Are you on Facebook?

These days, who isn't? What used to be network for college students only, has now been opened to the public and organizations as well. Recently, the NYT joined Facebook:

NYT sees success in Facebook push
The New York Times is happy to be your Facebook friend. An internal memo yesterday from Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy touted the newspaper’s “successful” advertising campaign on Facebook in the days following the presidential election.
Members of the leading social networking site could answer the NYT’s question, “What should Barack Obama do first as president?” and send each other gift icons with a fake Times front page with “OBAMA WINS” stripped across the top. Heekin-Canedy wrote:
The goals of the campaign were to increase our number of Facebook fans; raise awareness of NYTimes.com as an interactive news center; and engage the Facebook community in a conversation about the election outcome.

The Times took out a roadblock, or exclusive, ad on the front page of Facebook with a brief video of Obama and an invitation to submit comments. Heekin-Canedy said the ad was seen by 68.3 million people, and 34,000 comments were shared. The free gift was sent by Facebook users to their friends more than 400,000 times. And in the process, the Times nearly quadrupled the number of fans on its Facebook page — a figure the Grey Lady takes quite seriously:
We increased our number of fans more than three times in just 24 hours — from 49,000 to 164,000 — and in the process far exceeded our 2008 goal of 100,000 fans…Possibly the greatest success of this campaign, however, is that our fans continue to rapidly grow…into a powerful, free word-of-mouth network that we will leverage for future marketing messages.

Organizations, like the New York Times are jumping onboard Facebook to increase awareness of what they have to offer us. According to this article the Times increased their number of fans drastically in a 24 hour period--of course, due to social networking. An idea, video or thought can circulate faster on Facebook than it can if it's in an actual newspaper. It's also far easier and conveniant to hop online, check out your friends pages and NYT at the same time.

I work as the Publicity Coordinator at the Library in Litchfield and among the many things that I am exploring with the director is joining a social network like Facebook or Myspace to get our name out there more. We have an outstanding number of people who visit the Library, partly due to press release that we send to newspapers, advertisements on the radio, but also our website. We have a blog (which I also write for!!) and all sorts of research tools and information on the website. The website is highly accessed, as is the blog. We live in a technological world, whether we want to or not, and more and more people are turning to technology as a conveniant and informative tool. I know many other libraries are using Facebook/Myspace to establish more of a connection with their patrons. For instance, you can get their feedback on how the library (organization) is doing, what could be improved, what do they like the most etc. It's also great for teens who practically live on Facebook. In order to market to all populations you need to advertise in all sorts of venues.

I believe many other newspapers, journals, magazines and organizations will be joining the social sphere in the near future! Even organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife and Sierra Club have their own pages.