Networks of Engagement: Facebook Pages

Tower Hamlets Summer University use Facebook pages to promote future activities and celebrate activities that have taken place.

Facebook pages offer an opportunity to promote positive activities to young people, and have information spread through online network.

If you’ve not taken a look at the ‘Pages’ feature in Facebook for a while – then it’s time to look again and explore it’s potential as a tool for promoting positive activities. Pages have emerged as the victor in the ‘Groups’ vs. ‘Pages’ debate as the best way for organisations to have an identity within Facebook and to reach out to young people.

Facebook pages are similar to individual’s profiles – but instead of becoming ‘Friends’ with a Page (a reciprocal relationship), Facebook users can become a ‘Fan’. As the administrator of a page, you can post news, videos, photos and other content – just as you would on a personal profile – and it will appear in the News Feeds of your ‘Fans’. Just like profiles, you can add applications and extra features to Pages – and making use of the notes feature, you can even get your Page to automatically pull in an RSS feed of news from outside Facebook – offering an easy option for when you are getting started and want to keep your page up-to-date.

Getting Started

You can set up a Facebook Page to promote positive activities from your youth centre, project or local area in less than 30 minutes (but you need to make sure you’ll have time each week to promote and develop it, and keep it updated.)

Setting up a Facebook Page

Case Study: Buying Bradford Connexions

Using targeted Facebook adverts I got around 20 new fans of the ‘Buying Bradford Connexions’ consultation project within 48 hours. Over 80 people clicked on adverts to view the Facebook Fan page, but not all became fans. Overall – the cost of advertising turns out to have been around £1 per new ‘fan’ – but the real test will be to see what value and interaction having a new channel to share updates and invite input from a group of local young people brings.

Safe & Sound

As with all work with young people, it’s important to make sure that your activities support young people to be safe and free from harm. Here are a few things to think about as you plan your Facebook page:

• Allowing young people to comment on your Facebook page, and to contribute photos and videos, can increase young people’s engagement with the information you want to communicate. Make sure you have planned time to check and, if necessary, to moderate any content submitted by young people. Think about how you will encourage young people to get the consent of all the people in photos and videos that they might post on your page, and how you will respond if someone asks for photos or videos to be removed.
• If young people interact with news items or posts on your page, Facebook may show this interaction, and the original posts, to their Facebook friends. This can be great for spreading news about activities. However, it can also lead to young people unintentionally revealing information about their interests and even where they will be at particular times – and to this information being available to their wider network of friends on Facebook. Think about whether the information you put on your page encourages or discourages this & how you can limit this sort of ‘leak’ of personal information.
• It is right for young people (and adult too) to double-check details of the activities that they discover online Think about periodically sending out an update with guidance on how to double-check the details of an activity and to encourage this as a positive behaviour.

You can find more guidance on safety in using Social Network Sites in the ‘Youth Engagement and Social Media‘ guide.

How will you use Facebook Pages?

Are you already using Facebook pages to promote positive activities? Have you got ideas for ways you could use Facebook pages in future?

Plings and RSS Feeds

The Plings Output API provides access to all the activities in the Plings datastore. You need an API Key to get at the full XML data (get in touch if you would like one), but the iCal, KML and RSS feeds of activities are open to anyone to use.

RSS is a particularly powerful tool for get updated information fed right across the web – and it’s something we’ve been exploring a lot in the Networked Participation Action Learning Set. To help explain the power of RSS I put together the presentation below:

Plings is one of those tools that produces RSS. Of course, it’s not sharing articles, but activities – and as David recently reminded the Plings developers e-mail list – that means thinking slightly differently about how you use it:

The Plings RSS feeds that come out of the API, have a link back to the ‘Activity Title’ in them. Currently this takes you to a pretty ugly page at something like (e.g.)

http://www.plings.net/index.php/a/114576

It’s worth remembering that the RSS feeds we supply are not really as you might expect RSS to be, but more just a way to transfer data (i.e. they tell you all the data we have for a particular day, not when new activities have been added)

There are lots of tools out there that will accept our RSS feeds and show (e.g.) today’s Plings (perhaps in a Wordpress Blog for example)

You might then want to manipulate that feed to do certain things for you…

By making use of Yahoo Pipes, here’s a quick example (it took about 5 mins) that:

a) only shows Plings to come (i.e.gets rid of anything that started over an hour ago (I think!))

b) re-writes the url, so that anyone clicking on an activity title is take to a preferred site to see more info. (in the example we change ‘http://www.plings.net/index.php/a/’ to ‘http://stockport.placestogothingstodo.co.uk/Activity.aspx?id=’)

http://pipes.yahoo.com/plings/rss_with_rewrite_links

If you are parsing your own data, of course you can do all this yourself, but just thought this was really nice! You can also clone this and other pipes and see what you can come up with.

