This whole campaign has been about social media and group effort. First, I polled the Matrix Group staff to see if they wanted to repeat the social media fundraiser from last year. The answer was yes. Then I asked the staff to nominate their favorite charities; I picked the top 5 charities selected by staff.

Next, we reached out to the local charities and asked them to create an informative video that makes the case for giving them money. Not surprisingly, we got amazing, authentic videos from each organization. One was created by a volunteer who did a stellar job.

Next, we came up with a way to fold in social media, increase our reach, and make the campaign fun. So we filmed a kitschy video that explains the campaign and tied the donations to getting new likes on Facebook and subscribers on YouTube. The whole campaign, including creating the video, working with the charities and putting it all together on the web was made possible by my amazing staff.

Check out our funny video on YouTube explaining the campaign and introducing the charities.

Watch the videos of the five deserving organizations on YouTube. The five organizations are Doorways for Women and Families, Food and Friends, SPCA of Northern VA, Washington Animal Rescue League and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association.

Here’s how YOU can raise money for those in need this holiday season:

• Like us on our Facebook page.
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
• Vote for your favorite charity or charities by liking their videos on our YouTube channel.
• Spread the word about the campaign to your networks on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

You’ve got until December 20 to like, subscribe, vote and share. I’d love to raise $5,000. Can you help?

On Monday, Google opened up Google+ and allowed companies and brands to create corporate pages.

If you haven’t done it already, I encourage you to create a page for your organization, company, brand or initiative by going to the Google+ Create Page.

Even if you don’t know how or what you’re going to do on this new social media platform, I think you need to be on it because:

• Google+ has 40 million subscribers and that number is growing fast. It’s nothing compared to Facebook’s 800 million subscribers, sure, but 40 million is still a big number.
• Google+ users tend to be early adopters. According to Target Marketing, in the first few months of the network’s presence, the users were mostly young men, a third of users were between 25 and 34 years old and 59 percent of all visitors were male. This will surely change over time.
• Just as there isn’t one TV network or channel that dominates anymore, chances are your organization’s target audiences are on various social networks so you probably need a presence on all the major platforms.
• Google likes to drive traffic to its web properties, like YouTube and Blogger, so having a corporate presence on Google+ will be good for search engine optimization.
• Google likes to integrate its offerings, so there will surely be really neat tools to tie together Google+ with Google Analytics, Google search, AdWords, Google Reader, Gmail, etc. For example, there’s already a way to +1 an article in Google reader. +1 is Google’s version of the Facebook “like.” I’m especially excited about Ripples, which is an interactive graphic of the public shares of any public post on Google+ to show you how a post has rippled through the network and help you discover new and interesting people to follow.

My dilemma right now is that I don’t know how the Matrix Group Google+ page will be the same and different from our presence on Facebook. If you’ve ever heard me speak or if you follow this blog closely, you know that I preach a layered approach to social media where each platform has a different purpose and content strategy. There is overlap to be sure, but it’s best to have a different strategy for each platform to encourage your target audiences to follow you in multiple ways.

As your marketing team ponders this same question of market positioning for your Google+ page, be sure to create your page early to reserve the name and have a presence for the early users who will be looking for you.

Have you created your company’s Google+ page? How will you be using it to connect with your customers, prospects or members?

It’s not that I don’t like Google Plus. On the contrary, I like the interface, I like that it’s so easy to add people to circles and post updates to only specific circles, and I like that the interface is (for now, at least) nice and clean, not cluttered with ads.

It’s just that I’m feeling saturated. I already have my routine of posting interesting news items to Twitter, posting personal updates on Facebook, uploading my weekly video interviews to YouTube, checking into FourSquare when I go out to eat or visit a new place, and blogging once a week.

The question for me has become: what place should Google Plus occupy in my life?

I guess I could simply post the same updates to a bunch of social networks, but that doesn’t make sense to me. If I’m connected with the same people on multiple networks, they would see the same posts and that’s no fun and a waste of time.

Perhaps Google Plus will become, like Twitter, another public persona for me, whereas Facebook is the network I reserve for family, friends and close network.

Sean Parker, a co-founder of original music file-sharing service Napster and a prominent Facebook shareholder, says that, “power users have gone to Twitter or to Google+.” Could this be true? In my case, my techiest of friends and co-workers seem to be more active on Google+ these days but my network is still firmly on Facebook. And yet, Google+ is grabbing subscribers fast. GooglePlusWiki says that there are now over 20M people on the network.

After pondering this issue for a while now, here’s where what I’m thinking. Although the majority of my network is still not on Google+, I need to be on it. Because no one network will dominate and it will be hard to ignore Google+. Just as I tell clients that they need to be on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Flickr because their audiences are on these networks, I know that I need to be on all the major networks personally. I will figure out where to find the time to post to Google+. I will repeat some posts because there is some overlap in connections but it’s not 100%. I will hope that HootSuite will soon let me post to Google+ in addition to Twitter and Facebook. And I will figure out what brainspace Google+ will occupy.

How about you? Are you on Google+? What is Google+ doing to your Facebook and Twitter updates? Are you posting different things? How are you integrating Google+ into your day?

This totally makes sense to me. When I find something new, cool, interesting, amazing or whatever, I immediately post it to Facebook and Twitter (increasingly, Google + as well, but more on that in a future blog post).  And I rely on my network of friends, co-workers, clients and business colleagues to find out about other new, cool, interesting and amazing things.

So I got to thinking. If social sharing is an important means by which we (again, the collective “we”) learn about new sites, we can’t and shouldn’t leave this sharing to chance. Sure, most websites now have a ShareThis widget, but is this enough? I say no. I think every organization needs a social sharing strategy that includes the following:

• What you want people to share. Do you want visitors to share your home page? Individual articles? Donation pages?
• How you want people to share. Do you want visitors to send an e-mail, post to their social networks, save to their social bookmarking pages, all of the above?
• Regular review of analytics to find out what and how people are sharing links on your site. Be sure to review your usage reports, ShareThis account and other reports to find out what’s popular, how people are sharing, and learn why certaini articles or posts generate activity.
• Design and CSS guidelines that make your site shareable. For example, if you share a link on Facebook, Facebook automatically indexes the images and allows you to cycle through the images and select one to include with the link. If your organization logo is set up as a background image in your CSS or the logo is not whole, your logo can’t be included in the link.
• Calls to action to encourage sharing. While many of us will share our favorite links on our own, other won’t unless prompted, so I think it’s important to have calls to action to encourage sharing. It’s also a good idea to test calls to action on a regular basis to find out which calls to action work best.

The design and front-end team at Matrix Group has developed a set of guidelines for setting up web pages so that titles are complete and the proper images are included in links. Be sure to test the shareability of your site on a regular basis and address issues with your web design or maintenance team.

How about you?  What’s your platform of choice for sharing links?

According to Facebook, “Top News shows popular stories from your favorite friends and Pages, many of which have gained lots of attention since the last time you checked.” What this really means is that Top News shows the posts from the people and company page that you interact with the most. For example, I tend to “like” and comment on the updates from my friend Eileen, the photos from my brother Alex and articles from PBS. Since I interact with these Facebook account regularly, their posts are pretty much guaranteed to be in my Top News stream, which, by the way, is the default view.

Top News also displays updates by relevance, based on an algorithm. If a post is getting a lot of comments, it will probably show up at the top of your stream, even if the original post is not the most recent in your stream.

Most Recent “shows updates from as many as 250 friends and Facebook Pages.” This is a more traditional stream because it shows all posts, in chronological order, unless you’ve hidden posts from a specific person or company. If you haven’t checked out Most Recent recently, click on it now and you’ll see posts from a bunch of people and companies you thought weren’t posting. If you start interacting with some of these accounts more, you’ll start to see them in your Top News stream.

What does this mean for marketers?

It means that it’s absolutely not enough to have fans or followers. Your company’s Facebook page can have a million followers but unless they’re liking and commenting, your posts won’t show up in their Top News, which means they’re likely not getting much attention. On the flip side, once you get followers to interact with you more regularly, your posts will show up in Top News, which will further encourage them to like and comment.

