Strike Indicator by Ellen McGirt

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Facebook and Virginia Tech: A New Normal

In the hours, now days, following the tragic shooting at Virginia Tech, this blog, as well as numerous outlets, chronicled the role of Facebook and other online media sites in the lives of those affected. First, information about the event and -I'm alive! - declarations spread between Virginia Tech students and their loved ones. In some cases, Facebook was the only source of information available. Later, funeral plans were shared. The site also become a resource for news media, who gleaned intimate details about the victims from their profiles, and in some cases, broadcast information on-air and online which was intended to remain private. (The Facebook communications staff spent a brutal forty-eight hours policing their privacy policy and violations thereof.) Now, Facebook profiles of the deceased victims have been transformed into dynamic shrines, where friends can continue to post messages of sadness and tribute. And there are also more than 500 global groups which any registered Facebook user can join to share messages of support, tribute, outrage, activism or grief.

Today, as classes resume, the Virginia Tech students, faculty, family and community are struggling to carry on in the wake of something terrible, a brave attempt at a new normal, invented one halting step at a time.

But the new normal of a digital age adds an additional, and often mind-bending, element to the attempt to make sense of a world gone temporarily mad. Consider the killer’s first victim, nineteen year old Emily Jane Hilscher. Within hours of her murder, Hilscher had become the subject of gossip and conjecture on The Drudge Report, among other sites, due to early speculation that she was Cho Seung-Hui's girlfriend.

Her friends, certain that they knew the facts of the matter, immediately set up a Facebook global group, Truth For Emily Hilscher, to defend her honor, and that of her actual boyfriend, who had become a person of interest in the moments after the shooting. (The police have since confirmed that Hilscher had no mutual relationship with Cho, though police are searching to see if he had contacted her via phone or e-mail. And because her own boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, was an early suspect, it may have lead to the speculation that this had been some sort of love triangle.) Like the other victims, she is now the focus of many Facebook memorial groups. One particularly poignant one, which I won’t name, opens with a pointed message to the media not to contact group members or quote from the site. Hilscher - and her story - also became a Wikipedia entry. (It’s since been expanded to include all the victims.)

In this case, the ability to set a record straight is encouraging. But in others – like the false profiles of the killer which popped up across social media sites – remain more disheartening, and familiar examples of the madness of crowds on high-speed. And still others, like mydeathspace.com – a macabre portal of publicly available information about myspace members who have died – are just too creepy to discuss. (They’ve been offering premium memberships since March. Woohoo.)

And as if things weren’t bad enough, the notorious Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, famous for their bile-filled, anti-gay rhetoric, threatened to picket any Virginia Tech funerals. The organization, which is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, runs two websites, GodHatesFags.com and GodHatesAmerica.com. They have become known for staging protests at events such as funerals for military service personnel, because they believe, among other things, that random violence and war related deaths are God’s wrath against homosexuality.

Again, Facebook users spread the word. The group - Stop Fred Phelps and the WBC from protesting at fallen VT student funerals!! alerted community members to the threat, and circulated a petition of protest. Something worked. From the group's profile page: “Through some influence of this group or just the willpower and prayers of 50,000+ people, the WBC was STOPPED. They will not be picketing any Virginia Tech victims funerals.”

The public outcry, quite likely fed by online protests like those found on Facebook, brought the issue to the attention of radio talk show host Mike Gallagher, who offered the WBC airtime to spew their viewpoints, in exchange for leaving the mourners in peace. (He did the something similar after the WBC threatened to disrupt mourners after the Amish school shooting last October.) The terms of the negotiation was announced on the WBC’s own website:

Westboro Baptist Church hereby cancels all pending pickets, and agrees not to schedule future pickets, related to The Virginia Tech Massacre, on the following terms and conditions; to wit: In consideration for 3 hours of national radio time with Mike Gallagher on his National Radio Show -- next Tuesday, April 24, from 9 a.m. to 12 noon New York time -- Westboro Baptist Church has agreed to cancel all pickets now pending and not to schedule future pickets related to The Virginia Tech Massacre.

