Please join us at our next free WEBINAR: ”Latest Web Trends in 1 Hour” on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10am.  Signup and details here.

At the April 2012 Web Trends Webinar, Miriam Schwab, the Friendly CEO of illuminea, spoke about:

Love the Sociabell graphic!

Google:

• Google Webmaster tools keeping data for 90 days
• Keep a close on your Google account with activity reports
• Need more space in your inbox? Sort emails by size with a Google Spreadsheet script
• How Google Penguin updates affecting sites
• Google Drive finally launching but not with iPhone access
• Google+ gets a new design, as if that’ll make more people join…

Facebook:

Fancy graphs to show user's engagement with the Facebook timeline

• You can now email people’s message box based on their profile URL. Good for stalkers…
• Download IP addresses to see who’s been logged into your account
• Timeline Checklist – a list with useful tools for optimizing your timeline
• Fancy graphs for Facebook engagement since the launch of timelines
• Facebook ads that link to internal Facebook pages perform better, and are cheaper.

Linkedin:

LinkedIn's People You May Know feature

• People You May Know feature
• Targeted updates
• Follower stats
• iPad app which represents a general trend of people moving away from apps and more toward specialized mobile and tablet sites

YouTube:

• Overview of ad options and prices
• Partner program allows you to put ads on your videos and do revenue share with YouTube

We also discussed: Pinterest, WordPress stats – over 72.4 million sites built on WP, Klout, Wajam, Sociabell,  joliprint, and secure.me.

We invite you to join us in-person at illuminea Headquarters in Jerusalem or online via live straming for our next 1-hour Webinar on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10am. Signup and details here.

Watch the April 2012 web trends lecture video
We apologize for the quality of the video. To see the accompanying presentation, go here

April 2012 Slideshow on Slideshare.

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So, we decided to launch a monthly event where Miriam presents all the knowledge she’s gained in the last few weeks to a small group of marketing professionals at our illuminea headquarters in Jerusalem and online via live streaming.

If you want to join us for the next hour-long, information-packed “Latest Web Trends for Marketing Professionals” lecture on March 26, 2012 at 10am via live streaming, register here and we’ll send you the link.

If you want to find out about future events, sign up to our newsletter (from the sidebar).

At our first Web Trends event in February, Miriam talked about Pinterest, facebook ad revenues, facebook e-Commerce, facebook featured stories, facebook timeline, YouTube’s new features, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Google video schema, and more!

Watch the February 2012 Web Trends lecture.

And here is the slideshow. Enjoy!
Web trends monthly lecture by Miriam Schwab, February 27, 2012
View more presentations from illuminea : web presence agency.

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Here’s how my Washington Post reading activity showed up in Miriam’s Facebook news feed:

As viewed in Miriam's facebook news feed

Here’s how an aggregation of Miriam’s Facebook friends’ reading activity appears at the top of her news feed (how does it get to be at the top?!):

Facebook Social News Reader in Miriam's news feed

That hidden area on the right are thumbnails of Miriam’s friends next to articles they read.

Is this an example of the beauty of our online social lives, or is it an incredibly aggressive invasion of our privacy?

Social beauty

On the one hand, people get to easily share things they find interesting with their network. Instead of having to go into facebook, or use a social media management tool, to share the articles they like, the Washington Post does that for them. And isn’t that a lot of what we do on social networks?

Massive invasion of privacy

On the other hand, do you really want your Facebook friends seeing EVERYTHING you’re reading? Here are some examples of why this type of automatic sharing could work out badly:

• You’re thinking of getting divorced, and are doing research on divorce laws or recent divorce cases.
• You’re questioning your sexual orientation, and are reading up on what it means to be homosexual and come out of the closet.
• You adore Justin Bieber and read every article about him. But that is best kept under wraps, isn’t it?

This is aside from the fact that you’re also giving these Facebook apps permission to access some of your details. And yes, apps are forever, if you let them be. Answer a questionnaire once about your knowledge of Sesame Street and two years later, that app is still viewing your information (unless you remove it of course, which I explain how to do below).

Also, if you install this app, you can’t see your own posts in your profile! Only your friends can. Which means you can’t remove anything from appearing there. Read an article about how to exorcise demons? It’s in your profile forever.

Massive social chutzpah

These social facebook news readers are clearly win-win for the news sites behind them. Their content gets wider exposure, and assumedly click-throughs. Except…if you see that your friend read an article and you’re interested in reading it too, and click on the article in your facebook news feed, you aren’t taken to the article! Instead, you arrive at the app installation page where it asks you to install it:

Washington Post Social Reader Facebook app installation page

I have to install an app to read your article? You want access to my name and birthday so I can read your stuff? Buh-bye.

We’re very curious… How many people are actually installing these apps in order to see the post? Being forced to add it in order to read an article must deter many. So by strong-arming us, the Washington Post is losing a lot of potential views. Also, you can’t like or comment on these posts, which removes the social aspect of this type of activity. But at least the Washington Post gets to dip directly into many facebook profiles!

Change your settings

So facebook users, beware! Installing an app gives the app owner direct access to lots of your personal information.

If you do install one of these news sharing facebook apps, note that you can change the settings, choosing who can see your posts from it and who can’t. Here is how to do it:

1. Log in to Facebook. In the top right hand corner is a downward facing arrow. Click on it.
2. Click on Account Settings.
3. In the left-hand sidebar click on Apps.
4. Click the Edit button next to the app you want to edit.

Then you’ll see the following:

Washington Post's app settings

It is recommended to once in a while go into your facebook settings and see what apps you’ve installed and remove whatever you don’t use or don’t recognize. You’ll be surprised what’s lurking there.

These facebook apps are sneaky too

Here is the kicker of the Washington Post Social Reader app. I did not sign up for it and suddenly it was there, sharing my reading habits with my network. I seriously don’t remember ever seeing that installation screen. Maybe I clicked on something to install it, but if I did it was not made clear to me at all.

Meanwhile, I had no idea that my reading activity was being shared with others until I looked over at Miriam’s screen (I happen to be Facebook friends with her) and saw this:

What the?!

Surprise Deena!

Wow! The Washington Post and I are BFFs and I didn’t even know it!

What do you think?

So you know what we think about this app but what do you think? Have you seen different news-feed apps that work differently than what I’ve described here? Would you, or do you, use an app of this kind?

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This person wanted to target people who liked the facebook Page of a particular chain of stores in Israel. This brand has an official Page on facebook, as well as a bunch of unofficial ones. Their official page alone has over 14,000 fans, yet when the person selected that Page under Likes and Interests in the Facebook Ad dashboard, they were told that the estimated reach was less than 20 people. I tested this out, and the results were the same, no matter what country or age group I entered (including all ages):

I was determined to get to the bottom of this, so I started running a bunch of tests. Eventually I realized the following:

If the title of a facebook Page has Hebrew in it, the Estimated Reach number is much lower than the number of fans. In fact, the number is always 20 or less – this goes for sites with 50,000 fans and up. And having English and Hebrew in the title doesn’t help. However, if a Page’s title is in English, even if the content is completely in Hebrew the Estimated Reach is in line with the number of fans of the Page.

I wanted to see if this is a problem with non-latin languages in general on facebook, so I decided to test a page with Arabic in the title: Al Jazeera Channel. The Page has over 1.2 million fans. I tested the Reach for this channel in a bunch of countries with large Arabic speaking populations: Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United States, United Kingdom, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt. The Estimated Reach for those countries ranged from 20 to 180 at the most. When I added all these countries, the estimated reach maxed out at 240 people, which doesn’t really make sense.

So unless I’m missing something, which could be, it seems that Facebook Ads have a problem with Facebook Pages with titles in Hebrew or Arabic. Which makes you wonder if there are any other issues with Pages with titles that include Hebrew, Arabic, or possibly other non-latin languages like Chinese or Russian. And if that’s the case, maybe Page owners should use English titles wherever possible for now.

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Facebook is rolling out some major changes to how Pages work. Some are good, some not. The good changes include the new layout of facebook Pages with the tabs on the left sidebar instead of at the top, and, starting March 11, 2011, the ability to use iframes, HTML, Javascript and CSS without the FBML App! This is going to totally change how you can develop facebook Pages! Party time!

One of the recent changes in the “not so great” category is facebook’s decision to remove the “Suggest to Friends” link on facebook Pages. Admins of a page can still access this feature in the Edit Page area, but fans cannot. So, we’ve been flooded with requests to add an Invite Friends Tab to facebook Pages.  Here are the steps for how to create the Invite Friends Tab on a facebook Page, but keep in mind that as of March 11, 2011, facebook will be deprecating the FBML App.

1. Go to  Static FBML App and click on Add to Page in the top left corner of the page. You will then see a list of your facebook pages. Click “Add to Page” to add the application.
2. FBML is now added to your page.
3. Go to the facebook Page you’re working on and click Edit Page.
4. Click on Apps.
5. Click on the FBML Apps and click on Go to App.
6. Give the Tab a title like “Suggest to Friends.”
7. Copy and Paste the below code replacing illuminea with your organization.
   Important! The action URL on line 3 of the code MUST be http://example.com and NOT http://www.example.com. No WWW welcome at this party.
   
   If you don’t follow these rules, you will get an error that says “Sorry, your request could not be processed. Please try again.”

   <fb:request-form
   method="post"
   action="http://facebook.com/illuminea"
   type="illuminea"
   invite="true"
   content="Connect with iluminea
   <fb:req-choice url=http://www.facebook.com/illuminea label='Go' /> ">
   <fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="Invite your friends to connect with illuminea" rows="3" cols="3" showborder="true" />
   </fb:request-form>

8. Save Changes.
9. Go to Edit Page > Apps > Click on the Suggest to Friends App you created > Go to Edit Settings and click “Add” where it says Available (see screenshot).
   
10. You can see this in action on illuminea’s facebook Page.
11. When your friend receives the invitation it says “Friend has invited you to “Static FBML”. Not so pretty so for now make sure your message text is really good! I hope there will be a better solution for this.
    

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Logic might tell you that you should be able to comment on a photo you were tagged in but actually that is not what gives you the ability to comment. What will allow you to partake in discussions under a photograph with your lovely face in it is if you “Like” or are Facebook friends with the person or entity that posted the photo on Facebook.

So that’s what wasn’t working!

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What are the changes?

It actually took me around a week to find out about the changes but once I found out, it was clear as day that something was fishy in Facebook land.

I woke up and found my email inbox all but flooded with messages mainly from strangers that looked something like this:

Turned out that Facebook had made the following quite anthropologically interesting change:

People can now add their Facebook friends to groups without the friend’s permission.

To be clear, in general, there is almost nothing I’d ever want to do to anyone without their permission. And now, if I ever want to invite someone to a Facebook group, I am basically “forced” to force them into the group. No more suggestions. That would just be too civil, wouldn’t it?

The new automatic settings

Wait. It gets more amusing (and then more amusing). So now this person is in a group without even being aware of it. Now to add to the pushiness, the automatic notification setting is that members of Facebook groups receive messages to their email every time someone posts or comments there. Every time.

That explained all the emails I’d received. Mind you, 99% of them were not about the group but instead attacks on the creator of the group for adding all of us without our permission. (I stood up for him, explaining that it wasn’t his fault, but Facebook’s fault. Aren’t I kind?)

As for this notifications setting, it’s very easy to change but you’ve gotta be on the ball or else it’s very annoying. You just click on “Edit Settings” in the upper right-hand corner of the page when you’re in the group, then a window pops up and you edit it as you wish.

The grand finale – I’ll never ever forgive you!

Now, ready for this? This is the other end of the new ability to add people without their permission.

