Facebook – Page 2 – @DanaMNelson

June 13, 2011

“The Creed Official” : Rules for online (and offline)

You know how a quote from a person long dead can sometimes apply to today’s current situation, even though nothing that involves the current situation was even invented at the time of the original speech?

I had one of those moments this past week.I was volunteering at Patchwork Central last week, and every day as we read “The Creed Official” out loud, I kept thinking how appropriately it fits our online lives.

“The Creed Official”

Listen and be safe

Online LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN… it’s never all about you. Listen for feedback and ideas from your customers. Listen to what people are saying about your competitors. Listen to what people need, and develop accordingly.

Follow directions and stay with your group

This is my favorite. Most online platforms have terms of service, or directions that you must follow. Many companies don’t follow the guidelines on facbook in particular.

Be nice and respectful

Yes, if a company truly deserves to be called out, call them out, but do so with respect. As BGKahuna said, Let’s Cut People Some Slack.

Use good manners

This is one I’ve wanted to touch on for a while. If someone talks to you, it’s good manners to reply. If they say or do something nice, it’s good manners to say thank you. Many businesses using social think it’s another way to share a message with its consumers, and it is. The difference is, consumers are talking back. Are you listening and using good manners, or ignoring the people who keep you in business?

Have a good attitude

No one likes a whiner. If you’re always telling the world how bad your life is, who would want to be near you? If your employees have a poor attitude online, what does that say about you and your company? (Do you even know what they’re saying?)

Be respectful of others’ art

This goes for any type of content. Don’t plagiarize someone’s blog, use photos without credit, or disrespect someone online. First, it just makes you look bad. Second, there can be very real and serious consequences.

Keep your hands to yourself

Don’t be a creeper. I tease many friends that they are “twitter voyeurs.” By this I mean they rarely tweet, they just use twitter to get news and updates. Don’t be creepy online.

Do your best and have fun

It doesn’t matter if you’re not great at composing tweets or blogs at first. Start small, ask for help, do your best, and have fun!

Use nice words – no cursing

I’ve seen people tweet their way out of a job because of the vulgarities of their twitter stream. I’ve seen teachers and youth leaders be poor examples to kids, with foul posts. Really, if you are trying to build your brand online, (See Branding Yourself for more on how to do that.) refrain from overly harsh language.

June 3, 2011

4 ways to Use Your Influence to Help

Like is good, but show the love

As more and more people flock to social media sites, like facebook, twittter, and youtube to get daily and in some cases hourly dose and over doses of information input, so too are businesses and not for profits following along. Go where the people are right?

As one of the people that not for profits are following to your favorite social site in hopes to get your attention, how can you use your influence to help?

Like is not enough

Ok, you band, youth group, club, church or other not for profit is on facebook and they asked you to like them. Great. But that’s not enough. Granted they’re going to have to provide good content and keep you informed. But other than just seeing it in your stream, what good does this do them?

1. Share

If they share you share. Whether it’s a blog on the latest update, a picture of a cool event, or a link to a story written about them, share it on your platforms. And while you’re at it switch it up. If you want to truly leverage your influence, take what your NFP posted on fb and share it on twitter, or Linkedin. By mixing up the platforms you help your cause reach a greater audience both for that event or post and for greater awareness.

2. Support by attending

Was that a call to action they posted? Attend the event as a participant. If you use geolocation, check in and let people know your there and the details they need to do the same. Post pictures of you and the event on your social platforms.

3. Offer to help

Contact your NFP and ask if you can help. Sometimes one more set of hands is exactly what is needed. Offer your connections. Maybe it is an event that needs businesses to sponsor or support it. Offer to contact a few of your connections to present the opportunity. Just as in selling, a warm introduction is always more profitable than a cold call. Don’t forget to post pictures.

4. Tell your story

Why do you support them? What did they do to win you over? If you, a family member or close friend has been impacted by a service or program from your favorite NFP, consider telling your story. Post it on your personal, or company blog. Don’t have one? Write it out anyway, and send it to them.

No matter how you do it, do more than like.

April 25, 2011

More Facebook Spam

This is the second time this week I’ve had to remove a post from Sitk.com. It appears to be a new social referral type network. Except that this network asks you to interface with your Facebook account. Once you allow this app permission within your Facebook, it sends out spam messages to all your friends.

This particular feature of this social network has been slammed by bloggers, tweeters and Facebook pages. The company has addressed several of those blogs and said it would correct this spamming feature. I still however receive these spam type messages.
But I won’t anymore.

How to Block Applications

As with any application that you do not wish to allow your friends to publish to your wall, you can block that application. You simply find a wall post from the application you wish to block. If you hover to the right of that post, you will see an X.

When you click the X, you will be given an option to remove the post, block the application, or block the user. If you simply remove the post, the next time someone posts one of these spam posts, you will have to remove it again. If however you choose to block the application, that application will no longer be able to post on your wall.

A Newer Threat

I have also received a notification from an unknown person that I was made administrator on a fan page. The latest one was for “apple ipad2 test and keep.” The previous one was for “Ipad 2 research”

If you receive notifications from an unknown person, do not click the notification. If you try to click the name of the person to see who they are it will only take you to that page where you are not an administrator. Once you’re there pop-ups begin, and your computer may very well may be infected. Change your password. Run a virus scan.
There’s not much out about this new notification spam.

As Facebook adds more vigilant ways to block spam and Facebook hacks, the creators of these annoyances will continue to be more creative.

Be careful and be alert.

January 24, 2011

My 5 Must Have Books

#1

Almost isn’t good enough by Wayne Elsey.

#2

Branding Yourself by Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy.