Gallagher’s statement on why he agreed to give them airtime can be found here. (Note: Gallagher's producer has since contacted me by e-mail to let me know that Gallagher also monitors the WBC website, so he knew of the threat to picket in advance of the public outcry.)

So while all of this rightly inspires debate on the role of social media in the modern world, it’s also a deeply practical matter for a fairly hefty segment of the Facebook employee base, the customer service department. And since I’m in full Facebook mode these days, I thought I’d share some insight into what they do all day, since when things go wrong with the site, or in the lives of their users, they are often the first to know.

In addition to fielding basic requests for assistance, password resetting, help using the site, etc., the fifty person customer service team also handles issues of abuse - everything from inappropriate posts and privacy violations to the appeals queue, where you end up if you’ve had your account taken away and are attempting to wheedle your way back on. (Good luck. I’ve met Simon. He’s heard it all before.) And in times of trouble, like these, the assistance they offer is far more intimate.

“We have had an unusually busy week,” allows Tom LeNoble, the director of customer service. A spike in user traffic would mean a related rise in customer service requests. But some of it has also been making themselves available to customers who need to connect. "Our users have expressed how much they appreciated Facebook during this horrific event as it, at times, was their only means of correspondence. They used Facebook mainly to let each other know they were ‘ok’.”

Let’s be clear: Any doubt that Facebook doesn’t take its business seriously is erased with one visit to the customer service floor. Leadership is a big part: LeNoble is a preternaturally calm man, with a soothing voice and just enough of a southern twang to make you want to curl up with a bowl of biscuits and gravy. But his easy-going manner masks a serious corporate vitae. He ran global service operations for Palm, supervised customer service for walmart.com and ran customer service consumer sales and support for MCI, among other things. Tapped by a venture capital "friend" to check out the growing business, LeNoble had never heard of Facebook when he showed up, in a suit, for his interview in November 2005. (Networking alert: Jim Breyer of Accel, a Facebook investor, is also a board member of walmart.com) Their original offices, which had been covered in murals (and are about to be again) were a surprise. “I thought I’d walked into a restaurant”. Zuckerberg appeared in t-shirt, shorts and his trademark sandals. “I was clearly overdressed,” LeNoble says.

Unlike the engineering area, the customer service space is relatively clear of food, debris and all-nighter clutter. But the talent pool in the department (some are pictured) is just as impressive as the wizards who stay up late. The nearly 50 reps are all college educated, mostly from top shelf universities. (As I mentioned in the piece, my back of the envelope calculation suggests that there is about five million dollars worth of tuition handling customer service at Facebook.) And they are hiring aggressively – there will be 100 reps by the end of the year. All are former Facebook users, and all have to pass a fairly rigorous screening and orientation before they are set loose upon the Facebook community.

They also play a role - about a third of their time - conducting quality control analyses or research on various products, for example, on how search works on the Facebook site. Or, they may be asked to do a competitive analysis on other social networking sites. “We spend a good deal of time generating information internally for our engineers and developers.”

But there’s no way to get a Facebook customer service rep on the phone under normal circumstances. If it’s a real emergency, it will be LeNoble’s voice that you hear. He’ll get on the phone with frightened parents looking to understand more about what Facebook actually is, although he won’t let them into their kid’s site. Occasionally, it’s more serious. “I deal with a few suicides a week,” he says, through the National Suicide Hotline, occasionally he’ll need to contact the Center for Exploited and Missing Children or some other authority “but those numbers are small in comparison to the number of users we have and also other sites.”