If my lovely friend added me to a group and I decided I am not interested in that group, I can opt out. That makes sense. The crazy part is that this means that my possibly-well-meaning friend will never be allowed to add me to another group again. Ever!

I must say that this part of the new set-up makes me think that whoever was behind it has super unhealthy personal relationships. Because seriously, assuming I am not on bad terms with any of my Facebook friends (I hope I’d remove anyone with whom I don’t want to be communicating at all), why would I want this to be so final? I probably opted out just because the group is not of interest to me. That doesn’t mean I never want my friend to be able to recommend any group to me ever again!

This, of course, is not to mention the fact that if, to begin with, the friend was sending me a suggestion instead of a forced joining, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

This change is actually childish, though even children usually only talk like that (“I never want to play with you again!”) and then 10 minutes later they’re playing as if nothing happened.

I do wish I wasn’t married to Facebook

So, those are some of the latest changes. I read a seriously lol-ful blog post about these changes by Danny Sullivan. The title is too long to quote here (I’d have to start paying for real estate) but it’s a great story about someone (true story) who was added to some highly embarrassing group just to prove the point I’m trying to prove here (that Facebook Groups are evil, of course).

Facebook so often does things that are so unfriendly that an urge arises from deep within me to leave Facebook. And then I remember… Too bad I have close to 90 photo albums and so much other information there. (I would absolutely love to have a way to download all my info from Facebook so I have it somewhere other than there.)

So instead of wishing I could leave, I just wish that Facebook would head on down to someone else’s office, say, Google, and ask them for some tips on how to make changes that gently fall into place and make the user’s experience just that much more pleasant and fun, instead of making changes that sort of slap you in the Face and make you wish you could take the Book and slap them back.

P.S. All of this is not to mention that really Facebook should take the pluses of groups and the pluses of pages and just put them together into one. But that’s for another post.

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Inbal Hotel – the first in their field

Inbal Hotel Facebook photo contest

It’s easy to jump on the social media bandwagon once it’s already moving, but to be the first to get the bandwagon going in your field can feel a little daunting. As far as I know, the Inbal, a hotel in Jerusalem, is the first Israeli hotel to really go all the way, social media speaking. From their gung-ho presence “all over” Facebook and Twitter, it’s easily apparent that Ruth Waiman, the enthusiastic Executive Assistant along with Online Marketing Manager Pinny Orzach, the SEO/SEM person, have been given the OK to really give social media a try.

It really is a risk when a company decides to put a substantial amount of employee hours towards a social media presence. There could be growing pains when a conventional company puts itself out there in the world of social media. Often there is a slight image change as the company shows itself to be more hip and young through their social media presence.

You’ve got to be at least a little creative and really quite proactive to keep your social media presence alive and well. It’s not just about posting, “The chef is now cooking duck for dinner.” It’s about being cool, fun and interactive.

The Inbal Hotel’s latest photograph competition is exactly that – cool, fun and interactive. Actually, the beauty of their competition is that it isn’t about the Inbal. It’s about Jerusalem. You can enter the competition by posting up to three photographs you’ve taken of Jerusalem on their Facebook wall. At the end of October the best photograph will be chosen and the winner will get a night for two at the hotel.

When I wrote to Ruth about their latest contest, she explained:

To further boost our interactions on Facebook on both English and Hebrew walls, the photo competition was launched and has been receiving enthusiastic feedback from the outset.

Having now received close to 80 photos on the combined pages, we’ve definitely noticed an increase of fans and interactions and are hoping to involve external photography professionals for the judging due to take place early next month.

Ruth also mentioned all the events they’ve been hosting at the hotel, including the WordCamp afterparty (which we, as the WordCamp organizers, are really grateful for) at the beginning of September.

Nefesh B’Nefesh’s “This is my Israel” Campaign

Nefesh B'Nefesh This is My Israel campaign

Slightly before the Inbal’s competition commenced, Nefesh B’Nefesh (NBN), the organization that supports Jews who move to Israel, started a photo contest on their facebook page. To participate in this competition, people were requested to take a picture of themselves holding a sign that says “This is my ISRAEL” somewhere in Israel. The place where they are photographed should be one that they see as truly representing Israel for them.

Also, a fun campaign that is not about the actual organization behind the campaign, but instead about “you” and Israel.

What a wonderful use of social media to get people involved in an organization and, of course, more connected to each other and Israel.

It is currently voting time on the NBN campaign so you can go to the album and click “like” on your favourites. The winning photographer will receive a Flip video camera. Sweet.

Goals and drawbacks

The main goals of campaigns of this kind are exposure and building a certain image and relationship with your followers. As long as your campaign really is, as I said, fun, cool and interactive, and not all about you, the image and relationship aspects will probably be fine. The only problem with these types of contests is that if you want to participate in the contest, you might hesitate telling others about it since the last thing you need is more competition!

(Of course that brings up the question, why am I writing about it here if I plan on entering the Inbal contest? I suppose my blogging addiction is stronger than my “I need to win” attitude.)

Otherwise, both of these contests are a great and fun use of Facebook.

And here are my pictures

So yes, I plan to enter three of my pictures in the Inbal competition. Here are the photographs I’m considering. Which ones do you think could be winners? Help me choose! I really could use a night in a fancy hotel.

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If you don’t know what I’m talking about (i.e. have been hiding under a rock etc.), Old Spice launched a campaign that combined twitter, YouTube and a bit of facebook that took the web by storm. The campaign included some planned commercials that set the stage for the manly-manliness of Old Spice Man, and then a series of real-time videos made in response to people’s tweets on twitter and comments on facebook and YouTube. Here’s the original video launched in February which attracted 19 million viewers (this video was actually shot in one shot with minimal computer graphics):

A few weeks ago Old Spice Man returned with this commercial:

What’s so great about Old Spice Man?

• Old Spice Man – actor Isaiah Mustafa is just amazing. He gets the message across perfectly.
• The writing – the lines Isaiah says are brilliant. I mean, how great is a campaign that ends with the line “silver fish hand catch”?
  