Remember, the key to Facebook success is to get your followers to interact with you regularly. I’ll blog in the future about ways to encourage interactions. And oh yeah, I’m doing a webinar next Wednesday, May 18, 11am Eastern on Social Media Marketing and Customer Engagement. Hope you can join me.

BTW, you can edit your stream options by clicking on Edit Options at the bottom of your News streams.

What do you think of Top News vs. Most Recent? Which stream do you prefer?

One of the most important changes is the ability of Facebook admins to interact with fans and other pages as the company or brand. Here’s what this means:

• Facebook admins can now be on Facebook as an individual OR the Facebook page or brand. If you’re admin on a Facebook page, go to your Facebook page and click on Account in the top right. The second option in the dropdown is Use Facebook as Page. If you click on this, you’ll get a list of all pages for which you’re an admin. Select one. You will now interact with others and pages on Facebook as THAT company.
• You can “like” other Facebook pages as the company, not as yourself. Pages that your Facebook page “likes” will be displayed randomly (5 of them) in the left rail of your Facebook page, with the ability to View All.
• You can comment on your own wall and other walls as the company, not as yourself. For example, Matrix Group can comment on a  client’s wall, even though it’s me, Joanna Pineda, who would be authoring the post.
• You can view a newsfeed of updates from the pages that your company likes, not your friends. For example, Matrix Group has “liked” the Facebook pages of our clients. When I’m on Facebook as the Matrix Group page, when I press Home, my stream is from other company pages, not the friends and family of Joanna Pineda.
• When I’m online as a page, Facebook recommends other pages for me to like as a company, based on the “likes” of the fans of my fan page. For example, Facebook tells me that 101 of Matrix Group Facebook fans like Starbucks and gives me the option to “like” Starbucks right from the Matrix Group fan page homepage.  Very slick.

If there are multiple admins on  your Facebook page, be sure to train them on how to switch between their profile and your fan page. And establish guidelines for when to interact with other Facebook pages and fans as themselves or the company fan page. Remember that just because you as an individual love a band, author or political party, it does NOT mean that your company or brand should like these pages as well. I love these new changes and look forward to being Matrix Group on Facebook!

We’re taking the money we’re saving by not mailing printed cards to our entire list and once again donating it to charity. This year, however, we’re trying to increase the amount that we give away.  For every new Facebook fan who “likes” our fan page (the deadline is December 14), we’re adding $10 to the charity pot.

Next, we’re asking our entire network of clients, partners, vendors and supporters to tell us how to give away the money.  I polled the staff and asked for recommendations for charities they thought were worthy of a gift.  We came up with the following organizations:

• Back On Your Feet
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Doorways for Women and Families
• Goodwill of Greater Washington
• John L. Gildner Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents
• The Reading Connection
• The Washington Animal Rescue League
• WEAVE

In our Facebook page, we set up a Poll that allows fans to vote for their favorite charity from the list above. So far, we’ve gained over 100 new Facebook fans and nearly two hundred people have voted.

I like this year’s holiday campaign because we’re able to increase the amount of our donation this year, we gain new fans, and we are able to showcase effective and well managed charities in the DC area. It’s also been fun to promote this holiday campaign to our house e-mail list, on our social media pages, and to our network of friends and supporters.

Here’s how you can help:

• “Like” our Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/MatrixGroup
• Vote in our poll
• Spread the word about the campaign to your network of colleagues, friends and family

We’ve got a goal of $5,000.  Help us support some terrific charities this holiday season!

P.S. In case you’re wondering, we decided to still mail printed cards to our key client contacts because we were worried about some clients and partners not receiving the e-card because of a firewall or anti-spam software. In the end, we liked the idea of clients receiving something tangible from us and the ability to sign and personalize cards.  But instead of mailing nearly 1,000 cards, we’re mailing fewer than 200 cards.

Getting lots of fans and interactions is the holy grail of Facebook marketing. The more people “like” your page, “like” your posts, click through to your offers, comment and otherwise interact with your page, the more likely they are to become loyal fans and customers.

So how do you increase likes and interactions on your Facebook page? Here are my top tips, based on the experiences of the Matrix Group marketing team.

• Give your Facebook updates an authentic voice. What most people love about Facebook is the fact that they’re reading their friends’ thoughts and comments in near real-time.  And these comments are not written in corporate-speak; they read and sound the way people talk, like they’re having a conversation with you.  Your company’s Facebook posts should probably not be too casual, but they should sound less like a press release, and more like a comment from a friend or colleague.
• Don’t just RSS your news items or blog posts. I’ve said this before but if all you’re doing is republishing headlines from your website or blog, you’re not giving people an incentive to follow you on on Facebook because the information is the same.
• Don’t automatically post your Twitter updates to your Facebook page. Why?  Because you’re probably chattier on Twitter than you are on Facebook and chatty people and companies dominate Facebook streams, so fans are more likely to right-click and press Hide.  Besides, on Twitter, all you get is 140 characters; you get more words on Facebook, why not use them?
• Make your posts stand out by adding photos and videos. You know the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”  It’s definitely true on Facebook and it’ s not surprising.  Most people scan their Facebook streams and a photo or video will catch people’s attention much more than a plain text status update.
• Ask for feedback. I’m always amazed that the simple act of soliciting feedback often results in feedback.  Funny how that works.  Heck you don’t even need to ask for serious feedback.  Ask your fans what color to paint your office walls; or ask them to comment on your holiday menu.
• Spark a debate. If you’re comfortable doing so, posting about topics that generate a little heat are great for interactions.  But always keep the language appropriate.
• Use Facebook apps to add interactive features to your Facebook page. For example, you could create a custom tab, sponsor a contest, or host a game.
• Offer exclusive benefits to your followers. Last holiday season, Snapfish offered a daily discount on its Facebook page that generated lots of interest, clicks and comments. I know because I could see the activity and I certainly checked the Snapfish Facebook page regularly for deals!
• Test, test, test. My marketing team is always playing around on our Facebook page to see what time of day is best for posting, the types of messages that generate interactions and ultimately sales, and how to wordsmith updates to generate the highest number of interactions.

Here are some good resources on Facebook marketing and interactions:

• Zimply Zesty has 7 ways to increase interactions.
• A study by Vitrue found that morning posts are more effective, users are more active at the top of the hour and weekdays are busiest.
• Smart Passive Income has some great how-to videos on how to create and customize your Facebook page.

How about you? What tactics have you used to increase interactions on your Facebook page?  Please share your stories!

I was researching an organization last week and visited their website, blog and social media pages.

So did I decide to “follow” the organization on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook?  Absolutely not. Since I had already subscribed to the blog RSS feed, I didn’t feel compelled to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  Why add clutter to my social media streams with information I can already get elsewhere?

I know it’s tempting to set-up pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms and populate them with posts from your blog or press room.  We’re all busy and most communications and marketing departments are stretched thin.  But posting the same information across platforms isn’t doing your organization any good. Why?

• By posting headlines that meet the least common denominator across platforms (probably Twitter, with its 140 character limit), you miss out on functionality offered by the other platforms.  For example, Facebook lets you post longer updates, upload photos and videos, include links, host discussions, etc.
• You don’t give your target audiences a reason to follow or fan you across platforms.  Just imagine this.  If you post complementary but different content across platforms, your clients, prospects and supporters might just follow you on multiple platforms, giving your company an incredible voice with those individuals.
• If you’re posting headlines from your news room, you’re not offering people the authentic, personal voice we’ve come to expect on the social media pages.

Here’s what we do at Matrix Group:

• Our website showcases our products, services, clients, portfolio, news and webinars.
• This blog, which is authored by me, Joanna, the CEO, features my thoughts and commentary on social media, marketing, communications, strategy, customer service, trends and gadgets.  This blog DOES feature website launches at the bottom of each page.
• Our Twitter page showcases our work and clients, but the majority of the tweets are about industry news, trends, how-to articles, and case studies.  Twitter will tell you who we are and what we’re reading.  We’re pretty chatty on Twitter; we post updates multiple times a day.
• Our Facebook page also showcases our work and clients, but we also post photos and updates about happenings in the company, including trainings, parties, fun events, etc.  Facebook will tell you a lot about who we are as a company and our culture.  For example, our staff pumpkin carving contest was featured on our Facebook page.  We’re less chatty on Facebook, just updating a few times a week.
• Our Flickr page is home to our photo library of company events, while our Facebook page has the “best of” photos.
• Our YouTube channel is a work in progress and will soon feature short interviews with senior staff about their areas of expertise, including branding, the user experience, software development and security.

