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Training Facebook in the land of Vkontakte

By Ben Colmery

Published on July 27, 2009

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So, you are sitting in Ukraine, and you are wondering, “Do I train Facebook or do I train Vkontakte?” If you understand what both can do, which one is more powerful, you think the answer’s easy—Facebook. Then you realize that Vkontakte is the website that gets the most traffic in Ukraine, among ALL websites. Yeah, it’s that popular. Facebook? No. 36.

Do you train the more powerful tool? Or, do you train the tool that everyone is already using? If your goal is to train skills that add a lot of value and power, using a site that is No. 4 in the world, and will therefore catch you up with everyone else in the world, you go with Facebook. If your goal is to tap into large groups of people in your country, you go with Vkontakte.

This presented me with a real dilemma. On the one hand, my mantra for the whole training was to “go where they already are.” Social networking doesn’t groove so well if you go somewhere dead (and by dead, I mean like when you walk into a bar or a restaurant and the serving staff all look up at you at once, happy to finally have a customer). On the other hand, this is Facebook we are talking about. Facebook can flat out haul ass compared to Vkontakte. It can do so much of what I wanted our trainees to go home knowing how to do that Vkontakte simply can’t.

3704908885_46773f4ba4_o If you don’t know anything about Vkontakte, it is a Facebook mirror created for Russian and Ukrainian speakers, founded by the Russian company Digital Sky Technologies. On the front end, it looks and acts like Facebook. And it is extremely popular in Russia and Ukraine, as web traffic ranking goes. But then it’s not like the Internet has quite the penetration in these countries, or that being No. 1 in a place like Ukraine is the same as being No. 1 in America, the birthplace of Internet addiction (seriously, we make the Internet look like crack, by comparison). Also, Vkontakte starts looking more like a Hollywood movie set once you take a look inside. That DST invested $200 million USD in Facebook makes it look a lot like they see a Facebook moon rising in this part of the world pretty soon. In our first training, in Kyiv, I focused the conversation back to Vkontakte, thinking that was the tool people would have to use. Facebook wasn’t, as far as I knew, available in Russian. Or Ukrainian. The problem with this was that all of my best examples of journalism and NGO uses were on Facebook. So, I was showing all these great examples on one tool, and recommending that people try to recreate them on another. This is complicated by Vkontakte being somewhat different even on the things you can do with it that are like Facebook. First, the layout is organized differently, so your wall, contact info, friends, and whatever else is available on both can be found in different locations on the page. Second, the various links you click, and processes you follow for actions like creating groups and events, have some differences in their steps. This makes it hard to train using a step-by-step approach, particularly when talking about two different platforms. So, I’m not sure that people got the most they could out of this session. You can’t create pages on Vkontakte, like on Facebook. And many of my examples were from Facebook pages. Like, the New York Times Facebook page and Amnesty International’s page. Thus, this was more theoretical than practical. People could create accounts for their news media or NGOs, and it would be something like a Facebook page, since profiles and pages are fairly similar. However, you lose all of the best functionality, like publishing updates automatically on fan’s homepages, adding applications like RSS and Twitter to publish automatically on your page. Like I said, Vkontakte is like a Hollywood movie set compared to Facebook. At a glance, you might think they are the same. But step inside, and one becomes hollow. It wasn’t a big surprise following the training that we got a lot of feedback that said the social networking and Facebook session was the least useful. Of course, I would make a discovery that week that would make the session a LOT more useful. After searching relentlessly trying to figure out how to get Facebook to appear in Russian or Ukrainian, I stumbled upon the translations application in Facebook that would make this possible. Would have been a lot more convenient the week before. Smashing! This made me a little more ambitious about training Facebook, and opened a whole mess of possibilities. Tune in next time when I tell you about Facebook pages and groups, and training them in Ukraine… Author’s Note:  This is part of a series of posts on my experiences doing New Media trainings with Internews-Ukraine in June and July 2009, as part of their MediaNext initiative, in partnership with European Journalism Centre. These views are my own, and do not reflect those of Internews-Ukraine or European Journalism Centre. Just so we’re clear on that. Photo: A nice example of how to approach social networking. Looks kinda like what I’ve been trying to convey. Courtesy of Intersection Consulting.

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Ben Colmery is a media developer trying to empower people through new and traditional media. That includes putting together trainings for journalists and NGO strategists in Ukraine to utilize tools like WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to spread content, raise awareness, and mobilize action. He is also researching capacity-building needs for traditional media in West Africa and developing program recommendations.


Tags: facebook, russia, social network, ukraine, vkontakte,

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