#3

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. by Scott Stratten

#4

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion By Gary Vaynerchuk

#5

The Thank You Economy By Gary Vaynerchuk

Fine Print: These are in no particular order. I have not received any money for my endorsements. I did receive my copy of Branding Yourself for free because I hassled Erik to death about it:) The Links are to my affiliate Amazon account.

January 9, 2011

Are You Responding to Influencers?

Southwest Airlines has long been a leader and innovator in social media. They do things differently and are not afraid to step out to try new things; to be the first guy on the dance floor, if you will. They are known for their antics and humor online, in the terminal and in the air. But how do they deal with serious issues? With style and grace.

Does every complaint matter on Twitter? @SouthwestAir says ‘yes!’

The above article outlines the story one man’s response to a major renovation in the airline’s rewards program. This one man made a stink and he was not shy about publicly letting Southwest know that he was not happy about it.

Who was this guy?

It wasn’t Scott Statten, who’s lead some very successful campaigns about how airlines treat their customers, with only a few tweets and his army of almost 77 thousand social savvy followers of his @unmarketing twitter account. It was @SJCsouthpaw With is ~~106~~ 107 followers that were genuinely upset with the company’s new program. He wasn’t the only one, but Southwest chose to answer him. Why? Because at Southwest “Our strategy is every customer matters, every customer’s opinion matters.”

Was that the right move?

Critics wondered. Frank Eliason, senior vice president of social media for Citi, says the airline made the right move, viewing Twitter as a customer service venue, not a PR podium.

“The number of followers is meaningless,” he says. “Today, every customer is an influencer. If your concentration is follower count, then all you’re doing is managing a PR situation. In this case it would appear to me that they are servicing their customer. Nice job, Southwest.”

Are you responding to influencers?

Frank couldn’t have said it better: every customer is an influencer. If your company ism’t monitoring and responding to your brand on twitter, you are not responding to an influencer.

Many companies today use only Facebook campaigns to promote their brand. They delete negative feedback to protect the brand. What they’re missing is that all social media can be used as a powerful customer service tool. If your brand is one that practices the above and uses it only as a promotion tool, or your brand is on twitter, but it is linked to your Facebook, and you’re not responding to comments or complaints on twitter, remember @SJCsouthpaw and @unmarketing – If you delete them on facebook, they are still influencers on twitter, where they can carry on the conversation about you – good, bad, and ugly.

You have a choice in how you use your tools in your tool box… use them wisely.

January 3, 2011

5 things to consider before you decide to promote your brand online:

Letting go of control

Sometimes, those of us who habitually spread ourselves too thin over too many things have to let go.

We like to feel like we are in control in business, life, and relationships. We micro manage the details to the extreme. And because of this dedication to detail we seem to be successful.

It’s an illusion

The ‘control’ we think we have is an illusion. We think we are on the right path with our life and career, that we have the reigns of destiny.

One drunk driver, one heart attack, one stray bullet can bring our well crafted, well intended futures crumbling down around us. Often it’s not until then, when we are left to sift through the rubble, that we realize we never had control in the first place.

I have control of my brand, and my business

No you don’t. With the wide-spread acceptance of social media as a means of communication, a business can no longer hide behind the illusion that it’s in control of its brand by choosing to moderate comments or by choosing not be on social media at all.

Deleting negative posts

When a brand decides to maintain brand reputation by deleting negative feedback, let’s say for example on their Facebook fan page, they assume they are controlling the conversation. The problem is that the conversation stops between the brand and the consumer and continues consumer to consumer.

People will continue to speak about good and bad service that your brand has provided even if you are not willing to participate.

5 things to consider before you decide

to promote your brand online:

Are you willing to give up control?
Are you prepared to deal with negative feedback?
Do you have a purpose?
What are your goals?
What are you willing to risk?

If you’ve not thought through your goals and laid out a plan that fits your purpose, then you’d better be willing to risk it all.

December 17, 2010

They did it again…

Facebook has quietly rolled out another change. I said it on air last week when we were talking about the new profiles layout. I suspected that Facebook would make some major changes to the business profiles.

Fan pages. Like pages… Whatever you want to call them. Business pages are a tremendous resource for people to connect and communicate with businesses, and for businesses to respond and communicate to the people they serve.

Over the past year we’ve seen a growing number of social media companies that specialize in page “bling”. These companies are worldwide, and have been selling to the general business population a well done graphic, some slick code, and a lot of hype. They don’t talk to their clients about strategy and planning, and they don’t teach them how to utilize the basic factor that SOCIAL pages are all about – relationships.

In comes the silent killer; Facebook changes their design once again. There was little to no chatter when they slipped the big switch in on us today. The custom tabs are now all under the profile picture and are all <<>> coded in the FBML gray logo.

Along with this new profile layout they had a few other features there as well. Like logging in as an admin to the page, and notifications for the page comments.

This layout change came amid a really lagging response time for facebook this afternoon. And before this post was finished, they reverted back to normal. So I predict that this change will take place very soon.

This sucks for the graphic only based business, but it also sucks for Pizza Hut and Harley Davidson who had some really useful Facebook tabs and customizations.

How will you deal with this change? (Hint: complaining won’t help… it’s free, so you take what they give you, like it or not!)

Usually a change like this is the precursor to something better. People will fuss for awhile, but after they do, the changes will stick and people will adapt and get use to the new layout – just in time for Facebook to change it again. They don’t want to alienate people. After all, look what happened to Digg when they changed their interface.

This is a very cool, simple drag and drop-to create-lists interface.

Still, it doesn’t have the smooth look and feel of Google+.