As you can see, our various pages are all designed to showcase our expertise, clients and work but the user experience on each platform has been carefully crafted to take advantage of that platform’s capabilities.  And while the website is clearly a marketing channel for the company, we’re not very sales-y on our social media pages, focusing instead on posting useful and interesting links.

How about you?  How are you creating an integrated use experience across your company’s social media pages?  What’s working for you?

While I love Facebook, Twitter, instant messenger, etc., I try very hard to limit the amount of personal information that I share on those networks, including and especially my address, home phone number, information about my family, etc.  But with the social networks constantly updating their terms of use and adding new functionality to their sites and apps, it’s hard to keep up with the changes and monitor the impact on our privacy.

Which is why I recommend an audit of your Facebook (and other social network) privacy settings on a regular basis. Here’s how:

• Log in to Facebook and click on Account in the top right corner of any Facebook page.
• You’ll get a dropdown of options; click on Privacy  Settings.

Facebook Privacy  Settings Landing Page

Here’s what your Facebook Privacy Settings Landing page looks like.  Note that you can share parts of your profile with Everyone, Friends of Friends and Friends Only.  I have edited my profile so that nearly everything about my profile is visible to Friends Only.  But wait, this page only shows you a fraction of the privacy settings available to you.  To view and edit all of your privacy settings, click on Customize Settings.

You’ll also notice two navigation items on the left for Recommended and Custom.  Click on Recommended and you’ll see that Facebook recommends that a great deal of your profile be available to everyone.  You can select these default settings with a click.  Me, I definitely opted for the Custom Settings.

Customize Settings Page

Here’s what the Customize Settings page looks like.  You’ll see that you can select who can see elements of your profile.  Here are my recommendations:

• If you post photos of your family, especially your children, make Posts By Me visible to Friends Only.
• Be sure to pay special attention to the Things I Share section.  This is the section where you can control what others are doing, including tagging you in photos and videos, checking you into Facebook Places, etc.  This allows you to NOT allow friends to check you into a bar or party, and stops them from tagging you in photos and videos and thereby making your photo visible to their friends.  Here’s a blog post about how someone nearly sabotaged a dinner party by checking all the guests into Facebook places.
• If your Facebook network is vast, consider creating custom lists and then specifying with each post and update which list can see your updates.  For example, I have a Family list that I use to share family photos and insider updates.
• Be sure to audit your privacy settings for existing photo albums. If you created albums before Facebook rolled out its new privacy settings, you may find that all or many of your albums are available to Everyone (I know I did!).

As for that pesky iPhone app that uploads your personal information to Facebook, unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about that.  Facebook did recently add a warning to the app, warning users to make sure their friends are comfortable sharing their information with others.  This is a small consolation to me; I would venture to guess that most people don’t think about the privacy ramifications of their actions and apps and will blow right past this user agreement.  What to do?  This may sound dorky, but here’s what I’ve told my friends:

• Please don’t sync your iPhones with Facebook.
• Don’t try to check me into Facebook places.
• When you’re at my house, never check into Facebook Places or FourSquare so you don’t reveal my home information.
• Please don’t upload photos and videos that are unflattering to me and my friends/guests.  (When I throw Rock Band parties at my house, videos are not allowed; we DO allow photos of us band members looking cool with our instruments.)

How about you?  Have you audited your Facebook privacy settings recently?  Any revelations?  Any privacy disasters?  What are you doing, if anything, to maintain a semblance of privacy online?

A recent article in Ad Age explores how some of the top consumer brands have Facebook pages with a fan base and interactions that far outstrip that of their official Web sites. Starbucks has 12.9M fans; Coke has nearly 11M fans; Oreo has 8.9M fans.  Of the companies in the article, only Starbucks has steadily increasing Web traffic.

All of this got me thinking:  What happens when an organization’s blog, Facebook, Twitter or other social media page gets more traffic than the official Web site? Is this the ultimate goal for marketers?  Is traffic on a social media site worth as much as traffic on a company Web site?  Does this increased traffic ultimately lead to more customers and sales?

I have clients who worry about redirecting traffic to social media pages, for fear of losing control over the conversations, not owning the Web property, or that the interactions are not quite official enough.  Others hold their social media stats in the highest regard.  Most of us  wonder what it really means when somebody chooses to “like” our fan pages.

How to make sense of all this?  Here are some thoughts:

• If your Facebook page is getting increased traffic and interactions, while traffic on your regular Web site is on the decline, ask yourself, “What is it about my Facebook page that’s working?  What’s making people “like” us, click through to articles and comment?  What are the lessons for content and opportunities for interaction on our official Web site?”
• Your goal should be to have your Web site, Facebook page, Twitter page, blog, e-mail campaigns, microsites, etc., all be part of an integrated strategy where each Web property is complementing the others and encouraging cross traffic.
• Ultimately, the goal should be conversions, whether that means more sales, more subscribers, more members or more donations.  Your goals should never be about traffic on specific platforms; that’s just a tactic.
• You need a way to track the effectiveness of followers, likes, clicks and fans across the different platforms.  Use tracking codes, cookies and marketing codes to determine which platforms are really helping your business to thrive.

Getting back to Matrix Group, here’s what we’ve learned:

• Traffic to our Web site has not declined.  On the contrary, traffic has increased as we have expanded our social media efforts.
• Our most valuable interactions still come from the Web site, where visitors get a chance to look at our work AND, most importantly, make a decision to call or e-mail us for more information or request a proposal.  We get several, high quality leads from our Request Information form every week!
• Our social media pages have proven to be valuable outlets for showcasing our work, sharing tips and resources with a wider audience, and demonstrating our expertise.
• The social media pages have also been a terrific way for clients, prospects and job applicants to make inquiries, give us feedback and comment on our work.

How about you?  What trends are you seeing across your Web and social media pages?  How do you value fans and interactions on Facebook and other social media sites?

Me (Joanna): I can’t predict the future, but I think Facebook and YouTube will stick around for a while.  Not sure about the smaller networks, especially those without solid revenue models.
Participant: But I’ve heard that the younger audiences are leaving Facebook now that their parents are signing up.
Me: Yes, I’ve read that as well, but Facebook has really tipped in terms of popularity, all the research shows that the older audiences don’t leave a social network once their friends have joined and they’ve made a commitment to the site, and Facebook as a platform for all kinds of third-party applications is really compelling.

But then I got to thinking.  Does it really matter if Facebook survives?  Does it really matter which of the social networks survives?

If you’re hesitating about investing in a social media strategy because you’re wondering which of the platforms will survive, I think you’re worried about the wrong issue.  Here’s why:

• Social media isn’t just a fad. Social networks have fundamentally changed how we communicate, connect and market.  Social networks have “tipped;” there is now a critical mass of people on social networks.  You can’t ignore the numbers.
• In the end, it doesn’t matter which social network survives because there are now so many mainstream and niche social networks, it’s almost pointless to worry about which ones will make it.  Remember when we thought no other search engine could threaten Yahoo!’s primacy?
• Your social media strategy probably needs to include having a presence on multiple networks, depending on where your target audiences are AND to ensure good coverage and reach for your marketing messages.

Here’s what I think IS important:

• Your organization needs to develop a core competency in using social networks to reach your current and new audiences.
• Your organization must be nimble enough to sniff out opportunities represented by upcoming sites and networks.
• Your usage reports should tell you which sites and networks are up and coming and worth investing in.
• Your communication team needs to be quick to understand the capabilities of new social networks and adapt your message and strategy to each site.

Once and when you DO develop this core competency, it won’t matter IF Facebook will survive.  The question will become: What’s next?

What do you think?  How is your organization developing competency in using social media to meet your goals?  What up and coming social media sites are you exploring?