The past few week, of course, has been dominated by the shooting. And LeNoble is characteristically circumspect about how they’ve been handling things. But he's clearly been working the phones and supporting his team. “The CS team, being so close to the demographic impacted, felt very compassionate and concerned for everyone involved…the victims, their families and friends,” he wrote me in a recent e-mail. The company sent out an announcement of sympathy that topped the News Feed for all Virginia Tech network users (39,000+). “And on Friday we changed the colors on the Virginia Tech network to maroon and orange in support.” But when any user dies, “we memorialize the account” says LeNoble, which protects the user’s privacy, while allowing their friends to continue to visit the profile and “post on the wall to express thoughtful comments.” (They have plenty of active military members, so they've had a bit of experience with this.) And with so many deaths happening at once, falling within Facebook’s chief demograpic, the growth of the memorial sites seems nothing short of amazing. “This clearly has become part of the grieving process for many,” write LeNoble.

Thanks to this digital world, now anyone can say - "today, we are all hokies" - and expect that the message will be heard swiftly and personally. That may be one of the more beautiful elements of the new normal.

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Facebook: We're Laughing With You. Mostly.

At some point a company or service gets so big that people make fun of it. (The public, not just family members.) Awareness in the form of pan-cultural parody is probably a good thing; it certainly marks a tipping point of relevance for any brand. (And, of course, if you use nonsense terms like “pan-cultural parody” it all sounds less mean than it can sometimes be.) So, in what is no doubt a tip of the hat to their growing cultural heft, people are starting to go out of their way to make fun of Facebook.

Facebook is still in many ways a niche site – the experience, albeit defining, of a very specific group of people, namely college students. As a result, the universe of users who know Facebook well enough to understand inside jokes about the site is also pretty narrowly defined. But even if you only have a rudimentary understanding of how the site works, you'll get the general idea pretty quickly. (In fact tribute/parody sites often have a funny way of helping you understand how the site functions.) And you'll probably be amazed at the amount of time that people who should probably be studying (or working) are spending making fun of the fact that they are spending too much time on Facebook. Either way, when SNL finally makes fun of Facebook, we can all feel good about knowing that we were laughing at, er with, them first.

Here's a skit, from a group called Penn Masala, who bill themselves as the world's first and premier Hindi a cappella group. It's performed to tune of the Enrique Iglesias' song Hero - with a bit of Bollywood flair thrown in - and makes fun of some of the voyeuristic possibilities of the site. It's enjoyed over a million views. From one commenter: “wow, that was retarted and disturbing.” You be the judge.

One group of filmmakers “Not Drunk Enough Productions,” turned the company into a scrawny, ever-present Big Brother character in “The Facebook Movie: They Know.”

In this particularly well-produced video, student filmmakers manage to make fun of both Facebook and eHarmony.

This is a short film about a boy who uses Facebook as a substitute for actual social interaction, courtesy of Nate Daniels. For the amateur anthropologists out there, it offers some interesting insight into the thought processes and dating habits of the young white male college student. (This is only part one; if you feel like you need to see more, part two is easy to find.)

This podcast from The RhettandLinKast does a pretty good job of both explaining and mocking the site.

A charming a capella tribute drives the point home that Facebook is to college as indoor plumbing is to the developed world.

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Facebook: Selling To The Brand Called Me

Matt Cohler spends his day thinking about money. “Were still in a high growth period,” says the vice president of strategy. “I spend a lot of time on big problems. Number one, how to monetize the site as effectively as possible.” A close second is thinking about “how we fit into the overall context of the landscape of what’s going on in social networking.”

Cohler, who is universally known around the company as “Cohler”, is one of the profoundly over-achieving 1.0 veterans who now populate many of the non-technical posts at Facebook. (Reading his resume actually made me tired.)

