Face-to-Facebook

The cover story in the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek is a profile of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, who's widely credited with helping the youthful company grow up. And in her free time? She throws meetings at her home:

Every few weeks a few dozen Silicon Valley women—doctors, teachers, and techies—head to the seven-bedroom Atherton (Calif.) mansion Sandberg shares with her husband, Dave Goldberg, chief executive of Web startup SurveyMonkey, and their two kids. The group sits on foldout chairs in the living room and holds plates of catered food on their laps as they listen to a guest speaker. Over the years, Sandberg has lured such luminaries as Geena Davis, Billie Jean King, Rupert Murdoch, Meg Whitman, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Robert Rubin, the most recent guest, said that 15 years ago when he was Treasury Secretary, it was good for Sheryl Sandberg that she knew him. Now, he quipped, it was good for him that he knows her.

These "Women in Silicon Valley" events, as Sandberg calls them, have become a mainstay in the lives of the women in her personal and professional circle. "I think there are a lot of people who feel they are very good friends with Sheryl, and that's a testament to how much she invests in those relationships," says Marne Levine, a former colleague at Treasury who joined Facebook last year in Washington as its vice-president of global public policy.

Last year a guest speaker at one of Sandberg's home soirees was Cambodian human trafficking activist Somaly Mam. After she discussed her work and shared her personal history of being sold into slavery at a young age, Sandberg stood up and announced her intention to hold a fundraiser for the Somaly Mam Foundation and asked how many of her friends would join her. Everyone volunteered. The fundraiser, held at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, Calif., in November, raised more than a million dollars for the foundation, a third of the organization's annual contributions.

So in order to effect real change in the world, this business executive -- who is already extremely influential -- turns to meetings. Not too shabby.

Convene Reads: The Facebook Effect

There's no way that a book about social networking and technology and social-networking technology wouldn't unfold in and around a bunch of meetings, and, boy, is The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, by David Kirkpatrick, ever the mother lode. Beginning with late-night brainstorming and coding sessions when Mark Zuckerberg and Co. were still at Harvard, through sitdowns with potential investors in Silicon Valley, to internal meetings and industry conferences and Facebook's own events -- the world's biggest virtual-communication company is all about the face-to-face.

Indeed, the book begins with the story of a civil engineer in Colombia who used Facebook to arrange a protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that was attended by millions of people worldwide in February 2008. As Zuckerberg tells Kirkpatrick: "We did some thinking and we decided that the core value of Facebook is in the set of friend connections. We call that the social graph, in the mathematical sense of a series of nodes and connections. The nodes are the individuals and the connections are the friendships. ... We have the most powerful distribution mechanism that's been created in a generation."

"Watch Facebook."

A couple of relevant tweets from Wael Ghonim's Twitter page.

Any meeting professional who has ever doubted the power of social networking should have had their doubts smashed this past Friday, when a popular revolution that began and spread via Facebook and Twitter toppled the regime of Egyptian president — excuse me, former president (!) — Hosni Mubarak.

FaceSkype or Skypebook?

Rumors have been circulating for the last week that Facebook and Skype are close to announcing what Kara Swisher -- co-creator and co-host of The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, who broke the story -- calls "a significant and wide-ranging partnership that will include integration of SMS, voice chat, and Facebook Connect." Sounds great to me. I use Facebook and Skype every day, professionally and personally, in ways that are similar but distinct, and it feels intuitive to integrate their services in some way.

Their (hypothetical) partnership also seems like it would create a social-networking analogue for a face-to-face meeting experience -- with Facebook as the platform that brings people together (e.g., an annual conference) and Skype as a program that gets them talking (e.g., a networking reception). That's a pretty good thing, right?