Recently I’ve had a few business owners and non-profit groups asking me why their blogs or other  updates on Facebook pages don’t  show up on fans news feeds.  The main reason is this.  Facebook decides what makes it to news feeds through an algorithm that is somewhat random but is informed by your own interactions with other user’s pages. Plus it also posts the most current content, so within a few hours it’s easy for your update/important blog post to be buried under a barrage of baby updates, links to bizarre crap on Youtube or other senseless musings. Essentially it gives preferential treatment to the pages and friends you interact with most and whatever is newest, unlike an RSS feed which is how many businesses have misinterpreted it. This means that if your Facebook fans and friends aren’t actively visiting your page then you may potentially risk falling off the radar so to speak.

What you can do to keep interaction going? Some of these may seem obvious but I’ve been amazed at how many companies don’t do these simple things:

Add favorites to your page. This is a two way street. If you add other organizations and businesses to your favorites there’s always the chance that they’ll reciprocate and sometimes if a big on reciprocates it can create a lot of attention for you. Think of it like outbound and inbound links. While you do risk adding an organization or company’s page without reciprocity (this risk now being termed as preciprocity) nothing ventured nothing gained is what I say.

In recognizing that the things you post to you own page won’t always make it to everyone’s news feed, when you do have something that’s particularly important use the send an update to fans option on your page.  The frequency at which you use this function is up to you but I know some communications specialists who like to treat it like a monthly newsletter function. In fact, some of them have a monthly newsletter that they will use the update function on their Facebook page to send out along with their mailing list. If you only have quarterly newsletters then consider having one particularly strong blog post every month that you update your fans and followers with. Then maybe consider having a condensed newsletter post that invites your friends and followers to download the full version from your site when the quarterly comes out. To get to this option go to EDIT PAGE and then on the right hand side in the edit mode you’ll see the option to send an update to fans.

Consider a Facebook newsfeed widget on your site. If you post all your blog content to Facebook plus your Twitter feed then this is an easy way to aggregate content from them and can increase the visits to your Facebook page and blog at the same time. Although in my opinion it’s better to have people visiting your site through Facebook and Twitter as opposed to the other way around. Nevertheless, if you want to utilize Facebook more effectively this is something to consider.

These are just a couple of ways you can use Facebook in conjunction with your blog more effectively.

Over the past few years some big questions have been asked about the impact of social media for small business,  social change, political or consumer advocacy and even to our democratic processes. Small businesses have been particularly vocal regarding their confusion or concerns about social media and the application of it in their operations. Another emerging group that has been questioning how best to use social media are non-profit organizations. I can’t give the same answer about how to use social media (or let it use you) to these two groups, small businesses and non-profits, because their own reasons for engagement, audiences they want to reach, and desired outcomes are so different. But I do want to share some general ideas that can help anyone looking to incorporate social media into their marketing and PR strategies, because that’s essentially everyone.

Today I want to approach social media from a more temporal context. By this I mean let’s look at our social media tools like they’re  instruments, creating a song, a noise, or a rythm, each one engages people differently and each one acts on a different temporal scale, holding a note or chord for longer or shorter depending on what function it provides.  Much like a symphony, some tools are used for sudden emphasis, like cymbals crashing to emphasize a crescendo, others can form the broad foundation of your opus, like violins and cellos.  And let’s not forget the triangle. So understanding which message goes where and what kind of time frame you have to operate in can help you to better form your own social media strategy for engagement, and bring harmony to your marketing strategy.

We’ll start with the long term engagement tools. And I’m not going to list off every social media app or platform, just a few to make my point.

Your website provides the foundation for your engagement. It should be updated regularly if it can be and always have something helpful, informative or interesting on it. It should be consistent, along with your name and logo it is the most powerful tool of your branding and should be a place where your customers go to again and again because they know they can count on it for the information they want. It is the cello section that anchors your symphony. Though not often thought of as being a part of social media directly, this is where you want your social media engagement to return to. You want new customers or supporters spending time on your site and supporting your business or non-profit. Engaging them through social media is a great way to encourage this.

