Facebook is a platform primarily for brief, informal communication. That did not seem a suitable place to go for the Revealed. However, the service has lately gained a reputation of a tool with an immense marketing power that affects events or even makes them happen... That is why I eventually decided to try it out.
If you are not logged in to Facebook, you won't see ratings and comments on individual posts.
The Revealed has more than six hundred fans on Facebook at the moment, most of them younger than 35 (84 %), and slightly more women than men (58 %; but women are 4 times as active as men!). Those users are a different group from regular visitors to the Revealed website - it looks Facebook may bring new fans to our project. There is a risk, though, that the Revealed will disappoint them. It is a project that is taking place in Europe and Africa with educational and wildlife protection goals and less focus on entertainment. It seems the most popular with Facebook users have been e.g. posts somehow related to recording of new gorilla fairy tales with Lucie Bila and those on a lighter note. On the other hand, profiles of gorillas living in Limbe by Simone de Vries were quite successful as well.
Having mentioned texts about fairy tales and texts from Simone, such content has not appeared on the official Revealed website as yet. Why? No one expects Facebook to carry comprehensive materials - it usually offers extremely brief posts, links to interesting content, photos and short videos. As regards the fairy tales, we were able to post first one photo of Lucie Bila before the microphone (taken just a few seconds earlier), then a photo from the production process and a bit later a fragment of an interview with Lucie Bila etc. Likewise, I have not considered texts by Simone de Vries suitable for publishing on the website as she has been sending them in parts... Therefore, the "official" website and the profile on Facebook can complement each other quite well, with our audience on Facebook being able to directly influence production and, to a certain extent, the direction in which the project evolves.
There is yet another point - we can see the users (the "we" behind the Revealed logo on Facebook means usually me and sometimes Jana Jiratova) and can communicate with them. They are not anonymous IP addresses accessing the website or nicknames in discussion forums. They are people with faces, some of whom become our Facebook friends. I only wish that people dare post their own photos or videos in the Revealed's profile on Facebook...
16.11.2009 Twiggs was born in the wild in Cameroon around the year 1997. She and another female gorilla, Brighter, was smuggled across the border to Nigeria as infants to be sold as pets on the locale pet marked.
09.11.2009 When Pitchou was very small, she was brought to Hotel Ilomba in Kribi to be sold, after her mother had been killed by hunters. She stayed there for three days, until the hotel owners could no longer bare to watch her suffer. The family donated her to the LWC.
02.11.2009 Chella came to Limbe Wildlife Centre when he was only two years old. He was found in the back of a bush-taxi sitting on his dead mother. Wildlife officials confiscated him and kept him three weeks before bringing him to the Wildlife Centre.
21.09.2009 Adjibolo came to Limbe Wildlife Centre when she was only about 6 months old. She was confiscated by senior civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Adjibolo, from a hunter who tried to sell her.
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