He was an early and smart hire - he'd worked with pioneer Facebook investor Peter Thiel at LinkedIn, and was in the room during Zuckerberg's first pitch for venture cash. He recalled being so amazed by Zuckerberg's invention, that he asked the then college sophomore if he could query the Facebook database personally to double-check what seemed to be stunning site growth. "It's not like I didn't trust him, I just wanted to see for myself." In what must have appeared to be the ultimate geek mating signal, Zuckerberg was smitten by Cohler's ability to think deeply and perform due diligence. Cohler was impressed by the potential, and he signed on, as he likes to say, around employee number five. He's been running on all eight cyclinders ever since.

Cohler isn’t the only one who is thinking about money. Everybody is. A new survey sponsored by iProspect and conducted by Jupiter Research says that 1 in 4 adults now regularly visit a social networking site. Marketers want to figure out how to cash in.

And sites like Facebook that encourages users to assemble themselves into affinity groups based on their many enthusiasms has the potential to deliver a highly targeted audience into the hands of marketers. It flows from the experience that Cohler says the company tries to deliver to users anyway. “We want them to be engaged and to feel like they own the site,” he says. “And that’s what savvy marketers want too. That’s how they get deep, meaningful brand engagement.” What remains to be solved is what he terms the lingering separation of church and state that defined the 1.0 ad model. “Then, advertising was only a separate thing. But we think about how much more engaging it would if [advertising] was actually a value-added experience.”

Cohler makes a good case for introducing marketers to an already existing band of brand-lovers. "This is happening organically - people put brands in their profiles. There are hundreds of thousands of groups where people are talking about brands [think cars, stores, watches - ed.] - which naturally harnesses user behavior of what doing on the site. Philosopically we want the experience of what marketers have on Facebook to be a value adding part of the user experience – not something that users would be annoyed by."

That's the tricky part. Annoyance. These people do seem to get annoyed from time to time. What remains to be seen is how the Facebook community will deal with new attempts to be marketed to. Facebook users are notoriously vocal about any change to the site, and have been known to rise up en masse to complain about pretty much anything.

And because Facebook is so high profile - and notoriously tight-lipped about their business model - there is constant Valley buzz about whether or not their attempts to increase revenue will work. (Their banner ads are currently handled by Microsoft.

But sponsored groups like Apple and Chase have met with a fair degree of success thus far. (All are approved by Zuckerberg personally as part of an extensive process that is handled by another senior staffer, Mike Murphy, who counsels the brand marketers in terms of best practices.) And marketers are continuing to debate the best way to go.
Of course, it will be interesting to watch what happens as the user base grows older. What new brand adventures will await? AARP? Life Alert? Reverse mortgages? Depends?

Sigh.

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Making Things, Breaking Things At Facebook

At the end of the day (or the beginning of it, since people who work there tend to stay up pretty late) Facebook is a technology company. It is staffed primarily by engineers; even some of the non-technical positions. (Even Zuckerberg, whose schedule is overloaded with executive responsibilities these days, doesn’t code much of the site anymore. “I just make things for fun and to keep my skills sharp.”) But Facebook is clearly a company filled with people who love to makes things. And like most people who are highly trained and focused, they have a charming way of being proud of what they create.

Katie Geminder (pictured) the Director of Product, sounds like a cross between a den mother and an air traffic controller as she describes what she does all day. “Product management interacts engineering and design, takes the vision, turns it into the details and gets the product out the door.” She and her team work directly with Zuckerberg and other lead engineers – or the engineering teams themselves – to vet product ideas. But things get made at “an amazing rate,” she says. “The rate of development and iteration that goes on here – it’s different than any other place I’ve ever worked.”

Geminder has been there about a year, and is one of growing number of 1.0 veterans who have come from what are now established technology companies to ride the wave of a yet another start-up. (Geminder hails from Apple, and most recently Amazon, where she also knew Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s current COO. See? Networking works.) Geminder talks animatedly – in fact, an hour with her is more energizing than a double espresso and a fist full of chocolate – about the Facebook culture, which she describes as “flat”, and that allows for ideas to both bubble up (from any and all engineers) and trickle down from on high.