Your Blog. Every company should have a blog, and if you have more than one person in your company you should have more than one contributor. This is a great tool for directing traffic to your site and for building an intellectual identity. I don’t care if you sell exotic plants or buttons and cuff links, you should be blogging about them and about upcoming sales in your store, trade shows or conferences you’re attending, and general thoughts on life as a small business owner. You NEVER know who might read your blog and what opportunities will arise from it. Your blog is the violin section that carries the main melody of your company, it should be regularly rather than sporadically used.

Facebook and Twitter. For those who might not have time to read your blog but still want to show their support as a customer and get updates  Facebook is a good option as is Twitter. Facebook is first and foremost a social networking tool, so bear that in mind when you make your company profile. It, along with Twitter,  is a busy place with lots of information constantly being thrown back and forth so though over time you can aggregate “friends” of your business or non-profit group it’s not a tool for long term engagement unless it’s a two way street. You can’t provide content and sit back letting the audience become engaged. You need to jump into the mosh pit. You can get all sorts of feedback from customers, suggestions, and even ideas. So for short term engagement it’s great to post promotional calls to action and for longer term engagement your Facebook account should become the dialogue between you and your base.  It accentuates the long term engagement and provides little reminders of your anchoring melody i.e. your website and blog. The chances that someone will develop a deep rooted and strong attachment to your company or organization by becoming a fan on Facebook is slim, but the chances that someone who does will be committed to a long term engagement through Facebook are pretty high.

Content is King

A great way to attract brand new supporters or customers is through content platforms like Youtube that can then go viral through Twitter and Facebook. User generated content that you can adopt into your strategy also gives your fans, friends or customer base, a stake in your company and vision that empowers them and involves them. Campaigns to generate user content can be highly successful, but can also bomb if not done thoughtfully and properly. And even if a contest to drum up UGC is successful and attracts attention to your site, if your site isn’t ready to capitalize on that exposure you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Viral videos for example are great for exposure, but if you make a video and post it on Youtube and hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people watch it and send it to everyone they know, and you website isn’t a lean mean eCommerce machine (or for non-profits a tool that will create quality committed engagement),  and can’t capitalize on that exposure then it is all for naught. Attention needs to be turned into action, and a brief burst of attention like a video that gets Tweeted and posted to Facebook all over the place is like a cymbal crashing or gong or timpani that creates a burst of sudden energy and activity, but ultimately it is to draw the listener deeper into the song. If the rest of your online marketing strategy isn’t ready for the attention,with quality content on your website, your blog, or if you lack  eCommerce tools and the capacity to turn attention into action then you’ve missed an opportunity to capitalize on social media in a business context. And you should be smacked in the face.

So when you think of all these tools for engagement take some time to orchestrate your strategy and make sure you’re ready in case you hit a home run. Have an e-commerce platform or a website built to soak up that attention and turn it into action. I hope this metaphor of the symphony in action helps to inspire you to question how you can better use social media to create success for your company or organization.

Wes

As long predicted, the age of print newspapers is waning fast. The days of waking up and going to the stoop to retrieve that thick and smudgy bundle of journalism are coming to their end. Of course this has been going on for at least two decades, so it’s hardly news.

The internet is to blame of course. Just as the ol’ www has led to an increase in ruined relationships, chubby kids and the spread of before-and-after photos of Heidi Montag’s plastic surgery, it has also been the death knell for print newspapers. But, like I said, we’ve known that for a long time.

So, then the next step in the evolution of news was that people were going to get their news from online sources, some of which included websites for traditional media like the sophisticated NYTimes.com, the slick and shallow CNN.com and that grumpy, old, uncle who likes guns and hates gays, FoxNews.com.

But it seems like that whole paradigm isn’t quite happening either.

The research firm Outsell released a study recently, about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers. And the results, as they say, are shocking. News aggregators like Google and Yahoo are wrecking everything. Well, actually its us news consumers who are ruining everything, with our short attention spans and over-worked lifestyles.

