It turns out that some of our obsessions are shared. One of these is worrying continually about What It All Means. Facebook, I mean.

Parliament recently passed the 150,000 fan milestone on its Facebook page. We now see a sharply increased level of interaction. In fact, we felt there was a “critical mass” at about 100,000 which turned us from mere dabblers in Facebook moderation to hard-bitten full-time pros.  We are now accustomed to seeing both “likes” and comments well into three figures and recently experienced our first 1000-interaction post (this one on Turkey, now at 1,243 interactions).  So we’re happy, right?

Right. We are happy.

"Like us." Is it enough?

But it’s a bit like that mid-life, mid-career thing: it’s all going swimmingly, but you start to wonder what it all adds up to. Where do we go from here?

The obvious answer is more of the same: 200,000, a quarter of a million… Yesterday, our keen new Facebook tweaker extraordinaire (he of our cool new Facebook chat app), who’s on a bit of a roll right now, said he would like to stay around until we got to the million mark at least… Let’s be clear, I’m not sneezing at the big numbers, indeed I feel rather humbled and privileged at the numbers of people who take an interest, but, without forcing the comparison too far, it’s a bit like your third or fourth billion dollars in the bank, n’est-ce pas, Mark? – you start looking for something more.

Though the Parliament’s Facebook fans give all indications of being quite happy, we can’t help worrying about them. Are they really satisfied? Are they getting what they really want, what they really need? Is all that amazing Facebook energy serving some higher purpose? What do we do with all those comments?

Obama’s thousands

It turns out we’re not the only ones asking ourselves such existential questions. We’re in very eminent company. Macon Phillips, White House social media supremo, is similarly wondering what to do with his 931,641 fans (though I bet he’s obsessing about the millionth one too!). As previously mentioned, we went to see Macon in the White House social media nerve centre, somewhat (I’ll now admit) disappointingly located in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Building next door to the White House (damn! another dream that’ll have to wait). Our conversation was largely about what happens to all those comments that people leave on the White House page. In their case, the numbers are frequently in the thousands.

The White House's social media nerve centre

To look at, the White House social media operation was not the teeming glass and steel, glitzy, Google-esque techno-mecca one might feverishly imagine. It was a rather old-fashioned, cluttered open space office populated by about 15 staff (most of whom had gone home, this being the early evening, thereby busting another fond West Wing myth of mine.) Fifteen staff. What can 15 staff, who are presumably also tweeting, blogging, commenting, emailing, and so on, do with thousands of comments every day? The truth is they barely have time to look at them. So is the White House page an exercise in digital democracy and engagement or a place for Americans to speak to thin air?

I took a bit of time to scan the comments on the White House page. They actually remind me of those on the European Parliament page. Most people have something to say. They say it coherently and concisely. They are broadly on-subject. There is a conversation going on between the users. In other words, there is value in these comments – not all of them, of course, but certainly more than enough for anyone in the business of democratic politics to want to leverage that value somehow. And yet, Macon Phillips frankly conceded, they haven’t really worked out how. Campaigning was one thing, social media were a tool of real world organisation. Government is quite another.

“Ten email addresses are worth 250 Facebook fans”

The search for enlightenment on these issues found us standing before two strikingly similar entrances in Washington DC, similar because they were simple, discreet glass doors, giving very little indication of what lay within and which proved remarkably complicated to get though. The first such door belonged to a consultancy company called Blue State Digital.

Blue State Digital is not just any old tech consultancy. It was created by Joe Rospars, formerly social media strategist for the Obama campaign and inspirational speaker on the tech-politics circuit. As its name indicates, it was set up to specialise in political communications strategy for people and organisations of a left-leaning “liberal” bent, but in reality seems to have moved far beyond that meanwhile.

So cool. Chez Blue State Digital

First thing to say about the meeting in Blue State Digital is that we swooned over the offices. Once we got through the glass door and up the stairs (broken lift), we found ourselves in the coolest industrial design open space any of us had ever encountered. All exposed brick and steel, trestle tables, splashes of strong colour, glass meeting rooms, the soft hum of sleek aluminium computers – you get the idea. Needless to say, the strongest take-away from the meeting was a fantasy about turning our beloved Rue Montoyer rabbit hutches into something like this. (You get a glimpse of Blue State’s offices early in this video postcard.)

Once we were over the swooning bit and had munched on some excellent sandwiches thoughtfully supplied for this lunchtime meeting, we found out what Blue State Digital think about social media.

“Embassies” was one word they used. Social media, in the Blue State world view, are about promotion and “early engagement”. Different networks work for different target groups: MySpace is still big in the Latino community (translate that into EU terms!), Twitter is for middle aged professionals, Facebook is for young and old… I love these confident and sweeping generalisations, which though clearly offered slightly tongue in cheek point to the importance of knowing who your target audiences are and using the right means to reach them.

This is where Rospars revealed that Blue State Digital is the only political consultant in town sending faxes. “Believe me, no-one sends faxes any more, so when you send one to a Congressman, it’s so unusual it gets read!” Nice.

