Branching Out

~ Cheryl

As a result of the trip to SMOFcon (not to mention SFSFC winning its bid to host World Fantasy Con in San Jose in 2009) Kevin and I have been thinking quite a bit about marketing conventions recently. As a result of this I have taken the plunge and joined Facebook. I confess to having been a little nervous about this. That’s not anything to do with concerns about identity theft or whatever. I’m pretty well out there on the Internet, and nothing I can say about myself could possibly be as damaging to my reputation or employability as what other people have already written about me very publicly. I am, however, rather concerned about Facebook pulling nasty stunts like monitoring what I buy on Amazon and then telling the world about it. Thankfully they seem to have been persuaded of the idiocy of that little trick, but as a consequence my Facebook presence is pretty minimal and in serious lockdown. It will probably loosen up once I understand how the site works a little better. But there you are, I’m out there. Those of you who are Facebook regulars are welcome to friend me. And if you have any tips about convention promotion on Facebook I’d be delighted to hear from you.

10 thoughts on “Branching Out”

  1. Paul Cornell wrote a long paean to Facebook on his blog recently, with some good explanations on how the site works. He uses it both for professional promotion and personal socializing, so you might find it helpful.

  2. Thanks. I’ve just gone and read that, and while it is very interesting it is not very useful. The sort of questions I have are things like: should a convention have a Page, or a Group, or just an ordinary user page, or some combination of these, or just be an Event? The answer to this depends to a large extent on what functionality these entities support, and often you can’t find that out without setting one up. A crucial issue is whether the entity you chose supports the Notes application, because your con’s web site is going to have a blog it wants to export to Facebook.

    And talking of Notes, the way Facebook handles RSS imports is hopeless. Other RSS aggregators can manage to display links in the feed correctly – why can’t Facebook?

    Ah well, so much to learn. 🙂

  3. What made you choose face book over my space? Other than the obvious maturity factor…though that’s a matter of opinion where I’m concerned. They were created by the same group of people.

    I guess what I’m asking is…Is there a reason Face Book is better for marketing conventions or fan projects?

  4. Primarily because a lot of authors I know are on Facebook, and some have said very positive things about it. If you have a WFC to promote, that’s a big plus. More generally the demographics of Facebook seem to match more closely to those of existing SF fandom than those of other services (see here for some background reading). None of which is to say that we should ignore other networks, it is just that Facebook seems likely to produce the most bang-for-hours-spent-online return.

  5. I think a convention would most naturally be an event in Facebook. An event has a location, date, and other stuff like that. It has a wall you can write on, and can have a discussion group (although the discussion group feature in Facebook is pretty horrible). Also, you can invite people to join an event, and they can, if they choose, allow the event page to choose whether they plan to attend.

    That said, as far as I know, you can add external applications (such as Notes) neither to events nor to groups. User profiles are meant for individual uses, so that isn’t a good choice either. That leaves Pages.

    You can import an RSS feed as notes to a page. On the other hand, pages are clearly not meant for individual events either. But in their classification (you have to classify a page) is a choice “brand” and under it a type “non-profit”. And a page can have events in it. So I think the best way would probably to create a page for the World Fantasy Convention “brand”, import the rss feed there, and create an event under it for an individual convention.

  7. That’s pretty much where I’d got to too, although of course it would be entirely remiss of us to claim the whole World Fantasy brand. All we could so is have a Page for WFC2009. Of course we might do SFSFC as a brand as well. But I bet you can’t have the same event under two brands.

    Meanwhile you have given me some other ideas (she says, ominously…)

  8. A page can have several admins, so you could of course share the admin responsibilities for a WFC page with others, and transfer it over to the organizers of the next one after the 2009 event, so creating a page for the convention brand wouldn’t necessarily mean you’re hogging the whole brand for yourselves. (This being fandom though, I’m sure some would still see it that way.)

    I would think of SFSFC more naturally as a group, myself; it’s something composed of people (and there already is a group type called “non-profit organizations”. Normal events can be tagged to be hosted by a group, so that would also connect the two quite nicely.

    Unfortunately I think that if you create an event under a page, that event is then automatically hosted by the brand (page), and you can’t connect that to a separate group.

    If you want to see fannish examples in Facebook, see for example Finncon (group), Finncon 2008 (event) and Ă…con 2 (event).

  9. SFSFC would be a group if it were a membership organization like BASFA, but it isn’t. It is a corporation which exists solely for the purpose of running conventions, and its only members are the board of directors. That sounds much more like a brand to me.

    WSFS would be a group, but as you note there might be some concern around fandom if any one person set up a WSFS group. Probably the Mark Protection Committee should do it.

    As for WFC, it is not a fannish event. It is owned by the World Fantasy Board, and you do things in its name at your peril. You ask permission first.

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