My Use of Facebook Groups: IA Capital Partners and Information Arbitrage

I have done a woeful job using these groups to stimulate discussion. I tossed out a few questions early on, generated some interesting dialog, and then stopped. Stupid. Sorry about that. So here is my pledge. I will use best efforts going forward to do the following:

• IA Capital Partners Facebook group: Pose questions and offer commentary around what I am actually seeing in early-stage deal land, a land where I am very active and seeing a lot of stuff. I'll share ideas, trends, themes and memes, and would love group members to share their perspectives as well.

• Information Arbitrage Facebook group: Raise thematic questions and issues of interest to me around Wall Street and technology, and generate a hopefully vibrant discussion around these issues.

I'd also love it if group members started question and theme threads of their own around the concepts and meanings of these groups. I think Facebook groups can be a very powerful medium for an active, multi-threaded conversation. I just feel like I haven't done my part to foment an active dialog. My bad. I'll try to do better.

Comments

[Michael Eyal Sharon]

I completely agree with Ian. Encouraging conversation around your primary and most visited community - although it's in some respects a limited channel - is far more useful than trying to stimulate discussion within multiple sub-communities based around related topics on sites which have higher barriers to entry.

It may not be your fault that there hasn't been enough discussion in those groups, perhaps it's simply that the conversation and the platform that you have here is enough for most people, most of the time.

You mention fomenting an active dialogue which reminded me of this article about the User Generated Content myth over at Publishing 2.0 (link neutered! google it). I think the reality of the situation is that encouraging an active dialogue within any one of your groups would require a non-trivial investment in attention - which you've chosen (unsurprisingly) to spend at your main site here. For me, Facebook is less useful for high value, public dialogues simply because content within the group is not searchable (through Google or FB). If the intention is for the conversation to be private or limited to group members only, then I think FB is the tool for you, otherwise, keep it in the blogosphere.

[Ian Wilson]

Why not just keep discussion centered on this blog? I am sure most of the people signed up to the facebook groups also read your blog.

Right now there does not seem to be any easy way to manage discussions around various web sites (perhaps monitor110 does that?) so having them all in 1 place, your place, seems like the easiest way to keep the conversation flowing, imho.

Facebook is becoming more and more cluttered with spam daily, so much so that its cost of use is getting too steep for me, I cant find the signal for the noise. Does anyone else find that?