Hi everyone. Bryan Murley asked me if I would write a post on the topic of Facebook, its relation to the media and what can be learned from it. Well, I got a bit long-winded, but I felt a need to be as comprehensive as possible.

Facebook has been a relevant part of my life in the past few years. I’ve found police officers on the social networking site using it to arrest a student. I’ve protested the addition of a “news feed” without optional privacy settings. And I’ve broken a story about how a student columnist was fired after posting some controversial comments on the site. Of course, I’m still a regular user, too.

All of this has gotten me thinking quite a bit recently on how Facebook might be more relevant to the media than just the next news story in the tech-journalism world.

So, after the jump, read about my thoughts on how the media can learn from the path Facebook has blazed to see how news organizations can begin to matter to their readers again. Also, there’s a rather funny anecdote about me doing the “milk challenge.”

By Kiyoshi Martinez | kiyoshimartinez@gmail.com

In middle school, I had my first Web page. It started with me posting photographs of Star Wars action figures on a GeoCities site.

Since then, I’ve always had an online presence of some sort. For whatever reason, I’ve felt some need to share my interests and thoughts with anyone willing to stumble upon my corner of the Web.

I consider myself extremely aware of the consequences of having a public online persona, especially because I insist on signing my name to everything I write online – from a blog to a comment on someone else’s blog, it’s going to have my full name next to it.

But even I couldn’t prepare myself for the shock of seeing a photograph of myself throwing up milk printed out and pinned-up on the bulletin board of a potential employer. The caption: “Got milk?”

Oops.

During this past summer my friends goaded me into attempting the “gallon challenge” where you try to drink a gallon of milk in one hour and not throw it up. Needless to say, I failed and my friend was there to document the whole thing.

Naturally, I blogged about the whole incident, with photos. And sure enough, someone in the Illinois statehouse press corps found them. I soon found myself answering questions about my milk-drinking abilities during internship job interviews with them a few months later.

I was fortunate. The bureau chiefs were seemingly good-humored about it and I was able to explain how I actually enjoyed blogging not just about milk, but also politics and news.

But it could have easily gone the other way. What if instead of finding pictures of me drinking milk, it had been something controversial or inflammatory they found? (And in case you’re wondering, I’ve since taken the blog down.)

And here’s a giant question with the rise of social networks: How do we strike a balance between being able to use our personal digital sphere and maintain a level of privacy from embarrassing real-world interactions?

Facebook: Why it’s Important to the Media
Maybe you think it’s just hype generated by a public relations machine to get Facebook’s value up before they sell out. Maybe you just don’t “get it.” Or maybe you are completely addicted.

In any event, Facebook (and, to an extent, its brethren social networks) shouldn’t be ignored by those in the media. In many ways, Facebook’s brief history and experimentation with its users provides a unique opportunity to look at how the news business tomorrow could be radically transformed.

After all, those using Facebook today are the consumers for news tomorrow.

The Need for Personal and Public Spaces
You know the sites: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the list goes on. I don’t know why a seemingly large portion of my generation wants to have an online presence, but I have a few theories.

Web sites like Facebook provide an opportunity to connect instantly with others in a more efficient manner than ever before and it replaces the need to actually communicate with close friends and distant associates. Right now, I’d argue we’re in a transitional generation where we might value actual conversations over a phone or in person, but over time we’re also adapting to getting updates on our friends through the Internet.

Why should I follow up constantly with people I only half know to ask them where they are going to graduate school or working when I can click “Add to Friends” and get a summary of their current life in a flash? It’s not that I don’t want to communicate, it’s that I probably don’t have the time to.

Call it stalking or call it the downfall of meaningful friendships, but it’s happening. And it’s only going to get bigger and more intertwined with our lives.

But, as we’re witnessing this transitional generation, we’re also witnessing the problems of online social networks.

Social networks as they existed before had very limited “permanent records” that were only kept in the forms of physical, single-copy photographs, remembered conversations and phone records. Now, with Facebook there’s an archive of everything you do while you interact. You know when you did what and with whom.

And it’s this added record-keeping process that brings up a lot of the scandals we see associated with Facebook. People writing things on each other’s walls, posting photos of them and their friends doing less-than-legal activities or being a part of controversial groups. One screen capture locks in your participation forever.

The police are on Facebook. The school administrators are on Facebook. Potential employers are on Facebook. We can’t escape each other.

Right now we’re trying to figure out how to reconcile personal and public spheres of information, and Facebook is a paradox of that concept. We make very personal profiles, but we also want to share them with each other. And it’s this information sharing that had users extremely frightened when Facebook introduced the controversial “news feed.”