“There’s a lot of collaboration, communication, moving fast,” explains Geminder. Engineers and teams sit together on the second and third floors, so information about product status bubbles up into the collective in a variety of ways. Like shouting back and forth? “Uh,” she laughs. “Actually, there’s this thing? It’s called Facebook?” She smirks. “It’s a very good way to share information efficiently.” Got it. (Facebook employees love that joke.)

One of the important functions of the customer service staffers – who are all college graduates from top shelf schools and long-time Facebook users – is to provide user feedback information to the product teams for review. User suggestions, click and page view data, complaints and questions are all analyzed. They also use other forms and methodologies – product testing and listening labs, for example. "We get as much user feedback as we can early in the product cycle without slowing things down,” explains Geminder.

Tuesday is drop dead day at Facebook. New products are fine-tuned and show up on the site in what’s called a “push.” Some products are going to be new, and some are going to be nuanced tweaks of existing features. “The user might not see what it is,” she explains. “Most of the new features and functionalities are small.” A big new product comes out whenever it is ready to launch, however.

But hacker nation lives on at Facebook, and the many engineers I spoke to are clearly damn proud of that. Frequent hackathons pop up like geek insurgencies - engineering all-nighters where people go deep on ideas that they haven’t had a chance to develop during their pre-push schedules. It’s a tip of the hat to the rebel nature of hacking (more on Zuckerberg’s philosophy later) but it also, it seems, gives people who need time to think in order to be able to create, a better option for making their contribution to the greater good.

One recent hackathon success story, says Geminder, was a tweak to the photo functionality that allowed people to see more pictures of, well, themselves. “People love to see themselves in pictures. So one of our engineers, Chris Cox, had this idea to make it easier for people to find pictures of themselves with specific friends in photos all throughout the site.” An already existing feature called photo-tagging made it possible. That functionality allows users to identify the people in their own photos. But the social aspect of the site provides the context necessary for the technology to correctly identify people in photos that are stored in other people’s albums. This lets users hunt for pictures of themselves with other people that may be stored on the site. Context counts - this can’t happen on sites that simply allow users to store photo albums. (And of course, privacy counts too. If you don’t want other people to see your photos, set your privacy controls accordingly.)

Den Mother Geminder sounds proud. “They whipped it out one night, and then out in the next push.” The functionality now lives as a button “see more pictures of me and so-and-so together.”

During the course of our several interviews, Zuckerberg talked early and often about the culture he is trying to build within Facebook. His stated goal is to create a system of openness that will foster a form of creative courage within the staffers. “Our company is full of really smart people – we emphasize intelligence over experience. We give people a lot of information, and give them a chance to contribute everywhere.” When things move fast, stuff goes wrong. The culture attempts to embrace that. “Our mantra is break things,” says Zuckerberg. “If things aren’t breaking, then you’re not moving fast enough. People learn by making mistakes.” And bottom line, “we just churn a lot of stuff out.”

And when things are moving quicky, things do break. They consider that a cost of doing business. For example, the gift feature – a small, low-impact feature that lets users send small icons as a “gift”, signifying a sentiment - broke down in about an hour, Zuckerberg explains. “But we also fixed it in an hour,” says Zuckerberg. This also explains why the whole newsfeed dust-up came as such a surprise. "Yup," he says laughing. "That was interesting."

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Inside Facebook - What's It Worth?

I recently spent a chunk of my life reporting a story on Facebook , the social networking phenomenon that seems to have swept away every person on the planet under 24 years of age. Nineteen million users worth. Or, as one extraordinarily intense intern here at Fast Company put it, “My. Whole. Life. Is. On. Facebook. SeriouslyIloveitsomuch.” Well. Seems worth a look, eh?