The secret is to get those people beyond Facebook to your own website

But I digress. Social media, whichever group and whomever targeting, offer a way to “start a relationship”, “join a discussion already happening” or to “convene a conversation”, but – and this is the key point for Rospars – the secret is then to get those people beyond Facebook to your own website or blog (albeit quite likely still using their Facebook identities). That’s the place where you can leverage the early engagement and really do something with it, organisationally and editorially. Your own website is a place where you provide the structure, transform the loose emotional engagement of an open social network into something more personal, direct and useful.

It was easy to believe that this was Obama’s former campaign director for new media. The vision was all about getting people to act, donate, join the team. As we saw again and again in the US, the collective obsession of political online communicators is getting people’s email addresses, seen as a qualitative step up from looser forms of contact. Hence the “10 email addresses are worth 250 FB fans” quote.

Maybe it’s not quite the same thing in our world, but there are interesting lessons here, in particular the simple fact that social media are not an end in themselves, but serve a purpose (or range of purposes) as part of an integrated communications and engagement strategy.

Tomorrow's WebCom HQ, Rue Montoyer 75?

We talked for a while about how that might work. One thing that works well, we were told, was to get people to tell stories about themselves and their own experiences. Invite them to do so via Facebook, but then take the best stories and develop them on your site, add editorial value, give the storytellers flip video cameras and ask them to make videos (an idea which came back, quite separately, in New York with Rachel Sterne of GroundReport), and then spread the content out again via the social networks.

It’s all food for thought, based on the notion that social media operate as intermediary channels, contacting, spreading, convening, inviting, disseminating, but that ultimately value must be added in a more structured “editorialised” environment on or off-line. One can also see how this principle might work in the sphere of e-democracy, where a useful deliberative process almost certainly requires a more structured environment than a Facebook comments column.

So part of the answer to the question of “what to do with all those Facebook comments” is to take those comments elsewhere. But I fear the existential quest cannot end there: all that Facebook energy most have immediate and direct value in its own right, surely?

Facebook knows best

The people behind our second rather anonymous glass door were probably less interested in getting people beyond Facebook – though they are doubtless more than happy to be the intermediary between Facebook users and the rest of the web – than in keeping them there, for this was Facebook’s Washington DC office.

Discreet presence: Facebook's former front door near Dupont Circle

Again the dodgy lift (though this one was – sort of – in operation), again the exposed brick and pipes post-industrial design. But here it wasn’t as slick and glitzy, this is not an organisation which is particularly worried about impressing a client. Seven or eight people work in what is essentially a single open space, and five of them joined us at a table in the corner to give us of their time. (Note: they now have a new office in DC, with a “funky Facebook sign“. We need to go again, it would seem.)

Over the last couple of years we have got to know Facebook people a little, mainly through their London operation, but also via fleeting visits in Brussels and once – with Randi Zuckerberg, no less – in Barcelona. They are always charming, interesting, enthusiastic and extremely keen that we should exploit all the potential of Facebook for what we do. Let’s face it, it’s cool to hang out with these people. We tell them about our experiences with their tools and products, offer the odd criticism and suggestion. Sometimes, a month or two later, some tweak to the Facebook system fixes the issue you had or gives you the new feature you wanted, though very often not in the way you expected. No advance warning, no checking back, no overt connection. It’s just there.

This sums up the Facebook ethos. They really want to provide what people want. They are undoubtedly keen that big organisations and institutional players use Facebook in their communications (as their communications even?). They tell you in great depth about how to exploit the functions they offer on their pages. They listen very carefully to what you say. But, when it comes down to it, they know best. Changes and developments come when, how and in the form Facebook programmers think best. It’s for everyone else frantically to catch up, weigh the implications of the latest development and get used to it.

“Facebook is not a fun place, it’s a business place. Don’t forget that”

So we didn’t really expect much in terms of privileged information, or direct insight into Facebook’s future strategy, they’ll never give you that, but we did want at least to put down a marker that we were preoccupied with the issue of how to get greater value out of the comments on our Facebook page.

Two of us had heard Randi Zuckerberg talking about something like a sentiment tracking exercise amongst Facebook users at the 2010 PDF Europe conference in Barcelona, so we wondered out loud about whether Facebook might be thinking of offering some sentiment analysis tool for general use. We also wondered out loud about the possibility of some integrated translation tool on Facebook pages. Actually, we wondered out loud about quite a lot of things. It was a fascinating conversation, as always, but equally as always we came out without any real enlightenment on whether either of these subjects – or indeed any of the other matters we discussed  – will be addressed by Facebook anytime soon, or at all.

However, we know they care about us and our like. As Colombia Journalism professor Sree Sreenivasan tells his students: “Facebook is not a fun place, it’s a business place. Don’t forget that”. It matters to Facebook whether public institutions and big organisations find their services useful.  So who knows, wait a while and we will see how much they were listening. If history is anything to go by, they were; but the same history tells us that if they do react, we will find out after it happens and it won’t be quite what we thought we wanted. Perhaps though Facebook itself will help us discover the life beyond Facebook?

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Next time: why America loves a failure.