News Organizations Seek Facebook's Help in Expanding Audiences

Facebook, the uber-popular social networking site, has succeeded in creating communities. Now, news organizations are hoping that it would do the same for them.

It’s only logical. Facebook represents where the coveted younger demographic is hanging out. They're not spending tons of time on newspaper websites. (What, newspapers?) As such, news organizations need to get their content and services to where the young people are.

Last week, Reuters reported that online media syndication company Pluck Corp said it would give traditional media companies the ability to link their Web sites to online social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

The move would allow people to leave comments on news Web sites that then show up on their social network profiles, allowing the traditional media outlets to reach people where they are spending increasing amounts of time on the Internet, said Pluck Chief Executive Dave Panos.

Already, as my friend Ana Patricia Ferrey points out in a recent post, ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership -- the site's first with a news organization -- that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new ''U.S. Politics'' category.

Facebook, undoubtedly, would be an important tool for news organizations to build traffic, even as they rely on search engines and blogs to direct readers to the websites.
For example, a Facebook user adds an application that includes headlines from a news organization that's supplying a headline feed. The user's friends see this when visiting the user's Facebook profile. The user reads an interesting article and highlights it -- perhaps in a Facebook group. This shows up in the "newsfeed" that Facebook users see which alerts them to activities by their friends, and within groups that they belong to. That is, if you add an article pointer to a group, your friends will all see this in their newsfeeds.

With Facebook, news is instantly disseminated to hundreds of people within one reader’s network. Also, everyone knows that word-of-mouth is the most powerful advertising tool and Facebook harnesses just that. If a friend is recommending something (like a news article), you're more likely to check it out than if you discovered it in the more normal, non-personal ways.

But news organizations shouldn’t embrace everything that Facebook touts. Nonsensical applications such as sending virtual drinks to your friends may be deemed too “cutesy” and degrade the cachet of a brand name.