Leveraging the power of social networks

How do you get civil society engaged in public online monitoring of your project? Even if you design a killer website for interaction among stakeholders, it will be of absolutely no value without visitors. And chances are that unless you're a seasoned search engine optimizer or have a very large budget at your disposal, nobody will ever find your website. This is where social networks enter the picture.

Facebook currently has more than more than 400 million active users sharing more than 5 billion pieces of content in over 70 languages each week. (Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) Wouldn't it be nice to tap into that power?

People all around the world increasingly turn to social networks like Facebook for highly specialized and localized searches, for example about the area where they live. And those are exactly the kind of users that you want to engange in public online monitoring. So why shouldn't your project have a Facebook page where friends of the project can access and share the latest news? In this regard, the development sector has a lot to learn from internet marketeers. Make it rewarding for people to visit your page! Allow and even incite your development workers to actively blog about the project. Upload pictures documenting the progress - and allow visitors to do the same. Write stories about the project and feed publish them. Have a question and answer section and be candid about your answers. Invite people to chat. Create a network of befriended development projects in Facebook, thus making it easier to find your project page. Apply viral marketing techniques.

You might object that Facebook is good for networking, but that you simply cannot run a development project on it. Well, Facebook lets you develop applications within its framework as well as integrate your page with third-party systems using Facebook Connect. One of the Drupal modules showing the most developer activity right now is Drupal for Facebook. According to the maintainer Dave Cohen, it 'turns Drupal into a platform for developing Facebook Applications. This allows you to embed your content and features within Facebook, or allow Facebook users onto your site via Facebook Connect.' So you can have your cake and eat it too: exercise the fine-grained control and flexibility of a database-enabled content management system like Drupal and at the same time harness the raw power of a zillion Facebook users.