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David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect” and former technology editor of FORTUNE, is a keynote interviewee at AMC on Oct. 4. MPA recently conducted a four-part interview with him.
How can magazine brands tap the power of social networks like Facebook?
Like any business, magazines need to be where the audience is. That, now, is increasingly inside Facebook. If members are spending 700 billion minutes there every month--as the company recently reported--then a Facebook strategy is not a luxury or an option. It is a necessity. And social media, especially Facebook, is a wonderful medium which can assist in the very rapid distribution of messages among your readers and fans. The key is figuring out what messages they will be most receptive to. Because messages people like get passed along inside Facebook.
The good thing is that it's easy to experiment. Every magazine ought to have its own page inside Facebook, and assign a fairly savvy employee to monitor, populate, and promote it. You should post content there at least once a day. You should interact with your fans who post there. You should listen to what they say and make something of a show of doing so. In my view, this will likely help you improve the quality of your journalism by insuring that it is what your readers want.
Alternatively, it's possible to utilize the features of Facebook on your own Website, by using Facebook's platform API tools. You can engage readers in the same kind of dialogue there by installing the "like" button and other features of the platform and Facebook Connect. In many ways this is even better, because you can take advantage of the viral quality of Facebook while more completely controlling the brand experience for your readers. Most of this advice would apply to any company, not just a magazine, but that's partly because the rise of social media turns every company into a sort of media company in their inevitable use of these tools.
Do you consider Facebook a media company?
What better test could there be besides whether or not it depends for its revenues on advertising? I can think of other tests that Facebook could pass in this regard, but the most important issue is that Facebook will either be competing with you for ads, or cooperating with you if you take the kinds of steps I suggest in the previous question and hitch your star to Facebook and its platform. Facebook will sell over $1 billion worth of advertisements this year.
Another way to think about the relationship between Facebook and media is that it is rapidly becoming one of the key ways that your content gets distributed. If a reader likes something you publish, they are likely to post it to their Facebook profile, thus sending it around to their Facebook friends. It behooves you to make this process as easy as possible. In my opinion many companies focus a disproportionate amount of their efforts on doing this with Twitter, which has a much smaller audience and where content is far more likely to get lost in a tidal wave of content.
As the former technology editor of Fortune, you could have written about any number of innovative companies today. What led you to write about Facebook?
I concluded sometime in 2007 that Facebook was not only likely to become one of the most impactful companies of our era, but that it was engendering a phenomenon--or a set of "Facebook Effects"--which would be among the most powerful of any sort in our lives. I think that has been borne out. Very closely related to my conviction back then about the importance of the company was my amazement that this company's CEO, then still so young, had such extraordinary strategic and competitive instincts. He is a genius product designer and a superb business strategist. On top of that he has shown himself to be a pretty good manager as well. All of this was hardly what one would expect of the guy I first met when he was 22. Since writing about things which are not what we have been led to expect is one of the central jobs of a magazine journalist, making the decision to focus on this company was not hard. First I did it at Fortune itself, but once I realized that I had obtained the trust of Zuckerberg it was a no-brainer to extend that coverage beyond Fortune and to write my first book.
PART FOUR If you could give Facebook a facelift, what would you change? Facebook's biggest problem, in my opinion, is the poor way it handles groups. The consequence has been that the act of "friending" on Facebook has become less and less serious. We are all becoming friends with people we don't really care about because friending on Facebook is seen as routine. What the company needs to do is to make it far easier to put people into appropriate and distinct buckets--family, best friends, work friends, friends we just accepted because we didn't have the energy to say no to, etc. To each one of these groups we want to show very different information about ourselves, and we want conversely to see very different information about them. Facebook technically does allow this kind of sorting today, but it is way way too difficult. In my opinion, if this problem is not remediated soon, the service will begin to decline. It is that central. The fact that a "friend" on Facebook is not considered to really be a friend is a very serious problem for the company. Facebook was designed as a place where you communicate with the people you already know offline, but that is not how it has come to be used. With proper group functions, it would be possible to accept friendship with anyone and still not see your experience of Facebook diluted. Today, by contrast, once you accept too many people who you don't really care about--which as I say we almost all tend to do--our natural instinct is to censor our own contributions to the service and adopt a lowest-common-denominator approach. Facebook then becomes less interesting, and many people diminish their usage. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS
If you could give Facebook a facelift, what would you change?
Facebook's biggest problem, in my opinion, is the poor way it handles groups. The consequence has been that the act of "friending" on Facebook has become less and less serious. We are all becoming friends with people we don't really care about because friending on Facebook is seen as routine. What the company needs to do is to make it far easier to put people into appropriate and distinct buckets--family, best friends, work friends, friends we just accepted because we didn't have the energy to say no to, etc. To each one of these groups we want to show very different information about ourselves, and we want conversely to see very different information about them. Facebook technically does allow this kind of sorting today, but it is way way too difficult. In my opinion, if this problem is not remediated soon, the service will begin to decline. It is that central.
The fact that a "friend" on Facebook is not considered to really be a friend is a very serious problem for the company. Facebook was designed as a place where you communicate with the people you already know offline, but that is not how it has come to be used. With proper group functions, it would be possible to accept friendship with anyone and still not see your experience of Facebook diluted. Today, by contrast, once you accept too many people who you don't really care about--which as I say we almost all tend to do--our natural instinct is to censor our own contributions to the service and adopt a lowest-common-denominator approach. Facebook then becomes less interesting, and many people diminish their usage.
THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS
