Updated
a contest on the subject today, in German. The contest "invites people to pay tribute to those who have used Facebook to influence social change and contribute to a more open and connected world," the company says.
First, the rules: You submit a short essay and up to three photos about your experience with someone who used Facebook to bring the world closer together; finalists will also need to submit a short video. The winner will receive €1,000 -- or, suggestively, €3,000 towards a cause of their choice. Submissions opened today and will close November 15. The contest is only running in German (at least right now [Update: Here it is in other languages]), and you can only enter it if you're a resident of Germany, Spain, France or the United Kingdom, according to the official rules.
Germany is a competitive place for social networks. Facebook has already been going at it fiercely with local copycat rival studiVZ, even apparently hiring street teams to throw parties and help bring in new members. Whatever the methods used, Facebook does appear to be steadily gaining ground against the main StudiVZ site, if Google Trends' numbers are indicative. However, the newly launched high school version of StudiVZ, called MeinVZ, has been doing even better than Facebook.
Is this contest a way for Facebook to remind Germans that it's the social network worth using?
It may not be wrong for Facebook to pat itself on the back while making a bid for more users -- after all, that's what most bloggers do. But Facebook uses a controversial example on the contest site to highlight how the social network is already being used for good. It points to a march that Colombian Facebook users organized to protest terrorist acts committed by the country's leftist guerillas. Thing is, right-wing Colombian guerrillas with close ties to the country's U.S.-backed government have also been implicated in numerous terrorist activities. That topic seems to have been covered in much greater detail by European media than their counterparts here in the U.S. Germany has a large and vibrant leftist youth scene that doubtless knows about the issues in Colombia.
If I were Facebook, I'd forge ahead with the contest -- and with any number of ideas for getting more users -- but I'd think hard about using that example.