Facebook Strikes Again

The Internet is amazing. Back in the 80's when I was attending a boarding high school in Oregon, I took part in a pen pal program with some foreign language students from China. Up to about 15 years ago, Lu Yang and I traded letters. Sometimes often, sometimes just once a year.

About 15 years ago we lost touch due to moving and the address changes that follow. In 2002 I attempted to find her, but no go.

Then, out of the blue, she emailed me. She had found some of the old letters when we were pen pals, looked me up and bam, there I was on Facebook. So we had a little chat today by cell phone. The world has changed so much, and become so small in many ways. 

Well, Lu Yang is attending to her family, and I have to go help my mother-in-law with her computer. But at least now we can be pen pals again. Only this time, we can email, video chat, Facebook each other or maybe use Skype.

I wonder what the next 10 years holds in store for us?

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Mashable Predicts the Future of Social Networking

Mashable is a great online resource for pretty much any questions related to the internet, social media, etc. When I have a technical question, or even a general one, and need current info, I usually find myself on the Mashable site.

And today I found their predictions for 2011. 

Well, actually it's Ben Harr's predictions,

See and download the full gallery on posterous

but that's good enough for me! He's a good writer, and I found it very interesting. Rather than repeat the whole thing myself, you can find the article here

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Facebook Destroys Personal Privacy! And the World!

Pretty catchy title, eh?

Yep, every month at least I am asked a question about privacy issues on Facebook. Usually it's based on some really alarming bit of news that's spread around and sounds really horrifying.

The funny thing is, in my opinion, Facebook has been pretty sensitive to privacy issues and customizing it for it's users. If you had 500 billion "customers," would you be able to keep up with every single request to make your business suit every single user perfectly? I know I wouldn't! So I find it hard to be critical about their privacy "issues."

In this article the title accuses Facebook of a privacy breach. But what the article is really talking about is 3rd Party Applications that utilize Facebook through it's open source programming. That means that a company outside of Facebook can access the Facebook program and connect to users.

I'm generally careful about which 3rd party applications I allow to connect to my Facebook profile because they generally require pretty open access to my information. So I only allows ones I'm actually going to use for some purpose, like the "Reviews" application for my business Page. Other popular applications are Farmville and Yoville. 

If you don't have a hankering to read the whole article, here's a video that covers the basics:

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The Evolution of the Fan Page

My knee-jerk reaction to the title of this post (actually, it's the title of the article I'm referencing in this post) was an assumption that it was a cave-man evolution explanation of Facebook Fan Pages. Of course, since social media development is fairly new, that's not what it's about. This is more about social media for business and the process of social media enagement leading to a sale.

It's a great article. Brian Carter did a very easy to understand explanation of how to monetize a Fan Page and it's worthwhile to check out and implement. How do you use your Fan Page? Have you discovered a particularly successful way to monetize it for your business?

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-facebook-fan-acquisition-strategies/22848/

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Tremendously Terrific Twitter Tuesday

Twitter is one of those beasts (birds?) that is often misunderstood. For a lot of people who are yet to delve into the world of social media, Twitter is usually harder to understand. Not too surprising, because it's so simplistic, it can be easy to miss what it's all about.

Fortunately, we were able to cover the whole subject comprehensively by using Hubspot's Inbound Marketing University videos. They have a series of 16 videos that cover most of the social media topics you'd want to know.

Of course, just because there is a video on a topic, that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to understand. So I watched the video first, prepared a list of probable words that most people wouldn't know that well, and rounded up definitions. During the class, I first went over the words and their definitions and prepped everyone for the video. If you'd like to get access to the Google Presentation I created, email me at trevor@theassociation.tv and let me know, I'll share the doc.

After the video, we had a question and answer period and got everyone's questions answered. Next week we plan to implement what we learned today, and create Twitter accounts for everyone. Next week I was planning on have the class on Thursday, but by popular demand I'm going to have the class on Tuesday and Thursday. Once we are done with Twitter, we may start over with Facebook. Is anyone interested in getting educated on Facebook and Fan Pages?

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The Do-It-Yourself Economy by Thomas Friedman

One of my main "tenets" in my social media philosophy is nothing has changed in business, it's just gotten faster. Communication is the backbone of everything we do, and the faster you can communication, the more power you can command.

That's why social media for business is so important. These social sites (and the World Wide Web) allow instant communication with large numbers of people. More importantly, the content gets indexed by huge "libraries," also known as Search Engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. are all providing us with instant education on any topic imaginable. Thomas Friedman, a well known author and contributor to the New York Times, wrote a great article called "The Do-It-Yourself Economy" covering what he terms the "The Great Inflection."

"The Great Inflection is the mass diffusion of low-cost, high-powered innovation technologies — from hand-held computers to Web sites that offer any imaginable service — plus cheap connectivity. They are transforming how business is done."

Social Media marketing tools and learning how to use social media will be an important part our future economy. From time to time business owners are still asking me about Twitter and other online social networking sites being a waste of time, and that they aren't interested in "chatting."  In reality, it's the same as saying "I don't have time to develop relationships with potential clients when I happen to meet them at a friend's house party."  Mr. Friedman's article is a great overview of what's happening in business - the time to jump on board with social media is passing quickly, the "testing the water" phase is gone.

Fortunately, it's not hard to learn social media, and you don't have know everything. I've covered some of the essentials in this series of videos. And there's a plethora of information at the other end of a Google search. Start on Facebook if you haven't already. It has everything you need to get started, and it's easy to use.

 

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Burbank Inbound Marketing Club Takes On Blogging

Each week I have a class called the Burbank Inbound Marketing Club, mostly for business owners struggling with understanding and implementing social media for business. It's hard to have a social media plan if the pieces of the plan are confusing. So my main bent is to demystify the situation while actually getting something implemented for each person.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Admittedly, getting something done for each person can be a challenge, as each person tends to be at a different level.  Still, we have fun and try to keep it as practical as possible. Today we continued discussions from previous weeks where we got a number of people started on blogs from posterous.com.  While Posterous blogs are insanely easy to use, there is still quite a lot of functionality, and quite a bit to grasp if you're completely new to online social media.

I like to give lots of examples, and today was no exception. I forget what the exact question was, but I gave a quick demonstration of how content can go viral on Facebook, because it is so easy to share information though personal profiles and fan pages.

In this class, we worked on setting up everyone's Posterous blog with the built-in auto-post feature. Posterous is set up to post out to other social media sites using email (actually, there's two ways to post content, but being able to use email is pretty sexy!).  I was hoping to show everyone how to install Google Analytics, but we ran out of time. So we'll cover that next week, briefly.

Somehow the topic of Twitter came up, and it was unanimously decided that Twitter would be the main topic of the next class. I had been planning to cover Facebook Fan Pages, but apparently I've been overruled.  It was also decided that the class would be on Tuesday. So, it's out of my hands, I'm afraid. That would be Oct 12th, by the way. If you'd like to RSVP to attend, visit the Really Simple Social Media Page event listing, and click on "I'm Attending."

If you are only able to attend the Thursday night classes, I apologize in advance!

I am going to attempt putting together an instruction sheet on how to add Google Analytics to a Posterous account, which will require setting up a Google Analytics if you don't alreadh have one. If you'd like to be included on the Burbank Inbound Marketing Club mailing list to get the instructions, please email me at trevor@theassociation.tv and put "Google Analytics for Posterous" in the subject line. Cheers!

 

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