What should they be? Is anyone comparing the generative nature of fb pages with other online discussion/exchange formats? Yesterday I gave a webinar presentation to dozens of school communicators http://e-democracy.org/schools and it was notable that all of the questions were about fb pages.
From my experience with community issues forums http://e-democracy.org/if a fb page member is worth about 1/10th the value of a full member of our hybrid elist/forum site.
However, I could be quite wrong. I've noted the decent engagement on this popular community stillwater, mn 11,000 member fb page http://www.facebook.com/WeLoveStillwater - but my 675 member neighborhood issues forum (reaching 15% of households) Http://e-democracy.org/se seems to generate far more traffic ( views? Unknown). So as almost all the institutional momentum for hosting any form of public engagement online shifts to Facebook (versus setting up a blog, forums, promoting broader community-wide interactive spaces, etc.) what does this really require to work well? Numbers, facilitation, content seeding frequency/style, etc. What are the best examples of community, school, local gov, fb pages that demonstrate effective practices? I'd really like to see a list of pages with the highest participation to members ratio and explore why they work. Perhaps someone out there has done that? I should note that we feed our issues forums into dedicated fb pages that we set up to make our content available in that format ... But they are more or less one-way. Steven Clift E-Democracy.org P.S. Please cc: clift@e-democracy.org