The magazine version of the story, which debuts this week on the web and next week on newsstands, traces the history of the company, how it operates today, and how it plans to sweep away the rest of us. We speculate a bit on their future plans, as well. But you'll also get a sense of Facebook’s 22-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg. Like many 22-year-old CEOs, ahem, his personality is the subject of an interesting amount of debate. For example, I recently hosted a dinner party where friends - editors from three major national magazines, actually - got into a conversation about whether or not Zuckerberg was arrogant. They’d heard he is. He’s not, particularly. He’s actually pretty terrific – extraordinarily likeable, decent and funny. Equally terrific, by the way, is his merry band of co-founders, who, through the miracle of editing, got a bit of a short shrift in the magazine piece. I hope to make it up to them all in these posts.

But a significant amount of airtime is also being devoted to what Facebook may or may not be worth, so I thought I’d mention the elephant in the room first. Rumors that the company has fielded and spurned offers circling a billion dollars – from Yahoo, for example - have been bouncing around for months. For web 2.0 watchers, it is great sport. In the big picture, the curiosity makes sense – it’s hard to imagine people this young creating something this successful, and surviving the growing pains of public scrutiny so well. And a billion dollars (allegedly) is a lot of money. But specifically for businesses that live on the web, memories from the bubble of yesterdecade – epic stories of overvaluation and excess, business plans on backs-of-napkins, etc – have taken on powerful second lives as punch lines and cautionary tales. Hey: Lesser mortals, even well-meaning ones, have blown through investor money only to end up as occasional entries in “where are they now” columns. Or worse. And we all love the smell of schadenfraude in the morning. I mean, come on.

Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it this way - “The strange boom/bust cycle in the late ‘90s is a big part of things here. Most people who lived through that remember the bust more than they remember the boom. That distorts a lot of thinking.” (I lived through it, and he’s right.) His bigger point is that Zuckerberg’s youth works in his favor – he’s less likely to be haunted by a specter of imminent market meltdown and stay focused on building something worthwhile. And Zuckerberg, sounding a bit like a stranger in a strange land, had an interesting take on the exercise of company-building within the context of the exotic Valley vibe (he’s from a suburb of New York City):

They just want to have companies here – starting a start up is like a cool thing to do. That just isn’t the case on the East Coast. You don’t start a company for fun or to have a start up. It’s almost like we wanted to NOT have a company, and it took us a while to admit that this even was a company, and to get it incorporated and start hiring people instead of just building it out as a project we had in an informal way…

All the web 2.0 stuff or other entrepreneurs – there are a few who are really focused on building interesting things. And they’re cool, and I’m friends with a bunch of them. But there’s this whole other segment of the culture that we don’t plug into that much because it’s just not very aligned with what we want to do.

So what’s Facebook really worth? It’s hard to know without a good long look at their books, which they don’t share publicly. But as you’ll learn tomorrow, the owners believe it’s worth more than anything they may or may not have been offered thus far. And they are legitimately engaged in building a business and enjoying the ride. (And for a company that’s officially 1,160 days old today, it’s been a remarkably interesting one.) And although I suppose it’s possible that Facebook could seriously screw things up, I’m inclined to believe that they are up to the task. This is a pretty smart group – 200 strong - who think very deeply about what, how and why they do what they do. And as any weary Web 1.0 survivor can tell you, a company that is ramping up for the sole purpose of selling itself off to the highest bidder has a very specific feel to it, a Potemkin-like optimism that swings, often wildly, from overconfidence to desperation very quickly. Nothing like that seems to be happening at Facebook HQ.

A quick heads up: In order to check out some of the features I’ll be talking about, you’ll have to register for the site. But fear not, you won’t have to share any information about yourself if you don’t want to. If you’re not a regular user of social networking sites, (or, if you’re like many people, simply an occasional voyeur when a friend or commentator points you to a particularly, uh, compelling MySpace page) you may be surprised at how much you enjoy using it. Even though the FC intern has thus far Resisted. Becoming. My. Friend. On. The. Site. – and Mark Zuckerberg was born the year I graduated college - I’ve managed to find my middle-aged way around just fine.