  

  I have to applaud the @oldspice writers for “Silver Fish Hand Catch” a catchphrase that will last forever.Thu Jul 15 07:48:04 via TweetDeckIain Tait
  iaintait

• Multiple channels – the campaign is coordinated across multiple social media channels, utilizing each channel’s advantages and cross posting as required. Twitter is used for direct conversation, facebook for posting videos and status updates with longer text and accompanying responses by fans; and YouTube for centralizing the video content.
• Appeals to men and women – For example, I can’t stand beer commercials which are obviously targeting men, but this campaign appealed to both sexes which is good for a product like Old Spice body wash, which men use but women often probably buy.
• Combines traditional and new media – these videos are commercials, a type of advertising that has been around for decades. But the commercials have evolved to take advantage of social media by using the medium’s potential. Creating new videos in real time is not something you can do with TV; also, the very personal style, and personalized videos (he spoke to his daughter, and helped a guy propose marriage, and even answered his own question), are very social media. But commercials are old media and we’re seeing the two come together here.
• Personalization – how fun is it to get a personal video message from Old Spice Man? Thousands sent tweets and comments his way in the hope that he would respond to them, and getting a response was like winning the lottery. In order to create these videos, marketing agency Wieder + Kennedy’s team worked at a furious pace, creating over 180 videos in 24 hours!!
• Old Spice Man is a nice guy – many attempts at creating viral media involved tricking people into believing what they were seeing is real, or being mean to others in some way. Old Spice Man is just nice, and cool. He makes us laugh. It’s a refreshing.

This campaign was a hit, with over 180 videos created, over 5.9 million views and 22,500 comments, as reported by Visible Measures. Visible Measures also reports that it is one of the fastest growing online video campaigns ever. Even once the videos have ended, people continued the trend. Reddit users created Old Spice Voicemail (with female and male versions), and some students at Bingham Young University created the a knockoff video encouraging people to study in the library.

Is this the future of social media marketing?

This is not the future of social media marketing. These guys created a groundbreaking campaign, but if companies copy this model, it will get stale. No one will enjoy this level of success because no one else can be first. Because when it comes down to it, success in social media is about creativity and originality, breaking out of the box and grabbing our attention. The next roaring success will have to be something else that’s never been done before.

References:

• Old Spice Mixes Social Media And Web Ads, Forbes.com
• Old Spice: The Archetype of a Successful Social Media Campaign, Mashable
• The making of Old Spice’s commercial: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Twit video with Leo Laporte
• How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made, ReadWriteWeb
• New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar, Harold B. Lee Library

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As you can see, the Wall Street Journal greets new visitors with a custom tab called News, which acts like a landing page.

I’m not going to get into how to create a custom tab on a facebook page here since there are tons of tutorials around the web on how to do so. What we are going to discuss here is how to put an image map in your custom fbml page.

Step 1: Get your image

First, find the image that you want to make linkable. Maybe edit it in Photoshop or some other editing program and add text. It’s recommended to underline text you plan to make linkable to make them look like links. Let’s use the following image as an example:

If you mouse over the image, you’ll see that nothing happens, and there are no links. I’m going to make the words Social Icons a link to an icon search engine, and each image will link to a similar icon online that you can download.

Step 2: Upload your image to a server somewhere

In order for your image to appear in your facebook tab, it must be hosted somewhere online. That’s the only way facebook can “call” it in to the tab – it can’t call it from your hard drive on your desktop (unless your hard-drive is a publically accessible server, which is usually not the case). Here are two great places for uploading images for free: Photobucket and Image Shack. I like Image Shack for quick and dirty image uploads since you don’t have to create an account there – it’s optional, which is helpful if you later want to remove an image or have control over your images, but not required.

So let’s use Image Shack as our example. Follow the directions to upload your image, and you will get to a page that looks like this:

We care about the field above called Direct Link (I put a green box around it). Select and copy the whole URL in that field.

Step 3: Create an image map

The image map must be created with CSS. If you use HTML it won’t work in facebook. Lucky for us, there’s a great free tool online for creating CSS image maps: Image Map Tool.

1. Go to http://image-maps.com.
2. Once you’re in the Image Map Tool, enter the image URL you copied from the Image Shack page into the field that says “From a URL”:
   
3. Click on Start Mapping Your Image. You’ll come to a page that says that your image was uploaded successfully:
   
4. Click on the link “continue to next step.” That’s where the fun begins.
5. You need to select the parts of your image that you want to make into links. Most parts of the image can be selected with the Rectangle tool, but unusual shapes can be selected with the Custom Shape tool. In our case I’m going to use the Rectangle Tool.
6. When you click on the Rectangle tool, you get this floating thing that you can move around and resize, and enter the link and link title/alt text:
   
   As you can see above, I moved the floating box thing over the words Social Icons and resized it so it covers both words. I entered a link to an icon search engine Iconfinder, and entered the alt text for the link. Next, click Save.
7. Click on the Rectangle button again and repeat this process as many times as you need until all hotspots are created. Since I want four links in this image, I repeated this process another three times.
8. Now, choose the options that you want from the sidebar under Advanced Tool Box. There are some useful and advanced options there, and I recommend you check them out, but take note of the options to Show Text Links and Allow Backlink. If you choose to show text links, text links will appear under your image with links to the places you’ve linked your image to. This could be good for usability since you’ll offer a text version of the links in addition to the image links.
   The Allow Backlink option will put a text link under your image map to the Image Map site. If you can, it’s nice to give credit to this site for creating such an awesome free tool. But if you can’t, make sure to deselect that option.
9. Now click Get Your Code. This takes you to a very confusing page with lots of text and tabs at the top. Click on the CSS Code tab at the top of the page:
   
   You will see a bunch of code. It’s basically ready to copy and paste into your FBML tab, but you need to make one change to it first. Image Map Tool adds a dotted black line that appears when you mouse over any of the links on the image, which is pretty annoying so you probably want to get rid of it. So you need to get rid of lines of code that look like this:

   a.LINKx:hover {background:transparent; border:1px dashed black; color:black;}

   The x above represents a number. The above line of code will appear as many times as links that you created in the image, and the x will be a number. So if there are three links, the above line will appear three times, and the x will be the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in each line.