According to the study, 44% of those who visit Google News just read the headlines. They never actually click through to visit the actual site where that headline came from.

Obviously this is a big deal, considering that the people who research and report on the news need to get paid somehow. And their paychecks come directly from the advertising on the news websites. So if 44% of news readers just get their news from aggregators, that’s a whole lot of eyeballs that are never reaching any on-site advertising.

So as strange an idea as it may be to contemplate, is it possible that Rupert Murdoch was right? A while back, he said he wanted to ban Google from accessing the news sites he owns, for exactly this reason.

Of course, it’s easy to get a bit histrionic about this whole thing. We see that 44% of us don’t read the articles, but just want a quick espresso shot of headlines. And then we blame it on the fact that we all have short attentions spans, and long work hours… just like I did a few paragraphs ago. But is that really the issue?

Maybe the issue is that “news” isn’t actually different than any other form of entertainment. Once upon a time, when we all diligently read newspapers every morning, was it because we really cared more about the world around us? Or was it simply because there wasn’t anything else to do?

These days, the internet provides endless entertainment for those wanting to surf around and read about stuff. And sure, some of that stuff will be news headlines, and maybe even whole stories. But there’s a heck of a lot of other content out there to keep us entertained. So if I scan a few headlines to get my fix of news, then go elsewhere to read an article about some cute undersea creature, is it because I’m addled by ADD? Or is it just that the internet is awesome?

Yes there have been many bloggers already ranting about Mark Zuckerberg and his comments this week but I promise this is the most scathing and sardonic of them all.

Millions of e-mails and other personal information were recently hacked by “someone” in China. It could have been you. How would you have felt if it was? Do you like to feel that you can trust these large corporate institutions to respect and protect your individual right to privacy and confidentiality? The CEO of one of those entities, Mark Zuckerberg, apparently wouldn’t have minded at all.

Privacy is a thing of the past according to the young child who runs Facebook, and he’s become a troubadour of this new no-privacy era. Of course the more things you share about yourself on Facebook the more marketing data that can be collected on you. It seems a culture lacking privacy benefits our pubescent wunderkind and the social media platform he rules. What’s more frightening is that a recent interview with an anonymous Facebook employee in The Rumpus reveals that every click and post and profile you view is also recorded and tracked and Facebook employees are given a master code to gain access to any and all personal accounts.What they use this information for? Nobody knows…

Like a modern day Emile Durkheim, Zuckerberg claimed that privacy was no longer a societal norm.  I can see Zuckerberg waxing intellectual about the ethical and moral sea change that has gripped the modern world, a harem of sycophantic devotees breathlessly waiting on his every idea, peanut butter and jelly smacking behind his peach fuzzed lips between sentences. Now I can see Zuckerberg peeing with the door open at the Facebook office, clipping his nails next to the water cooler,  I can hear him talking really loudly about his visit to the doctor while mixing grape Kool Aid and putting up a drawing of his secret office crush right next to the photocopier. A guy who doesn’t care about privacy probably shares every detail of the company’s cash flow, financing and debts with every single employee and person he meets too. Because privacy is simply a thing of the past, it went out the window with jousting and pistol duels. And yet many people who finished their post secondary education seem to differ with this milky skinned juvenile.

Take Professor Ryan Calo for instance, a fellow the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University’s Law School. He suggests that:

“The picture is clearly more nuanced than Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments would suggest…I’ve seen several recent studies out of Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, for instance, suggesting that people continue to value their privacy and are even willing to pay a premium for better privacy.”

Zuckerberg in his defense however did counter his critics by saying “A core part of Facebook’s mission has always been to deliver the tools that empower people with control over their information.” This of course coming from a company that operated in direct violation of Canadian privacy law.

Control over information doesn’t amount to privacy and protection of your information though, or maybe that’s what Zuckerberg meant to say. Maybe Facebook wants to deliver the tools that empower people with privacy and protection of their information, but that’s the thing with the internet. I have no idea who’s going to read this post when it goes live. I have to watch some of the things I say or write because I’m mindful of my reputation and the reputations of those connected to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m older (30) or  perhaps it’s because I’ve built up a network of friends, acquaintances and connections who I feel could be negatively affected by my actions and words if they were irresponsible and thoughtless ones? But when you’re 18 to 25 you don’t think like that. And so I think it’s dangerous that a company amassing such power over people’s identities and information should have a 25 year old college drop out at the helm.

Zuckerberg at the very least should realize the danger that comments like his pose. The president says he doesn’t like broccoli and suddenly a generation of girls grows up anemic. Zuckerberg says nobody cares about privacy anymore and a generation of high school kids grows up with a radically different notion of privacy. And I don’t care about what they themselves choose to post about their raging kegger or whatever else they feel is so important to share, it’s my privacy and yours that’s now compromised by “the new privacy” that Zuckerberg is helping to usher in. Think before you speak boy.  Would you like it if the Chinese hacked into your servers and poked around for a day? Or if the paparazzi harassed you for a week? Privacy is very serious and incredibly valuable.

It’s time Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg grew up and realized this.

There’s a lot of buzz in Vancouver leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics. There have been Olympic court battles , wars of words, major developments going over budget , rumors of social activism, some questioning if there will there be a riot? The police have been  buying sonic crowd control devices, and the climax of it all of course…the gold medal men’s hockey game .
The one thing I’ve been most interested in seeing though (after the gold medal men’s hockey game of course) is how social media will have its journalistic coming out party this February. True North Media House (Dave Olsen in particular) forged a trail into VANOC and the public discourse around the Olympics by being very vocal about the role of blogging and other forms of social media during the games. It was their hard work and initial phone calling, e-mailing and blogging that got social media recognized for the first time as a credible “news” source for the Olympics, a first. But while True North may have opened the door, W2 has turned on the lights and got the party started.

The co-working space across from Woodward’s has already been busy with local artists, bloggers and media mavens as the leadup to the Olympics and the opening of the official W2 space across the street in the new Woodward’s Building gets closer and closer. The W2 2010 Media House has already been fielding Olympic inquiries from as far away as Japan and the Netherlands according to their site, but they’re not the only space in the DTES that will be open for bloggers during the games. Other co-working spaces are beginning to fill up slowly as well, including the Building Opportunities with Business office at 163 Pender and True North Media haven’t been counted out yet either, though W2 has clearly emerged as the dominant hub for social media during the Olympics. True North Media House currently has no major sponsor or venue, though that could all change quickly if the stars align. Or perhaps True North and W2 will find a way to work together. An opportunity like this only comes once, and it’s an opportunity to really showcase Vancouver’s talented pool of social media experts and bloggers. More information on W2 , and more information on True North Media House . More information at the Co-working space at BOB .

There’s a certain irony that physical space has become such a contentious and competitive issue for bloggers during the Olympics, but social media has yet to fully satisfy every social aspect of human interaction. Sometimes having a coffee and relaxing while throwing ideas back and forth, face to face, just can’t be beat. I’m excited to see this unfold. Like clusters of independent journalists of old, these co-working spaces will be buzzing with objective and uncensored observation during the games. Vancouver has become the testing ground for a new paradigm of journalistic social media, so let’s do this right.

The Oxford American Dictionary published by the Oxford University Press recently released its “Words of the Year 2009” and with little surprise words formed out of social media dominate the list. “Tweetups”, “Hashtag”, “Tag cloud” and the 2009 word of the year “Unfriend” lead a list of new terms and definitions that have made their way into the prestigious and long trusted Oxford dictionary. But some are worried that texting and tweeting are destroying the English language, and while words like Unfriend and Tweetups are logical nouns/verbs used to facilitate social norms online, the truncated use of language in messages such as “soz 4 skrn u 2day” and “will b L8, car trub lol” represent a butchering of grammar that many sociolinguistic experts fear has irreparably damaged our language already. Add to that the recent additions of non-English websites with Arabic domain names and Asian URLs and it looks like the domination of the online world by the Queen’s English is coming 2 a close. Oops, sorry about that. Experts such as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt have predicted that Chinese will soon be the dominant online language as China has been experiencing gr8 online growth. WTF?! Sorry, sorry.

