Are you a “Fan” of us on Facebook? Will you join our group, add my app to your profile and please, please, please please, follow me on Twitter? (I am already following you!)
Perhaps it was this Tweet from the Orlando Sentinel’s Bill Couch that we will look back upon and consider the “shot heard ’round the newsroom.”
Sure seems that the Chicago Tribune got the message. The paper now has a Facebook page and nine “fans.” Eight of them are Tribune employees including big wigs, Owen Youngman, Bill Adee and Jonathon Berlin. (Full disclosure - I have worked with all three of these guys at various stages in my career)
The San Jose Mercury News has a nifty, new Facebook app that displays the latest blog items from their Rethink project. Staffer Ashley Dinges used free tools on Widgetbox to make the Facebook application. I noticed this and launched three new applications up on Facebook myself in about eight hours time. (Your mileage may vary)
But The Merc’s editors don’t stop there. They want better apps, and they are smart enough to ask the community what type they would use. Note: They are using Facebook’s Wall- feature to have the conversation out front. Smart.
The Mercury News also has a page and 26 “fans”. Nine of these are employees of the paper (as far as I can reckon) and a few others are former employees.
Groups on Facebook have been around for awhile - Yuri Victor created one for Visual Editors and it has attracted over 325 members.
I am not really sure why Facebook needed to offer businesses the chance to put up corporate pages when most people were already using groups to do the same thing - but at least I know where to find the Tribune people now . . .
Haha, excellent. I think putting them as Pages allows for better interaction than groups. Groups on Facebook, as a whole, are relatively inactive with respect to receiving updates about them on a daily basis (although, this is supposedly going to change…). With Pages however, activity updates are proliferated and there’s more prominence in your support of them on profile pages (interesting to note, though, that this box is a Facebook application that can be hidden or removed, should one choose to do so).
It is also designed to be the place where you will make money. Maybe not for newspapers, but for entertainment media certainly according to this article: http://digitalblab.com/?p=42
For comparison to the newspapers mentioned here, the New York Times page has a most-emailed Facebook app, a slide show and video roll on its page. And, so far it has attracted 2,290 “fans.”
http://www.facebook.com/nytimes?ref=nf
The State News (at MSU) has a facebook application. Granted it’s not all that great right now, but you can go to the application and click on stories which link to their website. It’s not much now, but it’s there and has potential. They don’t really have a coporate page, but I could definitely see one coming in the future. I think maybe college publications were more likely to catch on to this sooner.