10. Once that’s done, paste the code into your FBML tab and you’ve got yourself a working image map in an FBML tab!

Sources:

• Design Your Facebook Page Like a Pro – Image Maps Tutorial
• “Image Map” on the Facebook Static FBML forum

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Facebook also announced their new “Connections” system, which anyone who has logged into facebook since this was announced had to notice. Connections is a nasty feature that doesn’t allow you to control your profile information anymore. For example, if you want to say that one of your interests is Internet Marketing, your entry for that must link to a new automatically generated Community Page that facebook creates for Internet marketing. You can identify a Community Page by the lovely (not) logo that facebook plops in there automatically:

I’m guessing that at some point facebook will start to automatically enter images that they have deemed relevant to the content in the logo space, but in the meantime this meaningless DNA symbol is what we’ve got.

The pages automatically aggregate content related to the topic and displays it on the page. It places an emphasis on content from Wikipedia, Google Maps, posts from facebook, and content posted off of facebook. It seems to have the potential to become a pretty rich page, if we can judge from the Community Page for Jerusalem, Israel.

From what Facebook wrote in their introductory post on the subject, it seems that the goal is to help us have the things we “Like” appear in our facebook profile. They say that:

Some of you added information about yourself, such as your likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies, when you first joined Facebook. But we’ve noticed that more than three times as many of you have connected to Facebook Pages, such as those for bands, non-profits, universities or anything else you care about, as a way to express yourself. So to make it even easier to display your affiliations, we’ve improved the profile.

So Facebook is saying we’ve been more active Liking pages, than adding our likes to our profile info. So if we “Like” the page of a certain brand or entity, why wouldn’t we want that affinity to appear in our profile information, right? Well, kind of right, but here’s why their implementation of this idea doesn’t make sense:

Pages should be enough

People used to be able to easily see the Pages that we like on our Info tab on our profile. Why wasn’t that good enough? Now the Pages we like appear under Likes and Interests in an obscure link called Show other Pages:

You have to click on that to see all the Pages that person (me) has Liked, as follows:

If facebook really wanted to help us share our interests, why not prominently present the Pages we’ve liked in our Likes and Interests section? If they would do that, there’s no need for Community Pages.

Big brand discrimination

If facebook is trying to make a stronger connection between our profiles and the things we have actively Liked, why not help us link our Interests to existing Pages, rather than force us to link to their Community Pages? For example, I’d much rather have the link in the Employment section of my profile info for illuminea go to our illuminea page, rather than the useless illuminea Community Page that facebook created (see below).

And here’s what makes this even worse: if you want to enter a well-known brand or entity as part of your profile information – like Coca Cola, or 30 Rock – Facebook is helpful enough to offer up a link to those brands’ Pages! But if you’re (hypothetically) a tiny little company in Israel, fugetaboutit. Facebook helpfully creates a Community Page for your brand and ignores your existing Page cuz you’s too tiny to really know what’s good for yous.

Reputation management nightmare

In continuation of the above, if your brand is too tiny to matter, your brand now has two homes on facebook: your Page and your Community Page. Check out this example for illuminea. Here’s a screenshot of our Page that we created:

And here’s how the Community Page looks:

You have no control over the Community Page and what shows up there. I’m not just talking about avoiding negative feedback about a brand – at least complaints would be related to the brand. I’m talking about garbage showing up there.

Orli Yakuel from GO2WEB20 posted the following on facebook:

The link in that update takes you to the Orli Community Page:

What the heck is that? But it might not seem so bad. I mean, the posts are all from Orli. It’s kind of like a duplication of her facebook profile, another home for her on the web. But if you scroll down on the page you see this beauty:

And that’s not all that Orli has to face. If you do a search for her on facebook, you get this:

You’d think with a unique name like Orli Yakuel she wouldn’t have to compete for her name online. At least she appears first.

But we can’t expect to always be first: Rena Reich recently posted on the Digital Eve Israel mailing list that she knows someone whose facebook Community Page for their brand is appearing higher in search results than their own Page. Yikes.

You want privacy? On our web? Hahaha

People might have interests that they only want to share with selected people. But if your info is linked to Pages, that means you appear in the list of people who like that page:

Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. (Connecting to Everything You Care About, The Facebook Blog)

And you can’t not link, because if you choose not to, the interest or info won’t appear in your profile any longer:

Connecting to Pages is now the main [I think they mean “only” – MS] way to express yourself on your profile. If you didn’t connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty. If you chose to not connect to Pages during the transition process, there will be the opportunity to connect to the suggested Pages later at the top of the “Info” tab on your profile, and of course, going forward, you will always be able to add new connections by Liking Pages and/or editing your profile. (Facebook Help Center)

People really seem to hate this. Here’s what one guy commented on the facebook blog:

Orwell’s 1984 is happening now!! one of the reasons i joined facebook was to connect with people I KNOW!!!! not to share private information about me to people i do not know or for facebook to remember my deleted information and make public sensitive information about me!

Let’s say that the reason facebook is doing this is that also want us to be able to network around general themes, like Internet marketing, and to do that they have offered to create Community Pages for these topics that we can all gather round. That’s a nice idea, but they shouldn’t be forcing us to link to these pages; it should be optional.

Don’t post it if you don’t want Mom to see it

Facebook has been chipping away at our privacy bit by bit over the past few years. Check out this snazzy infographic for a visualization of what information used to be private on facebook, and what is private now (almost nothing). Why is facebook doing this? Pete Cashmore from Mashable sums it up nicely in the title of a recent post:

Facebook “Likes” World Domination

Basically, Facebook is working hard to avoid the fate of other dead or dying social networks like Friendster and MySpace. They hope to do so by not only interacting with you on facebook.com, but all over the web. That’s why you can now Like pages that are off of facebook.com, for example. I think Pete sums it up well:

It’s in Facebook’s interests to lock up your social graph, and it’s in your best interests that it doesn’t [my bold]. If Twitter, Google or another player were to make your social graph portable, you wouldn’t need to store all of your information on Facebook — you could do whatever you please with it.