The Background

Matrix Group has had a Facebook fan page for a couple of years now and we had been slowly building up our fan base. We did all the usual things to generate new fans: we let our customers know about our Facebook page, we linked to it from our Web site and blog, we asked staff to invite their friends to “like” us, we included the link in staff e-mail signatures, and we asked our Twitter followers to fan us.

I had recently read an article about how the Weekly World News got to 40,310 fans in 4 days (up from 3,244 fans!) and got inspired to launch our own campaign.  Weekly World News offered an exclusive video, they changed their ad daily, they did A/B testing on their ads and they leveraged their huge user base.  But what kind of incentive could we offer?  Unlike Snapfish, the photo printing site, which recently offered a coupon for a free 8 x 10 photo collage for “liking” its fan page, Matrix Group doesn’t have products to offer.  And we don’t have a customer base of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

The Campaign

We decided to use good, old-fashioned corporate philanthropy to incentivize people to “like” us.  The campaign was incredibly simple:  we would donate $10 to a specific charity for every new fan we got between June 21 and June 30.  We selected the National Park Foundation’s (NPF) Disaster Recovery Fund in the Gulf to be recipient of our campaign.  NPF is a Matrix Group client and the entire Matrix Group staff, like the rest of the country, is upset about the Gulf oil spill.  Selecting this fund only made sense for us.  BTW, we put a time limit on the campaign because we know that people are more likely to act when they have a deadline; hence the June 30 end date for the campaign.

We promoted the heck out of the campaign over the past 10 days:

• We posted regular updates to our Facebook fan page
• We tweeted regularly about the campaign
• We asked our staff and friends to update their Facebook and Twitter pages
• We actively asked for retweets
• NPF promoted the campaign to its Facebook followers
• We promoted the campaign on our Web site

The end result is that we’ve exceeded our goal of 500 fans and we’ve raised nearly $3,000 for a good cause. BTW, in case you’re interested, funds raised by the NPF Disaster Recovery Fund until September 1st will go to National Park Service efforts in the Gulf Coast region including park enhancements, education and environmental monitoring.  No funds will go towards mitigating BP’s responsibilities.

How about you?  What are you dong to generate fans for your Facebook page?  What kind of campaigns have you launched?  And with what results?  Please share your experiences!

Back in 2005, Facebook’s privacy policy clearly stated the following:

No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

The Evolution of Facebook’s Privacy Policies

But then, slowly and over time, Facebook’s privacy policies changed.

• In 2007, Facebook made your name, school name and profile photo available to the search engines unless you specifically prohibited this in your privacy settings
• In 2009, Facebook revamped its privacy settings and gave users more control over who gets to see which aspects of their profile.  Trouble was, the default gave “everyone” access to information.
• In April 2010, Facebook made the decision to make specific elements of all profiles public (name, hometown, school, interests and fan pages), and eliminate the ability to limit access to these fields.  If you didn’t want those elements to be public, Facebook recommended that you delete the information from your profile.
• In April 2010, Facebook also launched the Open Graph, which shares user profiles with third party sites so that visits to those third party sites can be personalized based on a person’s Facebook interests.  On the flip side, Facebook opened up its API (application programming interface) so that third party sites can add a Facebook “Like” button to their pages; when clicked, the information would be saved back to a user’s profile.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies, including links to archived versions of Facebook’s policies.

These changes to Facebook’s related to privacy and sharing data have prompted public outcry and scrutiny.  Gizmodo published of Top 10 Reasons to Quit Facebook.  On May 5, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 privacy and consumer protection organizations “filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that Facebook has engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices in violation of consumer protection law.”  Wired says Facebook’s Gone Rogue and calls for an open alternative to Facebook’s convoluted privacy policies and settings.

Take Back Control of Your Facebook Data and Privacy Settings

Okay, now that you’re totally freaked out, what should you do?  Here are my top recommendations:

1. Go to your Facebook page and edit your Privacy Settings.  Go to Account -> Privacy Settings.  Click on every link and update your defaults.  For example, under Personal Information and Posts, I set my default to Friends Only.  If I ever want a status update or a photo album to be available to Everyone, I can change the access level when I submit a specific update.
2. Delete sensitive information about yourself. For example, I don’t see any reason for my birthday to be on Facebook.  My family and friends know when my birthday is, I don’t really care if my family and friends don’t remember my birthday and who the heck needs to know how old I am?
3. Under Account -> Privacy Settings, I limited Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards to Friends Only and under Instant Personalization Pilot Program, I opted out of Facebook sharing my data with third party applications.
4. Go to ReclaimPrivacy.org and use their Facebook privacy scanner tool to audit your privacy settings.  I did it and it identified a couple of areas that needed shoring up.  Turns out that friends could share information about my Online Presence so I turned that off.  I did decide to keep some settings turned on, including the ability for friends to share my links and Web site.  I am in the Web business, after all, and I want people to be able to find me.
5. Remember that if you post a comment on a company Fan page, remember that your comment will be public since company pages are designed to be public.  If you don’t want your comment to be public, don’t post a comment; there is NO WAY to make it private.
6. If you don’t people to know about your interests, don’t click on Like buttons all over the Web. Clicking the Like button is like commenting on an article or blog post.  That action is meant to be public.  If you don’t want it to be public, just say No and don’t click.

Am I quitting Facebook?  Nope.  But I am keeping a close eye on the company’s ever-changing privacy policies, I’m auditing my settings regularly, and I remember the golden rule: if you don’t want specific information to be public, don’t share it anywhere.  Period.  End of story.

How about you?  What do you think of Facebook’s privacy policies?  Are the new policies making you think twice about joining or staying on Facebook?  Have you audited your privacy settings recently?

P.S.  Today, May 19, news organizations reported that Facebook is considering an about face on some of its recent privacy policy changes.  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned.

Facebook’s Rationale for the Change to “Like”

Facebook says it changed “Become a Fan” to “Like” to offer businesses a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.

In addition, changing to “Like” aligns with Facebook’s overall strategy of populating the Web with “Like” buttons so that Web surfers can announce their like of pages anywhere around the Web and have these “likes” posted to their personal Facebook pages.  (More on this in a future blog post.)

It seems Facebook wants to corner the “Like” market.

For the Most Part, Facebook Pages are NOT Changing

Aside from changing the language in the button from “Become a Fan” to “Like,” the Facebook pages aren’t really changing.

• Status updates on Facebook pages will still appear on fan (er liker) profiles.
• Facebook page owners can still call people who like their pages “fans.”
• When a Facebook subscriber “likes” a page, it will show up in their Profile under Info –> Pages.

What IS Changing About Facebook Pages

• Facebook now allows you to customize the order in which Pages appear on your profile. You can even move some Pages behind a “See all” link, so that you can still connect to Pages without displaying all of them prominently on your profile.
• Instead of seeing a random selection of fans + a link to See All, there are now two boxes:  “xx Friends Like This” tells you how many of YOUR friends also “like” a page while “xx People Like This” tells you the total number of likers or fans.

Will “Like” Encourage More Fans, More Connections?

According to PCWorld, Facebook reports that users click “Like” almost twice as much as they click “Become a Fan” — so, it follows that if Facebook changes “Become a Fan” to “Like,” more users will click on it.  Could this be true?

I don’t know about you, but to me, there is a BIG difference between announcing that I “like” something and declaring myself a “fan” of a company, product or service.  Think about it.  Fan is derived from the word “fanatic.”  Dictionary.com says a fan is “an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer.”  Being a fan is a far cry from simply “liking” something.

Who knows?  Perhaps it’s all semantics and Web surfers will behave exactly the same way.

Or perhaps, as Facebook predicts, we fans, followers and customers will actually be encouraged to “like” more pages.

How about you?  What do you think of “Become a Fan” becoming “Like?”  Are you encouraged to “Like” more pages?

