Greg Oates

Fast Company contributing writer Farhad Manjoo sat down with a murderer’s row of social media titans to discuss philanthropy and the future of marketing:

• Nick Grudin, strategic partnership development, Facebook
• Meg Garlinghouse, head of social impact, LinkedIn
• Biz Stone, cofounder, Twitter
• Hunter Walk, director, product management, YouTube
• Ken Weber, executive director, Zynga

The primary discussion revolves around compelling people to act on the causes they support, versus just posting something on Facebook, i.e., “slactivism.” The group is acknowledging and trying to fix that interrupt by creating a more seamless user experience between the call to action and the action itself. Walk calls it a “conversion funnel.”

Toward that end, the participants feel their social networks can work together better.

“Each one of our companies has some link buried somewhere with best practices for nonprofits,” says Stone. “What if we all made a new website that had everyone’s stuff in one place? If there were one site that says, ‘Here’s how you work with Adobe and YouTube and Twitter and how you combine them.’ That would be amazing.”

Although Stone spends much of the discussion interrupting everyone, he sums up the video well: “Industry is either going to kill the world or save it and make it better…. From an optimistic standpoint, we’re going to figure that out.”

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