I’m not advocating that we all stop using facebook. But like anything in life, consumer responsibility is important here: know where you stand with facebook, and what it can and can’t do for you, and hopefully you can put good use to it. In short, use the Mom Visibility Quotient: don’t post anything on facebook (or anywhere on the web) that you wouldn’t want your mother to see, and you should be ok.

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We don’t have a fax machine in our office. From the beginning I decided that we would withstand the pressure and insist that people email documents to us so that we can be a mostly paperless office. Yes, I know that there are fax services that will deliver faxes to your inbox, but in that case why not just use email? And for those that think that there’s no way to get a piece of paper to someone remotely without a fax machine, I’d like to introduce you to a handy device called the scanner.

We have so many ways to communicate online today: email, facebook, twitter…there are even people talking about how communication via social networks will push out email communication. I think that’s an extreme point of view, and email’s not going anywhere, but the point is: get rid of your fax. It deserves to be in the same place as your record player, dot matrix printer, and fluorescent slouch socks (I shudder when I think of how we wore those).

And since Dilbert agrees with me, we know that what I say is Truth:

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Forsman and Bodenfors opened a facebook profile for the branch’s manager, Gordon Gustavsson. The profile was to be used for business purposes only, as is evidenced by the vanity URL chosen for Gustavsson’s profile: http://www.facebook.com/ikeagordon – note that his vanity URL is ikeagordon, and not gordongustavsson. Better hope he works at Ikea forever…

Over a two week period, the agency uploaded pictures from Ikea showrooms to Gustavsson’s facebook photo album, and then made the announcement that changed this from run-of-the-mill social media activity to a raging campaign: they announced that whoever was the first person to tag a product in the pictures with their name would win it. And boy did people rush to tag the photos:

Check out this video overview of the campaign and how it was set up:

Why this campaign worked

The coverage of this campaign focused on the agency’s ingenious use of facebook’s photo tagging feature. It definitely was an original and unique use of this feature of the world’s largest social network. However, in my opinion that usage is just technical, and the reason this campaign was so successful is because it delivered what consumers want when engaging online with brands: exclusive deals or offers.

Digital marketing company Razorfish recently released its third annual FEED study which charts how technology is changing the way consumers engage with brands. Among the other interesting pieces of info gleaned from their study is the reasoning behind people’s choice to follow a brand on twitter and facebook. In the cases of both networks, the majority of people cited that they follow brands in order to get “exclusive deals or offers.”

It makes sense. Unless your brand is Apple or something that makes people feel all warm and fuzzy, consumers don’t want to be your brand’s “friend.” They may like your product and use it on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean they want to create an ongoing and public relationship with you…unless there’s something really worthwhile that’s in it for them. In the case of this Ikea campaign, people were more than happy to tag and share photos of Ikea showrooms if it meant that they would get to take a couch home for free.

Another example of success through rewarding consumers is br.st. br.st is a new web-based twitter client that became one of the top trending topics on twitter yesterday as well:

While I’m sure this new twitter client is nice, it didn’t get this level of exposure because of their great features. They got it because they are handing out 4 MacBook Pros and 21 Nintendo Wiis to people who tweet about br.st. As br.st CEO Jared Stauffer says on the site’s home page:

Instead of spending money on advertising we decided to give it to you in the form of prizes. So help spread the word by telling your friends and enter to win some cool prizes.

In fact, most of their home page is dedicated to the contest, as opposed to reasons why you should use br.st. Take a look at the following screen shot of their home page – out of all the screen real estate, only the grey box on the right refers to why you should give br.st a try:

While br.st may have gone to the extreme with their prize campaign, it did succeed in getting them a lot of viral exposure for a new product.

Recipe for social media success: viral + free stuff

Many social media evangelists talk about how the social networks can help you and your brand create warm and fuzzy relationships with your consumers. It’s not true. Consumers don’t want a warm and fuzzy relationship with most businesses or products. But they will help you spread the word if you offer them something really worthwhile in return, like a free couch or Ninento Wii. So by combining the features on the social networks that have the potential to make your brand or campaign viral with consumers’ base interest in free stuff, you’ve got a great recipe for social media success.

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The reason I took this approach is that you can find lots of information out there about how fabulous social media marketing is for promoting your business, organization, or other goals. However, with all this hype I fear that people are a) overestimating what social media can do for them and b) unaware of the challenges involved in using social media for marketing.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of social media marketing. We’ve had good results with it here in our own company, and for clients. My point here is to provide a social media “chill pill” – some facts and realities about becoming active on the social web.

So here’s my presentation. I hope you find it useful, and as always would love to get your feedback and questions:

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Here are the seven tips. For more info about the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe, please scroll to the end of this post.

1. Brand yourself as if you were a brand name

If you are trying to market yourself as a freelance writer, or freelance anything, it’s important to start to look at yourself as the product that you, the business owner, is trying to sell. Yeah, that’s a lot of hats to wear, and that doesn’t include the fact that you, the freelancer, are also the accountant, administrator, and coffee-fetcher. Anyways, in order to accomplish this, you need to create “Brand You.”

Why should I brand myself?

The brilliant Gary Vaynerchuk has the answer for you (bonus: guess who’s apparently a MOT (Member of the Tribe)…note how he says Alav Hashalom about Paul Newman passing away!):

Another reason you want to do this is because Google has a long memory, and you need to control what prospective employers and others see about you on the web. You have a chance at doing this if you have a personal site built on your own domain. To see what I’m talking about, read this post from Lifehacker: Geek to Live: Have a say in what Google says about you.