Does the social Web mean the end of privacy?  Are MySpace and Facebook to blame for all the personal revelations we spew out every day?  Or should we blame Google and Bing, which manage to index the Web and let anyone find out gobs and gobs of information about each of us?  When I Google my name (Joanna Pineda), I find lots of information that I WANT the search engines to find and index.  But I also find pages that have my address, my political contributions and address, yada, yada.  I’m not happy that Facebook changed its privacy settings and defaulted some of my information to be available to everyone, but I actually appreciate the more granular control that I now have over my posts, link and photos.

What do you think?  Is privacy dead?  How much do you reveal on social networks?  Are you doing anything to keep out of the search engines?

On December 9, Facebook rolled out new privacy options to its 350 million users.

• You have always been able to limit what information from your profile was public and private.  But now, Facebook lets you control access to every status update, link, photo, video, etc.
• When controlling access, you can grant access to different people or groups: Everyone (as in the world), All Friends, Friends of Friends, and specific friends or lists of friends, or deny access/hide from specific friends of lists of friends.
• Facebook eliminated regional networks, which allowed users to unwittingly share their profiles to entire cities, states, countries, etc.

Advocates for the new privacy changes praised the simplified settings and the increased control over every single post.  Critics, however, are livid over the fact that the default option was to make nearly everything on a person’s profile available to Everyone (that is, until users edited their settings and posts) and the fact that some information is strictly public and can’t be edited.  For example, you can no longer limit who can see your list of friends and your public profile always shows the Facebook pages that you are a fan of.  I know I was ticked off that even though I edited my privacy settings so that my photo albums are globally only available to Friends, Facebook made my existing photo albums publicly available until I edited each one manually.

If the new privacy settings and changes confuse you, here are my recommendations:

• Review your Privacy Settings by clicking on Settings, then Privacy Settings in the top right menu. Ignore Facebook’s Guide to Privacy and privacy recommendations and set-up your settings they way you like.  Facebook, for example, recommends that “Everyone be able to see information that will make it easier for friends to find, identify and learn about you. This includes basic information like your About Me description, Family and Relationships, Work and Education Info, and Website, as well as posts that you create, like photo albums and status updates.”  For me, this is way too much information for the public to see.
• Create lists within your Friends list. To do this, click on Friends in the top menu, then click on Friends under Lists in the left menu.  At the top of the page, you’ll see an option for Create New List.  You’ll be able to name your new list then select the friends who should be on that list.  For example, I have created lists for Family, Matrix Group staff, Close Friends, Business Associates, etc.  Create lists that make sense to you and think in terms of this question: “When posting updates, links, photos and videos, how would you like to group your FB friends so that you can easily share information with the right people?”  For example, I might share a photo album of my son just with Family and Close Friends but not Business Associates.
• Be mindful of the lock icon when posting anything on Facebook. Click on the little padlock anytime you post anything and keep in mind that Facebook defaults aren’t always going to match your privacy settings.  For example, I have set-up my status updates and photo albums to only be available to Friends.  When I post an update or link, the default is set properly to Only Friends, but when I create a photo album, the default is still Everyone.  Grrrr…..
• Check your public profile on a regular basis and don’t rely on the Facebook preview. I can preview my public profile (or the profile that anyone can access even if they are not logged into Facebook or what the search engines can crawl) from different sections of Facebook and they don’t always match; this could be a legacy of the old settings and Facebook will synchronize them up sometime soon.  But I also know that when you’re logged into Facebook, you get a different view of Facebook.  So I log out of Facebook and access my profile: http://www.facebook.com/jmpineda on a regular basis and monitor what’s available to the world.  I also ask friends who are not my FB friends to check out my profile and verify what is available.

If you want to learn more about the new Facebook privacy changes, here are some good articles:

• Facebook’s Guide to Privacy
• PC World announces the Facebook privacy changes
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation on the good, the bad and the ugly of the new changes; this one is absolutely worth a read
• PC World on how to protect your privacy on Facebook
• MSNBC on why you should check your privacy settings now; it appears that Mark Zuckerberg himself left some photo albums available to Everyone for a period of time, giving the world a peek into his private life; oops!

How about you?  What do you think of the new privacy changes?  Have you reviewed and tweaked your privacy settings?  What do you like about the new changes?  What’s making you crazy?

So, you’ve set-up a Facebook fan for your company, now what?  Here are some of my favorite Facebook fan pages and reasons I think they’re terrific and effective.

Stanford University – http://www.facebook.com/stanford

• The status updates are a mix of campus news, alumni news, sports updates, research and university news.
• The page has a good mix of updates, links, photos and videos.
• I love the office hours with world-renowned professors.  Each week, there is a short video of a professor discussing some important work; the professor takes questions from fans throughout the week.
• I also appreciate the handy list of Stanford Web sites and the photo albums.

Dunkin Donuts – http://www.facebook.com/DunkinDonuts

• When you visit this Facebook fan page, you are not taken to the Wall by default, but rather to a promo.
• This fan page uses a custom Tab for Maurice, the Dunkin Donuts mascot.
• Dunkin Donuts encourages fan posts to the Wall; there are even videos posted by fans.
• To manage fan posts, “DD Facebook Etiquette” is posted right on the front page; this makes it clear that DD welcomes fan interaction, but within specific parameters.

Aquilent – http://www.facebook.com/Aquilent

• It’s clear that Aquilent is targeting potential recruits and existing staff with its Facebook page.
• This government contractor does a great job of showcasing the company’s culture and events.
• The posts are a mix of updates about events at Aquilent that cover technology, health and fun.
• The photos are great and seem to generate lots of great comments from fans.

PBS – http://www.facebook.com/pbs

• I love how the PBS fan page encompasses PBS’ different offerings, including TV, Web site and online store.
• Many of the posts actively solicit fan engagement.  A recent post asks “NewsHour correspondents detail their favorite books, films, concerts and plays of the year. What do you think of their picks?”
• Facebook fans were recently offered a 20% off coupon +free shipping.  Nice insider post with a custom coupon code that lets PBS track the source of the sale; great e-commerce tie-in!
• PBS sponsors a discussion forum where fans can start discussions about any topic related to PBS and its programs and services.
• The fan page also lists online events that fans can participate in, including live chats.

City of Alexandria – http://www.facebook.com/AlexandriaVAGov

• As a resident of Alexandria, I think the city does a great job of posting the most important city news, updates and events.  I get weather advisories, health updates, and highlights of city events.
• I’m still subscribed to the City’s emergency alerts and still get my Alexandria Gazette weekly; the Facebook fan page complements these services really nicely.

Matrix Group International – http://www.facebook.com/MatrixGroup

• Since I run the place, I better like my company’s Facebook fan page. :-)
• But seriously, I think the Matrix Group marketing team is doing a good job of highlighting company culture and events, Web site launches to showcase our work, and individual staff accomplishments.
• We try to post a mixture of updates, links and photos.
• We also promote all of our webinars through Facebook to try and reach a wider audience.

How about you?  What are some of your favorite Facebook fan pages? What do the pages do and feature that make them so effective?

If you want more tips for creating an effective Facebook page, check out these articles on All Facebook and Mashable.  There are also great resources directly from Facebook.

Facebook says that the average user has 130 friends but I know people who have hundreds, even thousands of friends.  500 friends?  I can’t imagine many people who have that many friends with whom they would willingly share personal updates, photos, even their full birthday.  So I asked around and got some good insight into the friending and unfriending business.  These findings don’t represent a large group, just my friends! :-)

• There is a group of Facebook users who will accept friend requests from anyone and who actively try to expand their friend network.
• There is another group that views Facebook as a place where they can communicate freely so they only connect with true friends.  For these folks, Facebook is a place for personal communications, often about self, family, kids, friends.
• There was a general consensus that the new Facebook homepage, which splits updates between News Feed and View Live Feed, makes it harder to see updates from your entire network of friends, which makes it more challenging to have a large network.
• Many people have been cleaning up their lists on Facebook, Twitter, and other social network recently.  They’re actively unfriending people so they can manage the communications and flood of updates.
• Even if  a person has a large network on a platform like Facebook, they are more than likely only interacting with a small subset of friends. Indeed, the Facebook sociologist says that no matter how large their friend network, Facebook users tend to “comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends.”

So just how does one end up on an unfriend list?

• If you never respond to direct messages.
• If you never update your status.
• If your relationship with a person is tenuous at best.

