Social network/communities

Some love Facebook, myspace and other social network, others hate them. It doesn't matter. People use them including our members and potential members why we should be there too. We should have pages, groups and encourage our members on Facebook, myspace... to promote CIF/CIP.

Lets take Facebook as an example

Facebook members have friends, who have friends.... That's the whole idea of FB! If we can get all CIF/CIP members to put up a link and write one post about CIF/CIP then a lot more people will know about us (and Google will notice it!). CIF-Sweden went in and we got a lot of friends, both new and old. We try to use it to share information about CIF, social work, culture and work for peace. We also "socializing" e.g. send birtday greetings using a collection of cards

Groups - members on FB join groups on different purpose. Some live short, other longer. A great place to write about us, publish photos and links.

We have a CIP/CIF group with 15 members (just before the conference). After 2 days membership CIF-Sweden already had 25 "friends" and most of them where CIF/CIP members or friends. Half of them didn't know about the CIP/CIF group.

Why? Because we have not told them! No, it's not the creator who fault - she sent it to branches but what did we do? I haven't seen it on any CIF website or in World News. Did any branch send it out to their members? If not it might be time to do it now.

Pages are more formal places for organisations and companies to present their self or their product and communicate with "fans". No, there is no CIF or CIP page! Time to build one!

Later on we started a CIF-Sweden Facebook page. The good thing with a page is that people can see it without beeing a fabebook member - it is open for all. On our page we have also a list of different CIF and CIP "places" on Facebook.

Other social network like myspace use similar structure and we should try to find out where our members are and how we can use it to promote CIF/CIP and our program.

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For those of you, who want to know more about Facebook, twitter... from a more intellectual perspective BJ Fogg, PhD at Stanford might be something. He is an "experimental psychologist who explores how we can use computing technology to change people behaviors and attitudes".