So how do I do this?

At the very least, buy your name domain name now (we recommend using www.name.com – and we have no affiliation with them, they just don’t suck like some other registrars we won’t name). If you’re name is Joe Shmoe, buy www.joeshmoe.com. If that domain name is taken, add your middle initial and buy www.joezshmoe.com. If you don’t have a middle name, pretend you do and choose a middle initial to use from this point forwards in all your professional correspondence so that people will Google your name that way and actually find you. If you think it’s weird to add a fake middle initial, ask Michael J. Fox, if he regrets it. (To see why he didn’t just use “A,” the initial of his real middle name, read about his Early Life in Wikipedia. Hint – it may have to do with the fact that he’s Canadian, eh?)

If you’re not up to it, you don’t have to actually do anything with your shiny new domain name right now. So why are you buying your domain name now if you’re not going to use it? Because it can get snatched up between now and when you do want to use it by someone else, which would suck for you.

If you are up to it, I strongly recommend starting a blog that appears under your name-domain name.

But I don’t have thousands to spend on that kind of thing right now!

That’s alright, I say. Here are instructions on starting a personalized blog on a shoestring. The reason this method is good is because if your blog becomes a real success and needs to grow, you can relatively easily move over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog, like all the pros.

Starting a Personalized Blog on a Shoestring:

1. Sign up for a blog on WordPress.com. Try to choose a  name that represents you, but remember that you will be putting your new name-domain on your blog in a few steps.
2. Choose a WordPress theme that best suits your needs. You can find them under Appearance > Themes in the sidebar of your new blog’s admin section. I recommend choosing a pretty plain theme with a header area that allows you to upload your own personalized image. My sister Deena has done a good job with that on her blog, which runs on WordPress.com and you can see here: http://deenascreations.com.
3. You should go through all the other settings and choose what best suits you. To do this, go to Settings, and go through the sub-pages and modify as you see fit.
4. Map your domain name onto your new blog. First, you need to change your DNS settings for your domain name. DNS tells your domain where it should be point to, i.e. where the site that will be using this domain is sitting. First, log into your account on your domain registrar. Try to find where the DNS info is managed. It may be under Manage Domains or Manage DNS, depending on your registrar. When you do find where you manage the DNS, remove any existing nameservers and add the following:
   • NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
   • NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
   • NS3.WORDPRESS.COM
5. Now, go back to your site and click on Upgrades, and then click on the Domains tab.
   
6. Then, enter your domain name in the Add a Domain field:
   
7. At that point it should ask you to buy 10 credits in order to use your own custom domain on WordPress.com. This costs $10 per year.
8. Once it’s set up, create an About and Contact page (crucial), and start blogging your head off.

Here are some examples of people who have really succeeded in creating a brand around themselves:

Chris Brogan

Seth Godin – yes, I know his domain name isn’t www.sethgodin.com, but he’s Seth Godin for goodness sake! He can get away with it. When you reach his stature, you can too.

Suze Orman

Gary Vaynerchuk

Here are some resources on creating a personal brand:

By Dan Schawbel – who has succeeded in branding himself as a personal branding expert

Gain a Competitive Edge by Establishing a Personal Brand

10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired

By Brian Solis

Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand

Oh, and more Gary Vaynerchuk just cuz he’s so awesome, inspiring and in your face (and did I mention he’s an MOT? What naches.)

2. Don’t forget about social media

Since blogs run on RSS feeds, it means you can promote your blog content elsewhere. This is good because it increases the likelihood that people will come across your content, which is the most important thing here. You can set up your facebook and twitter profiles to automatically pull in your blog content, and post it for all your network friends to see.

In order to do any of this automatic republishing, you need to know where your feed is. On WordPress.com, it’s at http://myblog.wordpress.com/feed, where myblog is your WordPress.com blog name, or at http://myblog.com/feed, if you’ve mapped your own domain on to your WordPress.com blog.

To learn how to automatically post your blog posts on facebook, read Publish your Blog’s Feed to Facebook.

To automatically post to twitter, first create a user account on twitter. Then, go to EasyTweets, sign up, and add your twitter account to your profile. Then, click on the RSS icon at the right-hand side of your dashboard:

Enter the feed URL (see above for info on how to find it), entry frequency that EasyTweets will check for new posts (every hour is fine), any text to add before each tweet (I don’t recommend adding any text because then it looks automated), and whether you want to post the current new item in your feed, or only start updating from new items. Press Add RSS Feed, and you’re done.

One thing that came up during our session, and often comes up, is people’s confusion as to what usefulness twitter provides. Here are some links that may help you better understand why all these people get to excited about twitter:

7 Habits of Highly Effective Twitterers: Kris Colvin

How to Attract and Influence People on Twitter — The Ultimate Twitter Resource – this is like a how-to book for twitter

Twitter Enlightenment for Business Owners

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

The Big Juicy Twitter Guide

3. Get people to stay in touch with you via RSS feeds and email subscriptions

If someone comes to your site, you want to get them to subscribe in some way to stay in touch before they leave. If you do, you can start to create a long-term connection where they consistently receive content you create, and trust grows between you. If you don’t, chances are they’ll leave, forget that you exist, and never come back.

So, make sure to prominently display the options for subscribing. Here’s a screenshot from Natan Sharansky’s new site for an example on how to do this – note how the subscription info appears very close to the top of every page:

4. Focus – so that people know what they’re getting

People subscribe to certain content because they are interested in the general topic being covered. Imagine if you were an avid car fan, and you bought Cars magazine only to find a spread about the latest hairstyles (or whatever they write about in fashion magazines). And imagine if you were an avid fashion fan and you opened the latest edition of Elle only to find a spread about axel grease (or whatever they write about in car magazines). You’d be pretty disappointed because you are paying to read those magazines because of their focus.

Same with your blog: people subscribe to it because you are writing about something they are interested in, whether it be politics, celebrities, iPhones, or cats. So stick to that 99% of the time, and your readers will stick with you.