BTW, if you unfriend someone on Facebook, the person does not receive a notification, but they can no longer look at your profile and they can’t request to get connected again.  If you unfollow someone on Twitter, they don’t receive a notification and chances are, they won’t notice since many people have so many followers and people they are following.  It is quite another thing, however, to block someone on Twitter; if you block someone, they can’t follow you.

As for me, on Twitter, I let most people follow me on Twitter and I follow nearly 700 people back.  On Facebook, however, I only accept friend requests from people I know, people I would gladly have lunch with, and with whom I don’t mind sharing information about my son.  So while I’m connected to nearly a thousand people on Twitter, I only have 170 people in my Facebook network.

How about you?  How large is your social network on the different platforms?  What criteria do you use to assess friend requests?  Are you doing any unfriending lately?

You can read a nice recap of the panel on the Solutions are Power blog, but here were my take-aways:

• Your customers, prospects, staff and potential staff are increasingly using social media and they expect your business to have a presence on the most popular platforms.
• We need to view social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook as vehicles for marketing, customer service, prospecting and conversation.
• But businesses should not view social networks as just another place to advertise. Social networkers (you, me and anyone with an account) are both suppliers and consumers of content. In order for businesses to thrive in the social media environment, they, too, must be suppliers and consumers of content.  In other words, companies and brands must interact with customers and prospects by engaging in a two-way dialogue.
• The vast majority of Americans’ initial interactions with companies and brands online, so we all better have a great online presence that tells our story, focuses on benefits, and talks to our customers and prospects in a natural, real way.
• When in doubt about where our prospects are and what content will interest them, all we have to do is ask.

What I loved about the panel was the diversity of our backgrounds and perspectives.  The panel consisted of:

• Jill Foster of DC Media Makers and Women Grow Business served as the moderator
• Danilo Bogdanovic of Loudoun Scene is a Realtor and social media consultant
• Terri Holly of Creative Marketing Solutions is a social media consultant and coach
• Brent Leary of CRM Essentials covered the data and CRM (customer relationship management side of the equation)
• Me, Joanna Pineda of Matrix Group International representing an interactive agency

If you were at the Grow Smart Biz conference, what did you think of the conference?  How are you integrating traditional marketing with social media?

• Except for a few direct reports, I don’t invite staff to be my friend or get linked up. I imagine that some staff would view an invitation from me as wanting to know too much about them; at the very least, it could be awkward if they don’t want to get linked up and they have to turn down a request from their boss.
• I do accept invitations from staff to be my friend or get linked up. If they’re staff, they’re part of my extended family.
• I don’t accept an invitation to get connected unless I actually know the person. Even on LinkedIn.  Random strangers are NOT going to get access to my network just because they want to link to me.
• I do ask staff to follow this blog because I’m communicating with their clients through the blog and it’s always good for staff to know what the boss is broadcasting. :-)
• I do ask staff to follow or fan the company’s pages on the social networking platforms.  I’m not asking for them to friend me, but I am asking them to support our social networking efforts.
• I am never too casual in my updates. The updates are never too personal and I don’t use SMS speak, e.g., R U there? or Off 2 dinner.  I will use abbreviations like LOL (laughing out loud) or IMHO (in my humble opinion).
• In general, I will follow people on Twitter who follow me (as well as a lot of other people I just find interesting), unless their profile photo shows too much skin, the tweets are too racy or adult, or the account has lots followers but no tweets.
• I only post photos of me, my family, my friends, my staff and my clients where they look good.  Why would I want people I care about to look bad?  And if someone ever asks me to untag or remove a photo, I do it.
• I never, ever post a status update that I will regret later. Even if my Facebook profile is mostly private, I figure someone, somewhere has access to my posts and there will be a security breach that undoes all privacy settings.  The other accounts are all public and I assume anything I post will be part of Google’s index forever.

How about you?  What are the social networking etiquette rule that you live by?  Any lessons learned?

So how come most organizations shy away from incorporating UGC on their sites?

I think it’s because most organizations are not equipped to deal with UGC, good, bad or indifferent.  And they are deathly  afraid of negative comments.  Here’s my take on UGC, why it’s here to stay and why most organizations need a UGC strategy:

• UGC can take many forms. A magazine site that allows visitors to rate articles support UGC.  A store that allows ratings supports UGC.  A blog that welcomes comments invites UGC.
• Sites that welcome UGC invite participation. And participation by the right people encourages more participation and more followers.
• UGC lets you tap into the expertise and experiences of your members, customers, and partners, which will enrich the content you provide.
• Supporting UGC on your site or application does not mean that you lose control. You can set up guidelines and moderate comments.  On this blog, for example, all comments are immediately posted but I get notifications and I spam (delete) all comments that look spammy. Yes, I get the occasional snarky or negative comment, but unless the post contains profanity, I leave it on the site.  The New York Times recently announced that Wikipedia, the site built on UGC, will soon impose a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
• Celebrating UGC lets you tap into most visitors’ need for true interaction with you and your organization. I read every comment on this blog and respond personally when I get a request for information or assistance.  I believe these interactions have helped Matrix Group make followers out of readers.
• If your organization is suffering from criticism re: transparency and responsiveness, UGC can help you face your critics directly. The Direct Selling Association launched a blog 18 months ago to counter false perceptions about direct selling.  Although apprehensive about allowing comments in real-time, the organization decided it needed to make a strong statement about integrity and transparency.  The results have been great.  Negative comments are opportunities to address criticisms and myths.  More importantly, the negative comments have been few and far between.
• Supporting UGC is also a wonderful way to let your staff, clients, partners and friends network and share their experiences. I was moved by the dozens of memories that members of the Matrix family posted to our 10th anniversary microsite.  I didn’t know about some of the antics and every single post was a treat!

How about you?  What’s your take on user-generated content?  What are your favorite UGC sites?  Has your organization taken the UGC plunge?

Facebook says that it has 250 million users, of which 120 million login once a day, and spend 5 billion minutes doing “stuff.”  Just what what are we all doing on Facebook and why is it so addictive? Here are my thoughts:

• It’s really fun to catch up with a lot of people, all day long, quickly. I have 162 friends on Facebook and I know that’s low compared with most of my staff.  I check Facebook twice a day and I love reading the updates from friends and companies I’m a fan of.
• It’s a great tool for sharing photos and updates of our kids and home improvement projects. Let’s face it, people with kids just love to spam their friends and family with photos of their kids.  I know I do!
• The quizzes are hilarious. In the past couple of weeks, I learned that I’m an ENFP (Meyers-Briggs quiz, but I think I’m really an ENTJ) and that the shoe that defines me is stripper heels.  You should see the photo of the super-high stripper heels that now graces my profile, as well as the comments from my friends. :-)  I learn the most interesting things about my friends from these quizzes!
• Like Delicious and StumbleUpon, I learn about great sites and articles from my network, stuff that I probably wouldn’t find on my own, including links to cool bands, recipes, and news from around the world.

Lev Grossman from TIME Magazine says that Facebook is for old fogies and he might be right.  My nephew and niece seem to be abandoning the platform coz oldies like me are flocking to Facebook.  Dan Fletcher writes about teens dropping Facebook when their parents ask to friend them.  But for now, there are millions of us happily spending time on Facebook each day.

How about you?  Are you on Facebook?  How much time do you spend on it each day?  And what do you find addictive about it?

I don’t know about you, but even though I love Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, yada, yada, I still really like getting together with my college buddies, grad school buddies, fellow DC Web Women, fellow volunteers for Doorways, etc.. Yes, it’s “efficient” to get updates from friends in far away lands via their social network pages, and I have strengthened ties with folks via Twitter and FB, but will my social networks ever trump my traditional networks?

I don’t think so.

A recent article in The Economist maintains that “(o)ld-style networks… are usually stronger than online ones, , and the trust between their members facilitates transactions of all sorts.”  Transactions like doing business together, hiring staff, and lending money.

