Facebook - creating an environment you can trust

Facebook puzzles managers. It's clearly a great chance to reach a greater audience in a cool new way. But, they will ask you, how can I control what goes on in my Facebook group so that it doesn't get out of hand?

The natural instinct of managers will be to want draconian measures to ensure that the page only gets used exactly in the way they envision. But that doesn't work on Facebook.

Part and parcel of Facebook is that it allows you to create a social environment that people come to, voluntarily, to be themselves and do their "thing". And that means that you have to have a basic level of trust in the people you interact with, as well as in the "ruggedness" of the environment.

Imagine you're at a party where the host is forever moving from one guest to another, asking this one to be careful of the glass ornaments, that one not to talk about politics to other guests because it's boring, a third to eat over a napkin and not drop crumbs on the carpet. Everything you do seems to make the host twitch in dismay. Good party? Not likely.

Now imagine the difference if the host has put away all the breakables, trusts people to manage their own conversations, and accepts a few crumbs on the carpet as the price you pay for the joy of celebrating with friends. He has a couple of house rules which he makes guests politely aware of, and he keeps a careful eye out in case things go wrong; but he interferes as little as possible and just lets his guests get on with enjoying the party.

That's the atmosphere you aim to create on Facebook. There's nothing wrong with laying down a couple of simple rules - no bullying, no inappropriate images. Indeed, making ground rules clear may be a step in creating a "rugged" environment, one that you can trust not to be broken. And of course you need to keep a careful eye out for behaviour that may be inappropriate and threatening, and be ready to intervene if necessary.

But if you start managing the conversations, dictating what can and can't be done, and pulling the carpet out from under people who are simply doing what they want without harm to anyone else, then you are missing out on the social atmosphere that Facebook is meant to create. If you want to do Facebook right, trust it, lighten up, and for goodness sake stop staring at the crumbs on the carpet.