My (and Jennifer Preston‘s) workshop on nonick was great! I learnt so much! Jennifer and I had prepared it somehow on Thursday, when we first met. I was going to put Facebook down and she was going to explain why they trusted Facebook so much in the New York Times. And it worked perfectly! I would have paid a lot of money to get to know what Preston said his newspaper is planning to do on Facebook.

If you want to know the arguments against creating Facebook pages, look at my post. As of the pros, these are the most interesting things I could note:

– SEO is moving towards SMO or Social Media Optimisation in the sense that more and more users of websites are coming from social networks. Preston admitted to having a software engineer finding out how Facebook decides what comes to your wall. But they have not been able to do it so far. “It’s a big blackbox”, she said.

– We have to be very careful with the “Like” buttons, as they are later used to select what can be important for you. It’s not just a decision for a certain news, but something that will affect your whole use of Facebook.

– Journalists’ job is not so much about making news but also about finding new ways to spread them on Facebook. If they get a good knowledge about how Facebook’s API works, they are going to do their job much better. She stressed quite a lot this: both programmers and journalists need to know very well what information you can get and share from and on Facebook. The API is so important in this respect.

– Twitter is losing some importance. Facebook is dominating the social media market. As of revenue sources, Preston admitted seeing some problems in Facebook’s advertising system, because it is not sharing revenues with producers of content. This might be one of the next steps, as Google did in 2003 with AdSense.

– It is a nonsense to create a social network without tying it to Facebook. Even the New York Times will let its users log in thru their Facebook account. Facebook’s login is becoming the universal login.

– Recently introduced community pages will become very important for news sources as they are including information from Wikipedia. This is a step further for Facebook’s domination of the whole Internet and the New York Times is going to use these pages as a way to reinforce the importance of its news and reports on some subjects. SMO at its best!

– The new trendy word is “engagement”. People will engage with brands (and the New York Times is one) thru content. This is why community pages are going to become so important in this engagement.

– Groups are more useful than fan pages as you can mail users from them. But be careful: if you have more than 5,000 users Facebook won’t let you spam your followers any more. They are supposed to be working on it, though.