For me, however, it’s not a black and white issue.  Here’s what I think is happening:

• Family networks will probably trump all networks because “blood is thicker than water” although we all know that families are also our craziest and most dysfunctional networks.
• School, fraternity and work networks will remain the strongest because these are ties that get developed over time and involve shared efforts. So for me, my Stanford and Matrix Group networks will continue to be my strongest networks.
• Offline networks that involved shared interests will remain strong because members have a common interest. These networks, however, will be expanded to include online members.  In fact, I expect these networks to be strengthened by the ability to connect with others worldwide, in different languages.
• Increasingly, we will use our online and offline networks to make connections for work and play. For example, I may access the SAIS alumni network for a contact at the White House, but once  find a contact, I will continue to mine that person’s network through LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Across all our online networks, we will likely target a few people with whom we will establish a meaningful offline relationship. I have “met” and networked with dozens of people through Twitter but I have singled out a few for further cultivation and even a face to face meet up.
• We will rely more and more on our social networks to initiate and nurture our relationships. My school (grade school, high school, college and grad school) friends are all over the world.  Where I would have relied on phone calls, letters and emails to stay in touch in the past, I now use FB to stay connected and certainly connect with more people on a regular basis through social networks.

I actually feel that my offline networks are enhanced by the addition of online network capabilities.  And I love being able to share stories, photos and videos with family and friends in one fell swoop.

How about you?  How would you rate the strength of your traditional vs. online networks?  How are they competing or complementing each others?  Which is stronger?

But on Facebook, currently I’m http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=716098588.  Ugh.  Not exactly a memorable URL.  But all this is changing at 12:01am this Saturday, June 13.  At that time, you’ll be able to create a vanity URL for your profile.  You guessed it; I’m hoping very much to be http://www.facebook.com/jmpineda.  Perhaps more importantly, I want a vanity URL for the Matrix Group fan page, which is currently at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Matrix-Group-International-Inc/48658676723.  (The Matrix Group Facebook fan URL is so long and unfriendly that I have to access my bookmarks to share it with others.)

Vanity URLs, also known as addressable identities, will sure make it easy for all of us to share our Facebook profiles with others and encourage friending and fanning (are friending and fanning real verbs these days?)

The Facebook blog has this to say about the rules for creating a username:

• Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms.
• You can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer.
• Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (“.”).

So, if you have a relatively common name or you want to more easily share the URL for your personal or company Facebook page, be sure to stay up and get your new username/vanity URL/addressable identity on Facebook on June 13  (yep, it’s only a day away.)

Good luck and please report back on this blog about the experience — did you get the name you wanted, did you have any trouble on the site?

Update from Joanna on January 14, 2010:

It seems Facebook has changed it policies again. Good news! Now you only need 25 fans to apply for a vanity URL. Check out:
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=15073

When I’m on vacation, I like to really unplug, which is why my husband and I go to places like Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Prague, Costa Rica. We go to places where we’re not tempted to go online and work because there is so much to see and do; often, the time difference makes it difficult to stay in touch.

In the past, I might have dropped an e-postcard or quick e-mail to the office from an Internet cafe. But these days, with wireless access everywhere and social networks broadcasting everyone’s minute by minute status, what’s a girl to do? It seems all my friends and colleagues update their status wherever they are: on a date, at the beach, at dinner, at Disneyland, out West.

If we spend our time tweeting,updating our status on Facebook and MySpace, uploading photos to Flickr, or blogging about our experiences, are we really on vacation? Will I lose followers if I leave the grid for a while? Will anyone even notice that I haven’t blogged, tweeted or updated my status in a week? I bet not.

So, even though I have been on the grid and broadcasted my whereabouts, thoughts and food adventures pretty much daily for the past year, for the next week, I will likely just vanish from the Internet.

Unless I get free wi fi from my iPod Touch of course and I can use Twitter….. Argh. Have a great holiday.

What do the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Google have in common?  They have great platforms

Wikipedia defines a platform as “a place to launch software. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently as long as the platform is running on top of other platforms.”

I’m convinced that Facebook zoomed past MySpace because it launched a developer platform earlier.  The developer-friendly platform lets developers create zillions of cool apps and suck more of our time, energy and loyalty.  How many quizzes have you filled out on Facebook?

The iPhone is no different.  Apple opened up its platform, hosted a user-friendly store and nine months later, iPhone users had downloaded 1 billion applications, most of them free or under $5.  My husband says he can purchase or download apps for his Blackberry but it’s not easy and the apps are on multiple sites.  No fun at all.

Twitter’s platform lets developers capture streams of data from the millions of tweets posted every day.  Born from these streams are apps that let us visualize tweets, manage tweets, search tweets, map tweets.

Finally, the Google  app engine lets developers build and host applications on the Google infrastructure. Here at Matrix Group, we created a Google Earth app that lets us visualize where network traffic is coming from and we use the Google Maps API to plot the location of association members, George Washington portraits, and more!

There are lots of other companies that host platforms, but to me, it’s been interesting to see how a company like Apple, a company NOT in the phone business, redefined the mobile phone.  The open platform movement also feels like an extension of the open source movement; both capitalize on the skills and interest of lots of dispersed developers to create a larger, more dynamic and more interesting whole.

So how did I become a cool kid?  I had been coveting the iPhone for a long time but I refuse to switch my service to AT&T.  For Mother’s Day, my husband and son got me an iPod Touch.  Yep, I spent part of Sunday downloading apps for my sleek, new Touch.  Yippee!  I’m officially a cool kid.  Don’t forget to send me your favorite iPhone apps.

• FoodBuzz is a social network for people who like food.  You can create a profile and share your recipes, restaurant reviews and photos. In addition, FoodBuzz aggregates content from food blogs and allows food brands to create a presence and interact with users.  Here’s a link to my jmpineda profile, although I’m new so it’s still sparse.
• TeeBeeDee is a social network for “grown-ups” aka mostly the 40+ crowd.  You can invite your friends, join and create groups, and participate in discussions. As expected, the top topics are: Work, Sex Over 40, Relationships, and Health.
• Bebo is AOL’s social network.  It allows you to aggregate streams from other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. I really like how you can create an interactive timeline of your life through LifeStory.
• If you want to create your own social network, there’s Ning.  Ning lets you create your own social space, invite people, and customize what people can do through the hundreds of applications.  Associations might use Ning to create a closed network just for members where you control the brand experience and ways that members can interact.

How about you?  What social networks are you on?  Which best suits you and your interests?  Which one is your favorite?

• Status updates (aka What’s on your mind?) are definitely posting to the organization’s Wall and showing up on fans’ streams. Fans can indicate if they like a post, they can comment, and they can share the update.

• Only native Facebook applications are showing up on fan’s streams. In the past, we brought in photos and videos from Flickr and YouTube via RSS.  You can still do this today, but these updates do NOT show up in fan’s streams.  For example, if you want your fans to know that you posted a new photo album, you have to use the native Facebook application.

• Sending an update to fans does NOT trigger an e-mail. Instead, these updates show up in fan’s Inboxes, in the Updates tab.  These updates also exist in View Updates in the left navigation of the company pages, but only if you click More.  It took us forever to figure this out and I’m convinced that nobody is reading our updates because they have no idea these updates exist.

• Suggest to Friends sends a personal e-mail from your personal Facebook page. A company can’t actually send invitations to fans to people who are NOT fans, but individuals can send a recommendation to their friends.

• Where Facebook pages used to be fairly static pages, they are becoming more like blogs and Twitter.  Companies need to have a content strategy that covers what and when to post.

• It is darn near impossible to figure out your company’s Facebook page address. As near as we can tell, the addresses use this syntax: http://www.facebook.com/pages/company-name/number/.  For example, the Matrix Group Facebook page address is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Matrix-Group-International-Inc/48658676723 Keep clicking on the profile link and the logo, remove extraneous referrer codes to figure out your Facebook page URL, and keep trying until you figure it out.

Here is more information about the new Facebook pages direct from Facebook.  How about you?  What has been your experience with the new Facebook pages?

There’s no question that we can fritter away hours reading Twitter posts, watching random videos on YouTube, updating our Facebook status, yada, yada.

But for organizations that have made the decision to incorporate social networking into their communication, conversation or marketing strategies, how can we be sure that social networking sites aren’t just a sinkhole of time?

