Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new mission statement for his company Facebook on tumblr video romantic sexThursday: Bring the world closer together.
It's Chris Cox's job to figure out how to make that happen.
SEE ALSO: Zuckerberg sheds tears and gets political in Harvard commencement speech"We’re about to pass 2 billion people," Cox, Facebook's chief product officer, said in an interview ahead of the summit. "We're taking the opportunity to revisit our mission statement which is important because we’re a mission-driven company. We're going from connecting people to moving closer."
Facebook is hosting its first-ever Communities Summit this week in Chicago, where Zuckerberg and Cox will be speaking to be about 300 Group administrators about the company's new efforts, including five product updates.
While the Groups product isn't going to be drastically different, Cox said he believed the new features will make it a better experience for every Group.
Group administrators will now have access to Insights, meaning they will see real-time metrics on growth of their Group as well as engagement, such as numbers of posts and the time of day that members are most engaged.
Administrators also will have membership request filters, which Facebook said administrators told them is one of their most time-consuming tasks on the site. They can sort membership requests by gender and location and accept or decline them all at once. That makes sense for groups that are gender or location specific.
"If you’re running a physicians moms group, you don’t want men," Cox said. "A lot of Groups are local based so you want people who are local."
Moderators will be able to keep their Groups safer, Cox said, by not only removing a person from a Group in one step but also all of their content, including posts, comments, and other people added to the Group.
Page administrators can now schedule posts for a specific day and time, meaning they could spend less time actively on Group but making sure there is always new content.
Finally, Facebook is allowing Group administrators to recommend Groups to their members with a new Group to Group linking system.
This is far from it for Facebook building on Groups.
The team is still working on moderation and safety. Illegal firearm sales and other shady practices have occurred on the platform.
"I know the team has been looking at it on an issue-by-issue," Cox said. "Net real identity creates a ton of safety, but how do you help each group have the absolute best experience?"
Safety will be one of the many workshop topics that will occur during the two-day summit this week.
"There's not something we're announcing. We'll look at these different community leaders and ask them how do they think about it," Cox said.
For the last 10 years, Facebook has been focused on connecting the world. But now that they've already captured 2 billion of them -- only 3 billion people are online -- Facebook is looking to make connections closer, create community. You might have gotten wind of that if you read Zuckerberg's 6,000-word manifesto published in February or if you watched his commencement speech at Harvard University in May.
While Zuckerberg is trying to follow the new mission by traveling to every state in America this year, Cox is chatting with Group leaders, like those in attendance in Chicago.
Every other week this year, Cox has met with someone who runs a Group, such as a woman who runs a physicians moms group or 20-somethings in Nigeria who want to pursue careers in graphic design. This type of professional networking is a rather unexpected use case of Facebook, admitted Cox, who joined Facebook in 2005, shortly after the website began.
"Young people are aspiring professionals. They want to network around that, and turns out Facebook is incredibly good for that," Cox said. "The scale is unmatched."
Facebook itself is built on the power of Groups. Teams within the more than 17,000-person organization each have their own Groups to communicate with each other. Personally, Cox said he's a part of a Bay Area DJs group as well as a plant-identify group.
But as to the many Groups on Facebook dedicated to "Mark Zuckerberg For President," Cox said there's no chance.
"He is not running for president," Cox said, with a laugh. "I mean he's been very clear about that. He's a very, very, very honest person."
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