But many others have argued that linguistic protectionism can also suffocate a language or culture when such policies prevent a culture or language from adapting to economic, political or technological change.  It’s interesting 2 C how anglophone leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have been far less outraged than the French over erosion or mutation of our collective syntax.  OMG Jacques Chirac would not B LOL over the effects of txt and msg on French 4-real. Seriously! I am so sorry, it’s just become habit now. It’s way faster and I don’t get paid hourly.

So as the French (not all of them though) are tripping over themselves to protest the use of our bastardized chimera of a language in the EU and culturally cloister themselves from the onslaught of our watered down Germanic gibberish in their daily lives, the Oxford dictionary announces “Unfriend” as the 2009 word of the year.   In France the unfriending process is known as “la défaire d’un ami dans le Livre des Visages“.

Doesn’t that sound better? And with all those extra words they still manage to work 15 fewer hours a week than we do.

New Years’ Eve is a big night for drinking. And, unfortunately, it’s also a particularly popular evening for drinking and driving. Often the weather’s bad, taxis are hard to find, and after a few drinks, lots of people make the dumb decision to get behind the wheel.

Of course the police know this, and strive to discourage this behavior by setting up lots of drinking and driving roadblocks. And in general, the police want people to know there will be roadblocks out there, but they certainly don’t want drivers to know exactly where and when they are. And that’s why there’s some fear among the police that an increasing number of people will use Twitter to alert others about drinking and driving roadblocks tonight.

And they’re right to be concerned about it. A quick search for “roadblock” on Twitter reveals that more than a few people are doing exactly what the police are afraid of. According to the same article, Twitter isn’t the only way that drinkers are spreading the word about check points either. Both Facebook and social media-based iPhone apps are also called out for their potential abuse in helping people avoid getting pulled over.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that technology has got in the way of a good police roadblock. The website “Road Block Registry” is a wiki, of sorts, for those who want to alert their fellow drivers to the location of regular roadblocks. Individuals can both consult a list of ones in their area, or add to the list themselves.

But before we go vilifying all technology for encouraging drunk drivers, there’s also a newly released iPhone app called Buzzed that helps you calculate whether or not you’re over the legal limit. You enter your height, weight, age and how many drinks you’ve consumed in what amount of time. The app then calculates your approximate blood alcohol level, and even helps you call a taxi. It sounds handy, but I won’t be impressed until there’s an app that can actually determine your BAC when you blow into the iPhone’s microphone. Now that would be fun at parties.

Don’t drink and drive, and happy New Year!

So it’s that time of year again. Many of us have spent the last week eating too much turkey and shortbread, racking up credit card debt and testing our liver’s limits with delicious nog-based holiday libations. And so with the looming dawn of 2010, we may be thinking about a New Year’s Resolution to mitigate some of that damage.

Unfortunately, studies show that New Year’s Resolutions don’t really work for most of us. Though we start with the best of intentions, 25% of our resolutions are history within a week of making them. And only 12-22% of us actually stick with them for the year.

However, it seems that one way to help keep your resolve is to share your resolution with the world, say by tweeting about it, or putting it up on Facebook. Sure, if you send out constant Twitter updates about your big resolution you might annoy your friends and make them feel bad about themselves… but you might just actually stop smoking, reduce your Whopper intake, or quit your online porn habit.

According to Wikipedia, 12% of New Year’s resolvers meet their goals. But, that number increases to up to 22% among those who shared their goal with friends and family. Public shame, it seems, is a powerful motivator. So, given that statistic, it only makes sense that broadcasting your resolution to the world, via your favorite social media tool, will give you a much better shot at keeping on the straight and narrow path.