Information Philosophy: Push or Passive/Interactive
When Facebook introduced the News Feed, there was a pretty vocal opposition to it. I’d know, as my roommate and I created an online petition that now has 111,302 signatures asking for more privacy settings on it. It freaked everyone out who saw it.

But what caused this instant fear and backlash among the Facebook community?

I theorize the reason was that we saw Facebook flip from being a interactive network where people casually browsed profiles without meaning to a “push-technology” social network that told you what you should know.

It’s two different theories of how to deliver information: push and interactive. And right now the Internet, I’d argue, is largely in flux over what kind of medium it actually is.

Push technologies are already in effect, I’d argue, with the conventional newspaper. It’s a set of people telling a consumer what to consume. There’s no options and it’s a fixed product. What you see is what you get. You can’t have it a la carte, you get the “Lifestyles” section right alongside the “Sports.”

And this is what makes the newspaper an arcane model for making revenue and it’s backwards in terms of maximizing an advertiser’s dollars.

By contrast, a newspaper online is a interactive medium. Here, consumers are information seekers looking for specific content and can pick and choose what they want. They don’t need the entire New York Times for the one article on YouTube celebrities. Instead, they can navigate directly to the products meaningful to them.

Indeed, this is the model the Internet is built on, with the possible exception of e-mail and instant messaging. Information is gathered and sought, not delivered. But now, I don’t think that the interactive model is going to stick around for much longer.

Despite what angered people about the news feeds on Facebook, you have to admit that they have become the lifeblood of what makes Facebook tick. They’re a brilliant idea: provide the most relevant information to your users on an ongoing basis. Completely individualized and delivered.

And I think this concept gets even more appealing when you think about how appealing this all is to advertisers. There’s a reason Mark Zuckerberg could think twice about a $1 billion offer from Yahoo! Inc.

He’s dealing with the most exclusive information network in the world!

What Does it All Mean for the Media?
As I pointed out, when it comes to information that matters to consumers, Facebook moved away from an interactive-only site to one that made push technology a prominent part of its user experience.

For those of us in the information business, we have to realize that we can’t trust for our Web sites to stick to a strictly interactive interface. Facebook evolved and overcame the protests that accompanied its transition. It made itself relevant to its users in a way they didn’t imagine they needed it to be.

The news has to do the same thing. It has to find a way to make push technology work alongside its interactive content.

While I praise and welcome newspapers transitioning from print-only to online destinations for interactivity and audience participation, that’s not going far enough.

You can have all the user-submitted content, videos and blogs, but that’s not a sure-fire, money-making machine. You need to not just let people play, you need to provide the information they can’t get elsewhere and push it on them.

What’s Next: From News Organizations to Information Centers
Excuse me for using a Gannett-coined buzzword in the subtitle, but I really like it (and it’s not just because I have an internship with one of their newspapers). The buzzword is a bold vision of what news organizations need to strive to be.

Get rid of the notion that you’re a newspaper. That’s a primary product for the time being, but it’s going to be the secondary product in your future. In an information center, you’re not going to be just focused on the news, but on a much broader scope of information for your consumers (notice, I’m not calling them readers).

You’re going to need to provide them with information beyond just the news.

Sure, you’ll give them hyperlocal content, constantly updated and found nowhere else. But the information center specializes in pushing data to users that’s specifically relevant to them beyond the news.

What’s this mean exactly? Honestly, I’m not completely sure what it means just yet.

Maybe it’s telling a parent that their student has a test today in school. Maybe it’s letting a teenager know a new movie is in the theaters. Maybe its telling you and your friends that one of your favorite bands is playing at a concert just an hour away.

News organizations have to build social networks to survive. I’m convinced. They need to not just offer news, because if that’s all people wanted, then they’d be buying the newspaper in larger numbers. There’s a desire out there to be informed about our lives and the things that its comprised of.

The question is, “Who will supply it?”

The one thing Facebook hasn’t cornered yet is the hyperlocal news network or information beyond just where you friends were bar hopping the night before. There’s still some time to grab that market. It’s a huge undertaking, but it can still be cornered and made profitable.

And don’t think for a second that people won’t want this service. Right now, my generation is using it and loving it. Those after us will expect it to exist and grow along with us.

+++++

I’m a Public Affairs Reporting graduate student at the University of Illinois at Springfield and the editor of CampusByline.com, a blog highlighting college media news. Feedback is always appreciated. Thanks to Bryan Murley for this opportunity.

Technorati Tags: social+networks, Facebook, information+center, news, media, journalism

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 2:42 am and is filed under General Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.