A while ago we made this one:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/plings/skplingsooon

to try to show plings in the next hour (we then plugged it into a twitter account using Twitterfeed). Using pipes and the Plings Output API you could easily filter this to display just a particular sort of activity instead – and, for example, feature upcoming dance sessions in Stockport on your own Twitter account or blog.

Retweeting the consultation tweets

Today I spotted two anouncements from local authorities with regards to consultations with young people.

From Nottinghamshire County Council:

“We need your views on our plans for children and young people – http://tinyurl.com/bknp4p“

From Fenland Council

“Survey: Young people in Fenland – tell us what you think about our Youth Council site http://tinyurl.com/c227f6 – http://tinyurl.com/cou9t4“

What was interesting is that both these alerts came through Twitter. I then retweeted these out to the Plings Twitter followers – which is a bit like forwarding on an email, but without (yet!) the negative conotations!

monitter.com allows you to track Twitter posts by keywords

At the time, I wasn’t even following either of these councils, and so didn’t have them in my own feed – but using a tool such as Monitter enabled me to keep tabs on keywords that were mentioned in Tweets.

This can start to get really powerful, given the fact that Monitter, and Twitter, enable RSS feeds to be taken.  Hence, you can start to follow keywords (ie: “young people”, or “positive activities”) across multiple sources, which could include Blogs, News Alerts, Google Searches – which can all be aggregated together.  This was the nucleus for our initial news project, so expect some updates on that over the coming days…

Skating is not a crime

Skateboarding generates a fair amount of column inches in our regional newspapers. One of the Plings projects has been monitoring news feeds for positive stories about young people, and skateboarding, and in particular skate parks, come up quite reqularly.

We’ve created a yahoo pipe to extract stories that feature the word skate. We then read from this pipe in a Google reader account to effectively store the stories. By then keeping these stories in a folder that we make public, a usable RSS feed about skating has become available.

We need to do a bit of moderation on the pipe so that stories about ‘Mr. Skate’ don’t get through, but generally it pretty much works itself. The feed is:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/17314785751022026283/label/Skate%20News

This also ties into the discussion we’re having on the blog about ‘Does it need to be an official thing to do?‘ Skating has become official in many places through the provision of facilities, some of which are open at all times, others which are ’staffed’, but it is still a sport/activity that can be done anywhere.

If you’ve got 2 mins to spare why not check out this random skating video on the net: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv3ecGIIdd0

622 newsfeeds… and one UFO

We have been busy recently collecting RSS feeds from local news sources online, as part of the Plings Pligg stuff we are doing.

We think we now have news feeds covering all the country, although we did find some areas not so well served by RSS as others – we will post up the news sources for people to view soon.

One story that attracted our attention though was the UFO saga in Woodford Green!

Positive News

Working on Plings you tend to hear a lot of good news stories about young people and their achievements, but, as you know, pick up a newspaper and it’s all stabbings, tradegy, and despair in the ‘youth of today’.

So how to redress the balance?

We’ve been working on the Plings pligg (that’s the name of the software that runs it) as a way of promoting good news stories.

The idea is simple; find a positive news story, tell others about it, and let people vote on their favourite stories, so the best float to the top. There are positive news stories out there, and if you have one we’d love to hear about it and promote it on the pligg.

We’ve also been looking into to some clever technology that will allow us to scour the web for news stories, and automatically publish them on the pligg. So with a combination of Google Reader, RSS feeds, Yahoo Pipes, and of course Pligg, we think we’ve got a pretty good way of doing this. We can take the rss news feeds from lots of sources (local papers, the BBC, individual websites) and pull them all together into one big feed for an area (e.g. The north west). Next, we take this feed to Yahoo Pipes where we can filter the feed for stories relating to young people, and try to filter out the negative stuff. Pligg can then read in the results of this processing and turn it into stories on the site. Nifty!

It’s been an interesting exercise, especially when it comes to seeing all the negative stories. Working out useful terms to filter stories by has meant that we need to block stories featuring, murder, stabbing, attack and so on – There are a lot more of these stories in the news than the positive ones, but not because the positive ones don’t exist, but because that’s where we allow our media to fish!

If you have a bit of time, take a quick look at some of the positive news over at http://pligg.plings.net, and help redress the balance.

Multi formats!

We had a very productive day today, in terms of getting PL!NG information available now in lots of formats. Check the buttons at the bottom of this listing:

We got the PL!NG data into RSS, Google Maps, XML, CSV, KML and a widget!!

Will explain more about these wonderful formats in future posts, but it is great so far!!

First widget

With the data starting to flow out of PL!NGS, we took a look at the widget creation site call Clearspring.

Overnight, Edward posted up a nice little widget, based on some of the designs that four23 had put together. All really great.

I now have this widget sitting in my iGoogle homepage, but the nice thing about the Clearspring stuff is that you can include options to tailor and pass on the widget for other sites such as Blogger and Typepad.

Once we get the PL!NGS feeds stable, we can release this widget via the directory on Clearspring.