Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
POIG - Meetup On the Spur of the Moment
dlvr.it - You Publish. We Deliver
Deliver It! - can take any of your RSS feeds and route them to any number of social sites including Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. You can filter, schedule and plan what goes out and where it goes. This a well thought out tool that gets your material out into the social grid right away. I can see small business using it to promote their business - by doing quick mini blog articles using Posterous or Tumblr. Catch the wave at http://dlvr.it
How can I create a custom URL for my Facebook Page?
You can create a custom url for your own page or for any fan page that you manage. If you haven't already set your personal username already - now is a good time. A custom url makes it easy for others to find you. You can print it on your business card or list it in other social networking sites. Once you set it - it cant be changed - so choose wisely. I always recommend to use your name if its available. If you have a common name you will want to capture the name before the other "John Smith" does. I think of it as part of my brand. You can do the same for your business fan page too - as long as it has 25 "followers".
The process is simple as long as you know where its done. Just click on this link below to go the setup page. Any name you select must be unique across all facebook user - so you will have to check its availability. If you are managing several fan pages - you will see a link that lets you set them up.
http://www.facebook.com/username
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Sunday, March 10, 2013
Five Challenges Social Media Will Bring to Business - David Armano
1. Integration. Becoming a "social business" (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing) can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications--even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.
2. Governance. Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.
3. Culture. All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple, which can be notoriously secretive, is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history, they have legions of people developing applications that run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers and employees in new ways, but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.
4. Human Resources. In order to transform from a business to a social business, companies are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.
5. Measurement & ROI. Every organization will continue to struggle with measuring results and reporting ROI. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to realized revenue or savings becomes more of a challenge.
via blogs.hbr.org
How to Create a Facebook Business Page
Creating A Facebook Business Page
1. Visit this URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php2. Decide what the best category is for your business. (Spend a couple of minutes on this as you can't change it later easily).
3. Enter your business/product/brand name and click "Create Page".
4. At a minimum, I'd suggest entering a short description of your business and a website address. This is in the "Add Information To This Page" area. I'd also advise uploading your logo as a photo/image.
5. Click on your business name in the top left corner (it's a hyperlink) and then click "publish this page" (until you do this, nobody but you will be able to see your new Facebook business profile).
6. Finally, and this is important, from your new profile page, click "Add to my products". This way, you become the first "fan" of your business.
via blog.hubspot.com
Invite all your Facebook Friends
I thought this script was clever. I rarely want to invite all my friends to anything. But this script works.
I set up a couple of groups on Facebook and wanted to invite all my friends, but it would have taken an eternity because for some strange reason Facebook doesn’t allow you to “select all” friends when sending an invite. I mean, they’ll let you do it… but only if you click one at a time! Uugh.
Well anyway I went on a little search and found that you could cheat the system by inserting a little javascript to make it happen! Here is how to do it:
- Go to your Event, Group or page and click “Invite People”.
- Once the page has loaded you should see all of your friends, but they are not selected.
- At this point, copy and paste the javascript code below into your Web browser’s address bar, then hit “Enter”.
- If all goes well, it selects all of your friends!
javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}
via onemansblog.com
I tried it on a Fan Page. I selected "Suggest To Friends" - and a popup window appeared and loaded avatars of all my friends. I just dropped this script into the url address window and hit return and it selected everyone. It doesnt actually send the invite - you still have to do that. So I think its safe to try it and back out.
Allen Bonde's 10 Steps to a Practical Social Media Business Strategy
1. Create a mission statement -- What are your top-level objectives for applying social media and Web 2.0? And how will you achieve them? Ideally, this can be boiled down to one statement, articulating both the vision and where you aim to focus in terms of specific strategies. Don’t skip – or skimp on – this one; it’s important.
2. Assign owners – Who will take the mission, build the team, secure the budget, identify the tools needed? And who will own each channel, like LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, etc., as you scale up the program? In about half of the organizations we have looked at, marketing owns social media, but this is mostly because early social business tended to focus on marketing or online commerce first.
3. Outline employee policies -- Do you have a corporate social media handbook, with policies, style guides and guidance for employees looking to participate (on behalf of the company) in public forums and social sites? And as you roll out new social business tools, beyond creating awareness – see below – how will you encourage new behaviors and even innovative uses for these social tools?
4. Identify existing communities -- Where are discussions taking place now? For consumer products, they may take place on Amazon or Facebook, while business topics may originate on LinkedIn or internal forums. But it’s also likely that most discussions will span multiple social (and traditional) channels and involve both user-generated and enterprise content. Your social business strategy will need to address all of these!
5. Create a marketing plan -- How will you promote and roll out your new (or existing) social capabilities? Will word-of-mouth marketing be sufficient? Also, a training plan, incentives and recognition programs for frequent posters to communities and moderators will be needed.
6. Develop individual channel strategies -- Depending on which channels best fit the goals of your social business strategy, it’s important to look at the “role” and “tone” of each, think about cross-links (e.g., Facebook promotion back to your corporate blog) and leverage monitoring and benchmarking tools for tracking discussions, sentiment and your current “influence.” For example, Twitter Grader is a good way to see how you stack up in the world of Twitter.
7. Develop community strategies and programs – How will you support existing communities via new social business tools and encourage the widest number of users to share, publish and comment on information, whether it exists inside or outside the enterprise? In addition, what is needed to measure reputation and enable a trust model that scales across all communities?
