Windows on the Web:  Chapters Creating New Web Presence

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

One of the consequences of the advent of social media (or if you would like a choice of buzzwords, Web 2.0) is that it is easier to get material onto the Web. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning allow you to quickly get a page up and visible to the public without worrying about Web hosting or HTML. The page may look like everybody else’s page, but you can establish a presence. NABE chapters are using some of these tools to help communicate with their members and allow members to communicate with each other.

Facebook

Following on the launch of a group for NABE, discussed in the February 2009 WoW, the National Economists Club, the Dallas-Fort Worth Association for Business Economics, LA-NABE and the Cleveland Association for Business Economics, have groups set up on Facebook. (Have I missed your chapter’s page? Let me know and I’ll add yours.)

The most important reason for starting a group for your chapter is to promote your chapter meetings. New events will show up as a notification on your member’s own pages, but by getting your members to share and re-post, you can gain additional exposure for your event from their friends, too.

If you already have a Facebook account, then it is easy to start a new group. Go to your Groups page, and right at the top you should see a button labeled “Create a New Group.” Click it, and you will start a series of dialogs that allow you to create a group. You don’t need the answers to all your settings, because you can always come back later and change them. Once you get your group set up, it’s time to go through your Facebook friends and invite the appropriate ones to your group. If you don’t have a lot of Facebook friends, there is a tool that lets you invite people via e-mail. The creator of the group can also promote other group members to serve as administrators.

Instead of creating a group, you can create a page for your organization. Do this by clicking on the Ads and Pages icon on the shortcut bar at the bottom of the Facebook page. After that, the set-up process goes something like a group set-up. When you invite friends to your new page, you invite them to be fans instead of becoming members of a group. What’s the difference between a group and a page? In my opinion, groups are better at promoting communications among group members, and invite more collaboration. On the other hand, pages are probably better at one-way communications between the organization and its “fans.”  However, given the various ways you can configure the two, they can end up being almost the same.

LinkedIn

The National Economists Club,, the Cleveland Association for Business Economics, the Los Angeles Chapter of NABE, the Richmond Association for Business Economics and the Philadelphia Council on Business Economics have groups set up on LinkedIn

The process of setting up a group in LinkedIn is somewhat the same. If you have a LinkedIn account (and if you don’t, then you aren’t very serious about your career), go to your Groups page. Over on the right you should see a yellow button called Create a Group. It leads you through a dialog similar to that on Facebook. Once your group is set up, you can invite your contacts to join. After that, you can use the group to promote your events or use the discussions page to encourage communications among members.

Sharing

At the bottom of this column, in the other stories in NABE News, and on various other places on the website, you’ll see a new Share Bar. If you use Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or a blog, clicking the appropriate button will let you quickly share the page with your account. You can also e-mail the page to a colleague.

We hope to increase the audience for NABE by using the Share Bar. If I post a link to a story on my Facebook page or group, my friends will see it. But if NABE members also post an item, we can double or triple the number of people who see the event. So feel free to share anything of interest that you see – it will help boost publicity for NABE.

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