Case Study: The Pickens Plan and Facebook

As I've been doing some work for a client in the electricity field, I decided to take a look at what another prominent player - the Pickens Plan - was doing on Facebook.  The organization has a fan page set up - I was interested to note that they categorized themselves as a website when starting their presence.  This makes sense - though I could also have seen them listing themselves as a service.

In any case, the Pickens Plan is very active on their fan page, providing multiple updates a day and generating a fair amount of discussion.  They currently have 31,067 fans, which provides a great base for getting people to interact with one another.  Site administrators do a good job of updating with interactive content.  Wall posts regularly include videos, photos, or links to other reading on the topic.  The textual updates are concise and to the point, serving to inform and occasionally to call supporters to action.  I was surprised at how much they do on the wall; I would have expected less frequent updates with more specific purposes in mind.

What's more, the Pickens Plan also makes use of the "causes" application for fan pages, which gives it an avenue to raise money.  Not surprisingly, from what I've heard of the difficulty in getting people to donate on Facebook, the Plan hasn't raised any money.  But I was interested to see that the Plan had employed this technique.  I wonder how aggressively they've tried to utilize it.  I suspect it has been a fairly passive effort; only 266 people have been recruited to the cause.  Out of the 31,000+ fans, that isn't very many.

The page has a message board that isn't hugely active, though it does have a shade over 30 topics posted.  The most popular, however, only has 15 posts in it.  Again, I wonder what specific efforts the page administrators have taken to push the forum.  While people are regularly commenting on wall posts, they seem less involved in the deeper options available on the page.  What's more, there doesn't seem to be a full utilization of the options available.  The events page lists only six, with none upcoming.  I find it hard to believe that an organization as sizable as the Pickens Plan has nothing that they can list in their upcoming events.

All in all, I'm impressed with the amount of content Pickens is placing on Facebook, but I wonder what more they might be able to do to generate a more active community.  It seems they have a prime opportunity to push discussion and promote action - but more organization would be needed to shepherd this in.  In general, I wonder how effective this type of outreach is on Facebook these days, as I suspect more people are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them on the network.