Facebook's new feature – community pages: a new opportunity or a challenge?
Howard Lake | 1 April 2010 | Blogs
Facebook’s newly introduced feature of community pages allowing supporters to set up a page for their cause, but also allowing Facebook community to take over administration of the page once it becomes very popular might cause quite a stir with already complicated situation of fan pages of many charities.
I have recently talked to a charity (and noticed at least two more on Facebook) desperately trying to manage unofficial fan pages popping out here and there, so I am not sure how the new functionality of Facebook will be used. If we struggle with accepting the fact anyone can set up a fan page on Facebook, how will we cope with the idea of anyone being able to manage its content? Yes, I am very skeptical at this stage, even though I see great opportunities in self-moderated communities of cause supporters as such!
Advertisement
Facebook community page, by allowing everyone to become an administrator might prove just as confusing to manage as Google Wave at its early stages, because for some reason we are still not used to curating of content and communities as a group. We still want to control the messages and we still very often want to control our brand. On one hand I am extremely happy that Facebook is pushing the line, and will make many traditionally thinking organizations to face the nature of social media. On the other hand I am deeply worried that I will see many repetitions of recent Nestle crisis, but this time in non for profit sector. Please tell me I am not right…
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.