Marketing of LondonCommons

As many of you know, I'm too on facebook and I use it quite often.

And there are in fact many interesting activist groups and causes to participate in.

But there is a fundemetal difference in how those sites are operated.

I think we must consider this difference, becasue we are recruiting activists or people who are moderatly interested in independent media, progressive politics or alternative lifestyle ,but who are used to using so called Social Networking Services which is now a huge buisiness.

On facebook, people are 'served' by shadowy "the facebook team". We don't really know how they operate behind the site, and we are never able to graspe what goes on in totality. The size of the network is simply beyond our imagination. But things go JUST FINE. For instance, I never witnessed any disputes on facebook which I believe there are many. I can't explain it very well, and I like facebook in many ways, but I also find it kind of creepy about its invisible, but visible precence of allmighty "the facebook team"

On the other hand, as you all know, London Commons encourage people in London to participate, and decisions are made by those who use the site and come to the meeting. 

What worries me is that if we sucess to recruit many people off SNS sites, and LC gets populated, poeple would still interact each other and use it as informal as they do on facebook, but they might not prefer to actually get involved with this wesite.

As a result,  there might be same people coming to the meetings, and other big majority are only users, and as population grows, there could eventually be power structure between servers and served who only want to use it as a informal communication tool. Then, things go out of control whenthere is a dipute, because we don't have pages of policies to police them, which I think "the facebook team' created knowing many users would not read it.

Anyways, they are only my speculation, and might sound bit paranoid, but here is my concern.

My first reaction to this is that gaining users doesn't seem to be much of a problem for us at all. The numbers keep going up all the time. I do think that gaining more of a local (EofA, London itself, even UWO) membership would be desired. As for targeting some of these groups through facebook, I would follow Trev in posting links to threads of interest. Anything official would have to be decided at a meeting following some thought and debate. I kind of feel that creating a londoncommons facebook group works against much of what I value in this site. I don't want to limit users to only progressive people, but do feel that what we are offering is an alternative to the mainstream, superficial, bubblegum, social networking sites. Having some sort of means to encourage worthwhile submissions would be a welcome development, in my view.

 " the goals of this project to be (which is, in my opinion only, a successful independent media organization"

To me that is only a part of the goals of this project. Some of these goals are still being defined and adjusted to the realities confronted with the growing usership. I hope to see you at our next meeting, Zachary.

Hi Zachary,

Welcome to the site!

I agree with you that internet allows us as activists to communicate with each other creativly.

And I would also like to see more people using the website.

However, as a participant of London Commons which has been promoted with grassroots aproach, I don't personally feel strongly about going out to major social networking serivices and appeal to mass.

I personally want people in London to find this website, rather than us going out there and trying to get as many people as we can, you know what I mean?

And also some people on this site might feel uncomfortable the site being promoted on Facebook becasue of its elements of popurarity competition as many people percieve it and dark areas on their privacy policy. 

Kota