Facebook is interesting. So you can pop in, check out your mates, see what they are up to, maybe browse some shared links, photos and videos, do a fun quiz and so on. And, er, that’s more or less it. If your friends don’t actively participate, it soon becomes a bit dull.

Last.FM on the other hand offers endless hours of great music and thousands of playlists, whether your “offline” friends participate in the community or not.  You don’t just need to rely on the content selected by your friends. And once you do start to build up a list of friends, Last.FM gets even better. For starters, with the fire.fm plug-in, you can play your friends playlists direct from your firefox browser bar without needing to visit the Last.FM website. And if you don’t like your friends’ music tastes, you can search for other people whose music you DO like and invite them to be friends. And then you can easily find and play their playlists…….. and so it goes.

There are also groups and radio stations (aka playlists) for different types of music, musicians, eras and more. And if you search by artist, you not only see their music and groups but also tour dates and other events.

But its not quite perfect – yet. Once you register, you get a profile page and though Last.FM cleverly personalises it for you by making recommendations based on what you’ve previously listened to, there’s not a lot you can actually do to customise your profile. And you do have to pay around £1.50 a month to get access to advert-free content.

If only the music-related content of Last.FM could be merged with the community tools of Facebook. Now THAT would be worth paying for!

When browsing for it, I accidentally discovered another “change” website. This one is change.org, calling itself a “social action network”.

The great thing about these two sites, beyond the excellent causes and issues they discuss, is the fact that the information flow is most definitely two-way. These sites are excellent examples of using web 2 tools for social change.

And not only are conversations and debates taking place among the site hosts and their visitors but in fact the sites themselves are also examples of what I would call “web theatre”.

By web theatre, I mean the following. It’s a well researched fact that the majority of visitors to web 2 – type sites (social networks, social tagging, microblogging and so on) tend to lurk rather than participate. That the participation by the “masses” is actually participation by “the few, watched by the masses”.

Clever site hosts can make the most of this level of participation to further communicate their messages to the masses, and this is what is being done in an excellent way by these two sites, especially change.gov.

Instead of pushing their messages blindly without allowing for open debate to take place on their turf (hence driving it to blogs etc where they have less influence) or when it does, simply ignoring it, the Obama team are sharing their ideas and plans and openly encouraging feedback, whether positive or not.

And responding to it. That’s the key to the “theatre” bit – performing with the few participants for the mass of lurkers.

On top of discussions and digg-like voting, they are also sharing information about the meetings they are having with outside groups. Even to the point of sharing agendas, presentations and so on. (Have a look at the “Your seat at the Table” section of the site).

If a new government can do this, imagine the opportunities available to other organisations. Greater collaboration with staff, customers, their community of visitors, greater participation in driving their agendas, greater transparency…. imagine.

And imagine how worried the boards of various multinationals must be.

Back then, I think the media coverage was measured by how quickly organisations could update their web pages, capture and show film footage and photos, and locate people to interview. Blogs and YouTube weren’t yet mainstream, sure there were some newsgroups and forums but I suppose most people turned to the tv and other traditional media for their information.

Imagine if a similarly significant event happened today – using web 2.0 tools people could post updates on presence awareness tools such as twitter, send photos and videos from their mobile phones to flickr, youtube and so on, and share their feelings in social networking groups and blogs. And get newsfeeds on their mobiles.

News coverage would truly be by the masses. Our record of history would definitely be different – no longer just the “official” (read govt-endorsed, corporate funded) version of events but made up of real stories covered by real people who were in various ways a real part of the event. A social version.

A pretty big difference in a short amount of time.

Imagine back to other significant events, earlier in our world history – the end of world war 2, say.

And imagine how different the coverage and information sharing about future major events will be. Once mobile connectivity is more reliable.

Great for democracy, and more power to the people.

And it dawned on me that, unless I’ve missed something, the writers of Groundswell have made a bit of an assumption around customers and their use of web 2 tools.

Their book suggests that if you figure out who your target customers or users are, decide why you want to communicate with them (e.g. to get ideas from them for new products, to promote new services to them, etc), and then understand how these users make use of web 2.0 tools (ie. their “social technographic profiles”) – well then all you need to do is use these tools and magically customers will communicate with you.

Except that they probably won’t.

The piece that seems to be missing is what Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody. Its something he calls “Promise”. Another way of thinking of it is the “what’s in it for me” factor.

For example, just because an organisation has identified its target users as being “critics” (in Groundswell’s  social techno profile) – due to the fact that they tend to rate products and comment on blogs – doesn’t mean they will do this on matters of interest to the organisation.

Forrester charges for access to its detailed information on social technographic profiles but I wonder whether the info considers this dimension – not so much exactly which groups use what web 2.0 tools but also what they talk about when using them. WHY they choose to use them. The “what’s in it for me” element.

Maybe I’ll find out by the end of the book.

All this talk about people having conversations online with each other, forming groups, getting what they need from the community and other customers rather than from organisations, the challenges faced by organisations around driving value from it all…..

stop right there <looking over my shoulder at my book shelf>. Community Building on the Web, Communities of Commerce, Online Communities, Hosting Web Communities. All excellent books about online communities, all published in 2000.

There’s nothing really new about a lot of this at all – except that this time around, the technologies to enable it are so much better.

I remember back in 2000, when I was working on a project to develop an online learning portal. The big thing the client wanted was an online community for Alumni, so they could remain engaged with them after they finished their courses and could sell them a range of stuff. Among the many challenges we faced (finding partners, developing sensible revenue models, etc.) were with the tools that were available at the time.

Vaporware doesn’t even start to describe it.

This time around, the technology is such that the vision of online communities providing business value is definitely achievable. The tools are there, its just a matter of organisations being creative with the content they provide and courageous with using it to communicate with customers.

Imagine how different our technology strategy for this client would have been had we had the vision of facebook and twitter back then. Though we’d probably be living it up on a tropical island somewhere by now, spending our fortunes earned!