Facebook Communication Done Right
Published by Rodney Rumford February 27th, 2008 in Facebook, Facebook News.
Facebook Communication Done Right: While we talk a lot about best practices and how facebook is effectively a communication platform at it’s core. I wanted share how facebook is eating some of it’s own dog food.
Facebook has many tools for communication. It has received some criticism for poor communication (as a company) from some of it’s biggest fans: Application Developers. Facebook has historically loaded platform changes on Tuesday night. Some of these changes were not communicated in advance and facebook heard loudly from many of the developers about their displeasure of this (lack of) communication practice.
The developer community has had some frustration around not having an input into changes that are implemented on the platform. If make a great deal of business sense to tap the collective wisdom of a bunch or really smart and passionate developers. Just ask them and they will tell you what they think. You might not want to hear what they have to say but at least developers will have had a say in the process and feel like their vote has been counted and their voice has been heard.
So for the first time (to my knowledge), facebook polled the developers about a proposed upcoming change that they were contemplating implementing. What was great about the poll was that you had the ability to add a note. What was even better was that after you voted you were able to see the poll results (counts & percentages). What was even better was the ability to see the names, pictures and notes from each respondent to the poll (I am visual and love to see these images). This is powerful communication and brain sharing at a high level. I am so very happy to see facebook reaching out in this manner with this effective knowledge gathering and sharing tool.
Here is how facebook could communicate even better. Facebook should add a wall and discussion threads after each poll results. This would facilitate even deeper communication and discussion of concepts, thoughts and ideas. They could take it even 1 step further and allow respondents to post a reply under each persons original comment. Thus providing naturally occurring threads and discussions that were started by original comments.
Facebook could facilitate even deeper & richer communication and take it a few steps further by allowing users to instantly upload video comments. Some things can best be expressed with voice and visual imagery.
Facebooks communications tools are some of the best available online. Imagine if this was a product that business owners, community organizers, brands, marketers, etc. could use as a feedback loop for understanding what people want and how they feel about specific subjects and topics. Whoa, Now that would actually be a deep product that facebook could get people to pay for (i know they already have polls… but their current polls product is much too simplistic for people to pay for in my opinion).
Enough of my heavy dissertation here… see what it looks like below in it’s current state: A nice communication tool. 
The poll:
The results:
The respondents comments:
Technorati Tags: facebook communication, facebook
You really think Facebook has to read all these comments. And especially watch videos?
Come on. They got better things to do. They need to process user feedback quickly so they can code.
John,
Hell Yes! They should be requred to read them if it is thier product. I read them all and it is not even my product. It took me a whole 10 minutes.
This is a very compressed feedback mechanism that is very valuable. They are blessed to have a community that is so passionate. The developer community manager is normally over this area also.
Actually most product managers don’t code full time. They work on determining what feature sets are most needed and defining the product roadmap.
The video comment idea was really meant to further discussion formats that might be very useful for participants as well as facebook. It is simply an app that they need to drop into the page. They could do this with nominal coding.
Thanks for sharing John.