Monday, November 26, 2007

Facebook.com ABC reporter Sunlen Miller has created a Facebook "page" -- which is different from a Facebook personal profile.

First, let me say that any journalist who's working in the year 2007 should have a Facebook account and profile. I hope I'm not speaking to too many journalists who have not figured out yet that they need to understand the social networking phenomenon, and for that they need to spend some time in that space.

For those of you already clued in, here's another twist: You may want two Facebook pages for yourself.

Most of us already on Facebook use it as a general social networking tool. Unlike the more professionally focused LinkedIn or Plaxo, Facebook profiles tend to mix business and personal. Your business "friends" on Facebook likely include lots of personal and family information as well as business stuff. This probably works fine for the people in your social and business network who see your profile. (And if it's not, you should probably be using LinkedIn instead of Facebook.) But is it appropriate for the audience for your journalistic work? Probably not. (And if you invited all your "fans" to be your "friends" on Facebook, you could become overwhelmed.)

So what you might want to do is set up a second Facebook page for your professional persona, and collect not "friends" but "followers."

An example of what I mean has been implemented by ABC News with its off-air presidential campaign correspondents. ABC has assigned a correspondent to follow each of the major U.S. candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties, and each of those journalists has a personal page on Facebook. These aren't normal Facebook user profiles, but rather "Facebook pages," which are the same format as used by businesses wanting to create a page for themselves.

With a Facebook "page," a journalist can collect followers or fans of his/her work. For example, here's a page for ABC's Sunlen Miller, who is covering the Barack Obama campaign. (Note: You'll need to be logged in to your Facebook account to see that page.) Miller's page features notes and photos from the campaign trail, links to ABC News coverage, and anyone can "Follow this reporter," which is sort of a variation of becoming a "friend." Followers of Miller's work can send her a message, or write on her "wall."

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Miller also keeps her "Facebook status" updated. As Facebook users know, there's a line under your name that you can keep updated with what you're currently doing. (It's similar to Twitter and other "presence" or "microblogging" services. In fact, with Twitter you can have Facebook status updated automatically whenever you post to Twitter.)

Everyone's still experimenting with this, but the ABC News approach seems like a good one. So for a news organization, instead of just setting up a corporate page on Facebook, it makes sense to also give every reporter, correspondent and columnist a Facebook page like Miller's.

Check out all the ABC News campaign correspondents on their Facebook pages to see how they are utilizing this opportunity to reach the Facebook generation.

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