Of course, there’s one big problem with all this. Since social media has recently been declared, by some, unhealthily addictive, it’s probably not a bad idea to make a resolution to stop spending so much time heeding the siren’s call of Twitter and Facebook. And therein lies the Catch-22. My recommendation: forget big changes and just stick to small resolutions like, say, avoiding trans fats, or cutting down to one pack of cigarettes a day.

2010 may be the end of the beginning for social media in many respects but while the novelty may wear off for many the utility has just begun to be realized for some. In 2008/09 we saw social media and the Obama campaign lead the Democrats to victory and then afterward invite the world to visit Whitehouse 2.0, we saw Iranian political protesters reaching the world and each other through Twitter, and we saw the power of social media over the physical infrastructure of the internet after the death of Michael Jackson crashed the internet.

So is all the exciting stuff over? Not really.

In 2010 social media will see growth from business, in particular larger businesses who have finally caught on to the tangible utility of social media by driving customers into physical storefronts on Black Friday via Twitter and Facebook. Social media ROI will become quantifiable as companies really start to explore this medium as a revenue generator, understanding the psychology of consumers once again becomes key in this capitalist scouting mission already underway. It will continue to be explored in a political context as well as by NGOs and philanthropists and supposedly, old people will start tweeting. Not fun enough for you? Read on.

Few of us bloggers have been really comparing the sociological aspects of social media to social trends that appear to play themselves out over and over again in the corporeal world. We may have new toys but the psychology that drives our behavior hasn’t changed a whole lot over the past year compared to these technologies. One changing aspect of social media that many analysts have predicted is an increasing exclusiveness of social groups. We will build our enclaves and hideouts, our social media tree-forts if you will; just as we do in the wild and in cities. (I consider the wild to be anything outside of a city pretty much)

Augmented reality will also be factored into new apps and developments explored through social media platforms. Layers is a great example of an augmented reality app and it was explored here in senses earlier this year.

So don’t despair, the fun isn’t all spent quite yet. 2010 should be shaping up to be another fascinating year for social media.

*****WARNING! Spoilers about the existence of Santa Claus ahead****

When I was a kid, and believed in Santa Claus, I always got predictably excited about Christmas. Yes, people told me that if I was naughty all year (and I was always naughty) I wouldn’t get that Big Wheel I wanted, but would instead receive nothing but a lump of coal and maybe some tube socks… But I didn’t actually believe it. I blithely assumed that, based on past years’ experience, I would actually get an awesome present or two, no matter how many bad grades, muddy clothes and stray animals I naughtily brought home in the months preceding Christmas.

But many of the kids of today may not share that same peace of mind as they bed down on Christmas Eve. They might actually be afraid of that whole Santa’s blacklist thing.

Or at least they will if their parents sign up for the “Parents Calling Santa” iPhone app. With this application, a parent can sign up to have Mr. Claus himself call up their kids. And, if that parent chooses, Santa can scare the living bejebus out of the kid by telling him or her that he was way too naughty this year, and won’t be getting any presents. Now, maybe I was a bit more naive than the kids of today, but if my eight year-old self had received a threatening phone-call from Angry ol’ St. Nick on the night before Christmas, I would have cried, crapped my pants or hid in my closet for a few days…or possibly all three simultaneously.

If that’s not scary enough, parents can also use send their kids a custom video of Santa talking to their kid. Like the iPhone app, this website also offers special customization options for kids who have been naughty. Parents can have Santa mention the present they would have gotten, if they hadn’t been so bad. A multiple choice drop-down provides a list of possible naughty transgressions that have offended Santa, including everything from spending too much time on Facebook, to talking with his/her mouth full.

There’s not much time left before Christmas morning, so if there are any parents out there with kids to scare, you better hurry. Though if your family is anything like mine, you don’t need clever websites or iPhone apps to scare the wee ones – Uncle Lou, a santa suit and 15 rum n’ nogs should more than do the trick.