In case you missed it: My roundup of ONA @ Facebook

Some interesting takeaways from the Facebook/Online News Assn. event I attended at Facebook HQ last week:

  • Facebook, motivated to improve its tools for helping journalists present stories, connect with readers and drive traffic to our websites, has embarked on a nationwide listening tour to gather feedback and give advice. They’ll be coming to the Times next month (mark Thursday, Feb. 17, on your calendars).
  • In the meantime, check out Facebook’s media page for tips: http://www.facebook.com/media or sign up for a free webinar to be held Feb. 1 from  11 am to noon. Here’s the link: http://www.naa.org/Events.aspx (you’ll have to create an account with naa.org first).
  • Basic advice for journalists: set up a fan page, engage your fans, rig your mobile device so you can publish to page from anywhere.
  • Since Facebook upgraded its social plugins – ie the Like buttons on site, blog and article levels – news orgs using them have seen an 100% increase in referral traffic from Facebook. According to Facebook officials, referral traffic for the Independent (UK) has soared 680% and the Washington Post more than 200%.
  • San Jose Mercury News has replaced its article comment system with Facebook’s plugin and believes the quality of conversation has improved. The Merc is working with Facebook to improve moderation options.
  • National Public Radio strategist Andy Carvin says the conversation on the NPR fan page – which has 1.4 million fans  – is of higher quality than on NPR’s official site. NPR posts 8-10 times a day on its fan page and routinely get more than 500 comments on a post; referral traffic is up to 4.5 million a month (about half from the fan page and half from NPR.org site like/share tools). 
  • NPR’s uses this threshold for whether to post a story on Facebook: Will our friends want to talk about this? NPR Facebook audience is 70% GenX and GenY. “We have almost no one older than 65, and almost no one under 18,” Carvin said. NPR uses the fan page as a sourcing tool 3 to 4 times a week and almost always receives useful tips that are used in stories. “We have gotten our Facebook fans used to the idea that they are part of our brainstorming team,” he said.
  • Read more about Carvin’s presentation here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/01/nprs-facebook-page-a-multi-million-pageview-machine/

Here are some of the choice tweets and a YouTube video from the event:

 

 

Competing with Facebook: How Twitter gets it right and FourSquare gets it wrong (via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life)

Good description of differences between Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare here: 

This is where the positioning and focus of Twitter as a news service as opposed to a social network puts them in a good place in comparison to Facebook. Twitter is where I go to get entertainment and news about the topics I’m interested in from subject matter experts. These subject matter experts (in many cases bloggers, minor & major celebrities) are not people I know nor  have I met. This is distinct from my Facebook social graph but has some overlap depending on how much of a subject matter expert I am myself. On the other hand, FourSquare is a place where I go to share my location with people I know or have met. This set of people is almost always a subset of the people in my Facebook social graph. The only value additions you get from FourSquare are the game mechanics and deals (not anymore). FourSquare has unfortunately reached the point where the only practical difference between using it versus Facebook Places is that I get to be mayor of my local Gymboree and collect two dozen video game style achievements. Personally I’ve already grown bored with the game mechanics and suspect that targeting the console gaming demographic guarantees it will be a niche service at best.