Given the statistics above, these are very relevant questions for association marketers today. Fortunately, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb.com shares insights about how, for those who have recently entered the workforce, Facebook has replaced conventional calendaring and other stuff that we consider the domain of Microsoft Outlook. And of course, you already knew that e-mail is for old people.

If you've decided to take your association into the Facebook world, your first inclination might be to start a Facebook Group for your association. Hold it right there! Don't do it. Opt for Facebook Pages, a richer option for business users with features like statistics, embeddable flash or video, and more. Check out these two posts from FacebookAdvice.com for a primer on how to set up your association's profile in Facebook Pages.

So you've got an association blog, and you're active in Facebook. Maybe you've even begun streaming your blog content into Facebook using their Notes feature. Great! Read through Mari Smith's 10 tips for leveraging your blog in Facebook. My favorite piece of advice? "After a certain period, use the Share feature on your Note (imported blog post) to post out the Note on your profile. e.g. say 3-5 days goes by and your Note has many comments - you could post to your profile (use the Share button) and include a comment to the effect there’s a great discussion going on and you’d welcome more input."

As always, if you have feedback or a tip, e-mail me at bkmcae at gmail.