8. Develop your platform strategy -- As companies look to integrate social channels with core business processes, a growing number are turning to social business software (SBS) platforms like those from Jive, OutStart or RightNow via its HiveLive acquisition. In evaluating these options, it is important to outline enterprise requirements (built-in expertise location, mobile access, etc.) and dependencies to help you scale from individual communities to enterprise collaboration and social networking.
9. Create a social business dashboard -- What metrics will you use to show the ROI for your programs? In the customer service arena, reduced costs from avoided calls or email and higher customer satisfaction are two proven measures to start with. For enterprise use of Web 2.0 in other areas, improved information sharing and lower communication costs are additional benefits that could be measured and tracked.
10. Publish an action plan -- What tactics are needed to fulfill your social business vision over the next 12 to 18 months? Typically, these plans start with management activities (steps 1, 2, 3 and 9), marketing-oriented tasks (steps 4, 5 and 6), content and community development (steps 4 and 7) and technology rollout (steps 7 and 8). Ideally, for each tactic, you want to articulate specific skills needed, timeframes and dependencies, and field trials to test assumptions and readiness for proceeding with subsequent phases.
How to Link Facebook Wall Entries to Twitter
You might be wondering how you can automatically post your wall entries on Facebook to Twitter. You want anything new happening on your fan page to be shared on Twitter. Its really quite simple. First go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter You will see a simple page that directs you to make the connection. After clicking you will be taken to a page showing all of you fan pages that you have control over. Find your fan page and click the button that says "Link to Twitter".
This takes you to the standard page where you get to "Allow" or "Deny" access to Twitter. You have the option here to login to Twitter or signout and login into a different Twitter account. If you are Twittering for a business - you will want to log out of your personal account and sign into the target business account. Once that is complete you will return to your list of fan pages and you will see some check boxes. If you dont want to share new photos then uncheck that box and save your changes.
I havent found a way to control the format of the tweets going out on Twitter from Facebook. Sometimes you want to customize your tweets by adding hashtags so your followers can find you.
Another issue that I find troublesome is that wall posting is shared on Twitter using bit.ly with the shortened url pointing back to the Facebook page. This is OK some of the time but when you just want to share your new blog from your website you want to be able to post only once to Facebook and then let Facebook autopost to Twitter without your visitors having the intermediate stop on the Facebook page before getting to the blog posting.
Another thing to notice is that when you share a link in Facebook it will include a nice thumbnail and text without you entering anything. However when this gets sent to Twitter - only the link is visible. Meaning that you need to add some text that does show up on Twitter. I would advise playing around with this a bit to get the hang of it and make sure you are happy with the result.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Chris Brogan's Online Ecosystem
Facebook: connect with friends and family. LinkedIn: share professional networks. Twitter: communicate in real time, and find the new good stuff. Google Wave: work on the future. Blog: think and muse and share and publish.
via chrisbrogan.com
I thought this was a good summary of the uses of online tools. Many people struggle with how to use these things. I say "nicely put"
How to Update Status on Twitter and Facebook
Its quite easy to provide a link that creates a twitter status update for something you are promoting in your blog. Same for Facebook. You dont want them to just go to Twitter but you want to help them out by filling out their status promotion for them. Usually in your blog software you can highlight some text and select the link icon which will pop up a small window and allow you to insert a target url. All the information is in the target URL.
In order to understand whats happening you need to know a little bit about how parameters are passed to a URL. Parameters are passed in key=value pairs. The first parameter is preceeded with "?" and subsequent parameters start with "&". I know its geeky - but little technical knowledge can help you understand whats going on.
For Twitter we just specify the http://twitter.com/home directory and specify the key=value pair of "status=what you wanna say and which links you wanna specify"
For Facebook we do something similar when "u" is the url parameter and "t" is the text parameter. These parameters are passed to the PHP method http://www.facebook.com/share.php. One thing I have noticed is that the title field gets overridden if you have a meta title (html title) set in your page. Someone might want to verify that.
How to Add Twitter Feed to Facebook Fan Page
Many people wonder how to have your Twitter updates go to a Facebook Fan page. Its pretty easy. The basic strategy is to add a RSS feed to the Notes tab and let Facebook post naturally to your Page Wall.
1) Go to your Twitter page and click on your Profile so that you see only your updates. At the bottom of the right side you will see an RSS icon and "RSS Feed of <YourID> Tweets". You can right click and "Copy Link Location" or just click on it to view it and then copy the url up in the browser address field.
2) Go to Facebook and navigate to your Page. What we are going to do is add the Feed to a Notes tab which will automatically display on your Page Wall. If you havent created a Notes tab - do so now. Click on "Notes" and then on "Write a New Note" and then on the icon looks like a piece of note paper. (Yes Im confused too!). You should a "Notes Setting" and a link that says "Edit Import Settings". After you click on this - insert the url (rss feed) that you saved from Twitter. Then press the "Confirm" button. You should be good to go. Facebook will periodically get todays tweets and shove it out to your Fan Wall..
Ok Now you might ask - What if Im already feeding my blog to the Notes Tab? Well there is an easy solution. What has to happen is that you must use a RSS Feed Aggregator so that you specify a single feed to Notes.
1) Create an aggregate feed by using http://xfruits.com Just login and create an RSS aggregator. This is quite simple. Just add any number of RSS feeds. I just used the url to my blog and twitter pages and it seemed to figure it out. You can also use the Google Reader to create an aggregated feed.
2) Take the aggregate feed url and just place it into the Notes settings page as described above. voila
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Helpful Facebook Resources
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