As someone who is fairly active on different SN platforms (I tweet and update my profile on Facebook regularly, I browse sites on StumbleUpon, and I certainly watch my share of YouTube videos), here are my top time management tips:

• I set aside time during the day to read blogs, tweets, Facebook status updates, etc.  Typically, I set aside a half hour in the morning and a half hour at night.

• I may update my status on Twitter and Facebook during the day, but I don’t do a lot of reading.

• I don’t read everything.  I’m really good at skimming.

• I use Tweetdeck to manage the tweets from people I follow.  I set up groups for the people whose tweets I really want to see:  family, friends, clients, CEOs, thought leaders, research orgs. Love Tweetdeck!

• If I find something I like, I either read it right then, or I save it to my Delicious account (social bookmarking) site for later consumption.

• Do the important stuff first.  For example, I try to blog a couple of times a week.  On the day I want to blog, that is my priority, not other SN sites.

• I don’t feel compelled to reply to direct tweets and blog messages in real-time. I set aside time to read, reflect and reply; I figure nobody’s going to die because I didn’t comment fast enough on their question about Facebook URLs.

• As a company, we have developed a content strategy that delineates the type, tone and frequency of our updates and tweets.  Which means we’re clear on what we need to do, when to do it, and the content we will provide.  Finally, we don’t tweet all day long; once a day is fine.

Will you catch me doing random surfing every once in a while?  Some days, and we all have them, I just need a brain break and I want to look at pretty photos on Flickr, catch up on my favorite blogs, and scan the cool URLs and mindless tweets from people I follow.  But hey, a recent Australian study says that “people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.”  Imagine that.

David Allen from Business Week says that social networking is worth the time if you organization has an agenda that is supported well by social networking, you are doing research, or you need to know how social media really works.  Beth Kanter has some additional tips for using your time wisely and not getting in trouble on SN sites.

How about you?  How much time do you spend each day or week on social networking sites?  How do you manage your time?  And do you think time management is an issue for you and your staff?

What does this mean? Well…

• Fans will interact with organizations the same way they interact with their friends. Updates from the org/company pages will be added to fans’ home pages.  Fans can view and comment on status updates, they will get notified when other people join a conversations, and they can view photo, videos and links.
• Organizations will be challenged to do more with their Facebook pages. The change to the new format is good and bad.  Good because companies can do more and have more engagement with their fans.  Bad because their Facebook pages will need more oversight and content.

The Matrix Group Facebook page was previously fairly static.  We posted events and pulled in news, blog posts and photos via RSS.  We didn’t want to overuse the “Send an Update to Fans” button too much, so we used the page to have a presence.  But now, our Facebook page just got a whole lot more dynamic.  We uploaded photos with captions, we’re posting status updates, and soon we’re going to post videos.  Just think, when we updated the Matrix Group status to say “congratulates International Assoc of Chiefs of Police for winning Best In Class for Discover Policing from the IMA. http://www.discoverpolicing.org/,” all of our fans’ home pages or status update pages got that post.  Pretty cool and I hope someone will comment on the site or the award.  So now we’ll use Facebook to create more of a dialogue, promote projects, share information about technology we’re playing with, give candidates a sense of what it’s like to work for us.

Here are some other Facebook pages that are now taking full advantage of the new Facebook page format.

• Stanford University has a great page.  Love the videos and all the comments.
• The National Park Foundation is using it fabulous collection of images to good use and even soliciting donations online.

My top tips for managing your new Facebook page:

• Post a status update, link, photo or video at least 2-3 times per week.  This will get your fans accustomed to hearing from you.
• Experiment with topics and messages to see what elicits comments and feedback from your fans.
• Make several people in your organization an admin on your Facebook account so that there is always someone tending the page.  (Select Edit page, then manage admins in the lower right of the page.)
• Have a content strategy so you are clear on the type and tone of updates, links, photos and videos you will use to populate the site.

Advertising Age says this change makes Facebook more like MySpace and Twitter and wonders “can brands be trusted to respect social (network) etiquette?”

• They’re called Business Pages on Facebook and they need to be connected to an individual profile.  Click on Create a Page for My Business at the bottom of a company page.  I recommend selecting Category = Brand or Product, then select Professional Service.  Choosing this category will let you enter the year the organization was founded, as well as provide an overview, mission and product information.  If you choose other categories, you are likely to only be able to enter the hours of operation and a URL.  And once you choose a category, you can’t undo it!  Thankfully, if you make a mistake, you can just not publish the page or delete it.
• I recommend uploading a company logo to dress up your page. Gif images don’t display properly, so upload a jpg instead.  The logo on the Matrix Group Facebook page is 350 x 114 pixels.
• Facebook lets you write on your wall, enter notes, post events, upload photos and videos, even host discussions.  But here’s the challenge: chances are, you’re probably already entering this same information elsewhere (e.g., on your Web site, on YouTube, etc.).  So the trick  is to use one of the zillions of Facebook apps to integrate your Facebook page with other sites. For example, we use MyFlickr to automatically bring in photos from the Matrix Group Flickr page into our Facebook page.  Just know that these third party apps can be a little flaky and there is little support should you run into trouble.  For example, we’re having trouble with SimplyRSS so we’re going to replace it with another app; we’re looking at RSS-Connect.
• The magic of Facebook comes from the fans.  You’ll want to Share your new Facebook page with your friends. Be sure to tell them how you are going to use your new FB page and encourage them to become fans.  When a person becomes a fan, you  now have the ability to “Send an Update to Fans.”   Since fans don’t automatically get notified when you post a new note, photo or event, use the Update feature to let your fans know about new content.  Be sure to ask your staff and network to share your FB page with their networks.
• Remember that FB business pages are connected to indvidual profiles. So if the staff person who manages your FB page leaves, your Facebook page will go with them.  So I recommend creating a generic individual profile and connecting that to your business page.

In a future post, I’ll share ways that we’ve helped clients create successful Facebook pages that are distinct from their Web sites.  In the meantime, if Matrix Group can help you navigate the social network maze, be sure to drop us a line.

P.S. Here are some posts you might find helpful:

• Getting Started With Facebook – Part 2 – The New Facebook Pages
• What We’ve Learned About the New Facebook Pages
• Become a “Fan” Has Been Replaced with “Like” on the New Facebook Pages
• How to Increase “Likes” and Interactions on your Facebook Page

I hope you find these posts helpful as you set-up and manage your Facebook page. Please do keep commenting and send me suggestions for topics you’d like me to blog about in the future!

My niece (age 17) and nephew (age 20) ignore my e-mails. But when I send either of them a message via Facebook, I’m likely to get a message back. When Facebook sends an automated messages about what I’m doing or posting, I might get a hello or an update. My older sister says she gets the same kind of treatment — that she needs to contact her kids through Facebook.

A friend who lives in Philaldelphia wrote on my Facebook wall to let me know he and his family were coming to the DC area and ask if we were interested in going to the Baltimore Aquarium.

After our trip to Costa Rica, I posted a few photos to Facebook and sent messages to friends. I’ve even had long lost high school friends send me messages via Facebook even though my e-mail is part of my Facebook profile. Finally, a friend is throwing a party next week and she sent an invite via Facebook.

It seems I’m not the only person to notice this phenomenon. Steve Tibbett talks about how conversations in Facebook are more meaningful because they are in context (of your interests, photos, activities) and they are not subject to spam filtering. Yes, Facebook sends you an e-mail when you’ve received a message, but if that e-mail gets lost in cyberspace, it still lives in Facebook and will be waiting for you when you next login.

It’s been fun to keep up with friends, read about their activities, and see photos where they’ve been tagged. I even love the little Facebook apps that let me announce how green I am, send karma points to friends, show the world where I’ve lived and visited, and send cute animal postcards. No, I don’t have a gajillion people in my network, just people I know and have some type of relationship with.

Don’t get me wrong.  E-mail continues to be a killer app for me. I get hundreds of e-mails a day on my matrixgroup.net e-mail — from clients, staff, family and friends.  But a great many of my family and friends are on Facebook, so it just makes sense for me to be there, as well.