The latest on Facebook’s German insurgency: A contest about who does good deeds on Facebook

October 7, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Updated

Facebook is so serious about making the world a better place it launched 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.

Next Story: BlackBerry’s iPhone-envy literally shows in Vodafone promo pics
Previous Story: Google launches in-game advertising for Flash web games

Bookmark and Share

Tags:

Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Adam Clark Estes
    i like the way you roll, mr eldon. but can't we all agree on some sort of webhegenomy? i'd be glad to sign my name along the line that nobody can really claim that the internet is yet able to represent a common good. too much of the world is frankly without access...
  • Adam Clark Estes
    i meant "webhegemony" by the way.
  • That point is too deep for this article, Adam, so I'm not going to address it.

    Separately.... I haven't talked to you forever, man. Email me. Same address.
  • btw... nice article
  • website already book marked!! good read! thanks for sharing! :)
  • Ezra Callahan
    Not sure this is as controversial as you think.

    First, the march was explicitly anti-FARC and not pro-AUC or pro-any other right wing paramilitary group. I think it's actually safe to say, given the march's focus on peace, that the million-plus taking part are really against all forms of violence in their country. It was a remarkable event - supposedly the largest protest in the history of Colombia or something like that - focused less on the controversial history of Colombia's paramilitaries and more on the desire of people to finally see peace in their country.

    Second the AUC and most other large, organized right-wing paramilitary groups have already been largely demobilized through a massive government effort under president Uribe there. So the right-wing paramilitaries, while not fully eradicated, certainly do not pose the level of threat to national security that the FARC does today. It's a bit old now, but you can read more in an article from the Council on Foreign Relations from January at http://www.cfr.org/publication/15239/colombias_...
  • Hey Ezra,

    It's true that the paramilitaries were partially demobilized... as the report you linked to pointed out, only partially. Some excerpts from the report:

    "In addition, new criminal organizations have emerged in the wake of the AUC [the right-wing paramilitary leadership] that bear a striking resemblance to their paramilitary predecessors.

    "But it’s unclear if the underlying operating structures of these [paramilitary] groups has been crippled. In February 2006, a senior U.S. military official told the International Crisis Group that many paramilitaries maintained control over drug trafficking and illegal assets.

    "In September 2007, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe told the United Nations that in Colombia, “today there is no paramilitarism. There are guerrillas and drug traffickers.” Many observers—from the United Nations to Colombian analysts—disagree. On the contrary, they say, the paramilitaries are smaller, more clandestine, and operating with just as much impunity as before the AUC’s demobilization.

    "In the 2008 foreign aid bill, Congress mandated that at least $20 million must go to the office of the prosecutor-general. In the fight against both drug traffickers and organized criminals, “there is recognition in Congress that the weak link is the justice system,” says Isacson. Still, of Colombia’s 2008 aid, 65 percent will be military."

    In other words, paramilitaries are still active in various forms, so to single out FARC at this point still comes across as one-sided and political on the part of the protest organizers. If the protestors wanted to send a clear message against violence, they should have marketed the protest as anti-violence, not anti-FARC. This protest is like a group staging a protest against Palestinian "terrorism" or Israeli "terrorism" or Irish Republican Army "terrorism" or Unionist "terrorism."

    So, just sayin: The Colombia situation is complex, and everyone seems partially to blame for the ongoing violence.
  • At the risk of being controversial by criticising another commercial business, I find it a little strange that Facebook can claim to be making the world a better place by giving away €3,000 for coming up with marketing campaigns for ... Facebook - it seems ill-judged and must represent a minute proportion of their marketing revenue let alone their profits. I have much more sympathy with their claim that their free site helps people to communicate which helps to bring about social change.

    As a free People Search engine and Global Address Book, we give away 10% of our revenues to charity because we believe that only by making fixed and long term commitments can commercial businesses claim to be ethical by helping the disadvantaged in the environment that they operate in. As a website that seeks to operate globally, we have chosen to donate to reduce global poverty. I wouldn't suggest that Facebook should give away 10% of its revenue stream, but I believe that a larger and longer term commitment than the one you mention would be more sustainable.

    Ben Leefield
    CEO
    WikiWorldBook
  • Marshall Kirkpatrick
    Soon-to-be US House Speaker Dennis Hastert told the Columbian military not to worry about congressional restrictions on US military aid that required them to cut ties to paramilitary squads that cut peoples' heads off with chainsaws in order to soften villages up. He said the restrictions were due to a leftist dominated congress and that he'd work to remove them. See National Security Archives at George Washington University, this post http://tinyurl.com/3ehvc8 Document #52 in particular.

    It's no coincidence either. Hastert et al. are in league with those folks who said "I made that food stamp cartoon with Obama, watermelon and chicken because watermelon and chicken are food, that's all!" http://tinyurl.com/49jqj8

    These people know exactly what they are doing. What's my point? That I'm not so sure Mark Zuckerberg knows what he's doing.
  • Great article very nice to read, waiting for yoyur next post
  • what a nice post
  • It's interesting marketing campaign by Facebook in order to compete with local rival in German. However, i think sometimes people prefer to interact with their own languages. Maybe this is the strength of the studivz. well .. i have never tried that studivz, dont know else that they give more than facebook. I dont even know how to create account over there (all in German language) :p
  • edhardy622
    British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
    http://www.abercrombiefitchstore.co.uk