5. Optimize for search engines

Yes, even you can optimize your blog for search engines. SEO may be perceived as a magical talent only bestowed upon special fairy beings, but there are some basic things you can do to help your blog rank better in the search engines. Here is a quick rundown:

1. Make a quick list of keywords you think people are using to find people like you. You can use all sorts of fancy keyword tools if you want, but you can also just use your brain since you know your industry. Take this list, and write it down on a piece of paper. Make a note of which terms are the most targeted, and which are less focused. You have more of a chance of ranking high for “Jerusalem car fans” than for “car fans.” You see what I mean? So while you’d probably like to rank high for car fans, it’s best to aim for Jerusalem car fans. But even so, don’t lose sight of the big vision of ranking for “car fans” because you may get there.
2. Once you’ve got your keywords, make sure to use them whenever possible in your blog titles, and in your first paragraph. However, when in doubt, make sure you are ultimately writing for humans. What I mean is, don’t stuff your title and paragraph with keywords that don’t make sense, because while you may make Google happy, you won’t make people happy, and that’s not good.
3. Tag your posts with tags related to your keywords, but also to other stuff you mention so that you may rank for those words as well.
4. Pay attention to meta keywords and particularly to your meta description, because that’s what appears under the title of your post in the Google search results.
5. Link internally. When you mention an event, term or phrase that you’ve mentioned before, link to that other post, or category if it exists on your blog.

6. Promote offsite

Aside from trying to get traffic via the web, make sure to promote your blog in other places as well, like in your email signature and on your business cards. And tell people about it whenever relevant, without being annoying.

7. Track your success

Like anything in life, if you are trying to achieve something in life, you need to track if you are getting there. As the saying goes “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” So track your site stats and feed stats. Don’t worry about seeing huge leaps in growth, but you do want to make sure there is a steady incline at the very least. You don’t want to plateau or start to shrink – that’s bad news, and if you see that you need to work to reverse it, generally by creating more content, and commenting on more blogs.

8. Bonus – accessing the awesomeness that is called humanity

“But you said 7 tips,” you say.

That’s right, I say, but I added a bonus. The bonus is about all the people you get to connect with via your blog and online activity, particularly when those people are…extraordinary (in every sense of the word).

Recently I got the following comment on this blog, and it makes it all worth it. Note the author’s name:

Author : moshe rabeynu
Comment:
I am a former male exotic dancer and am interested in establishing a “Chippendales” type establishment in Israel. What type of assistance and tax benefits does the Israeli government provide to new businesses of olim chadashim? Are there many such entertainment facilities in Israel?  I would like some idea as to how stiff the competition would be.  Do Israeli women, as a rule, like to look at males dancing in skimpy G-strings?  Are they generous tippers?  Would they put a shekel to the shmeckel?  If I hire other olim chadashim as dancers, would they have to pay any taxes on their tips?   Can I employ dancers who have not had a briss ?  I might want to hire one or two to add variety to the show lineup. Is a liquor license hard to obtain in Israel.  Do I have to bribe any officials to receive one?  To whom is it customary to pay proteksia money to start a business and keep it going and approximately how much to they ask for?  Thank you for your help.

If there were commenting Olympics, this one would bag a super-gold.

That’s all!

That’s it – 7 tips + 1 on how to market yourself using blogs and social media. Thanks to those who came to my session – it was great meeting you!

And now, a bit about the Tel Aviv Writer’s Cafe:

It was started 3 years ago by Stephanie Freid, a freelance writer and journalist, as a way of grouping Tel Aviv area writers together for networking and topical discussions on everything from how and where to look for jobs to tips on approaching editors to discussing what makes good journalism to deciding on filing taxes in Israel and abroad. Attendees come from a variety of writing backgrounds including technical, journalism, marketing, book writing & blogging.
Writer Forum guests have included NBC New bureau chief/author Martin Fletcher who spoke about his experiences covering world conflict and his acclaimed first book “Breaking News”, successful book author Matt Beynon Rees on taking a journalism career to the realm of fiction novel writing, NY Times writer Dina Kraft on covering conflict in Israel and why it seems to hit a nerve among so many, Pajamas Media editor Alison Kaplan Sommer on how to slot into the new era of blog writing, Israel Project Executive Director Marcus Sheff on keeping the foreign media informed and celeb blogger Lisa Goldman on how her blog propelled her into the limelight.

For more info, please contact Stephanie at [stefanella.stef at gmail.com].

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We are really excited to announce that after months of work, Natan Sharansky has a shiny new website, blog and social media presence. The goal of these efforts is to help spread Sharansky’s ideas regarding human rights, dissidents, democracy and Zionism, as well as to make access to his own fascinating history more accessible.

The site also offers a photo gallery, video gallery, audio gallery, timeline, and information about his books. You can also subscribe to a monthly newsletter with updates regarding Sharansky’s writings, activities, and news appearances.

Here are the details:

Website: http://NatanSharansky.org
Blog: http://NatanSharansky.org/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/NatanSharansky
Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/natansharansky/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Natan-Sharansky/38110548299
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/natansharanskydotorg
Delicious: http://delicious.com/natansharansky/

I hope you check it out and take advantage of this new resource!

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Almost a year ago, I met with representatives from one of Israel’s leading television and media networks, who had the backing of a prominent philanthropist to implement a social media strategy for Israel’s 60th birthday. Someone had recommended that they meet me, and I prepared a comprehensive presentation about what I called “Israel 2.0,” where we would create and implement a strategy that would celebrating Israel’s accomplishments with a diverse, wide-reaching web presence.

Notice I call it a “web presence”; that is because the web is no longer about just creating a website. It is about using the web and all its potential to promote your business, organization, or ideas with the greatest results possible. It is no longer sufficient to depend on your website alone, particularly since

“a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site – through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices” (from ReadWriteWeb)

Anyway, there was one guy in the room listening to my presentation who actually knew some of the terms I was using, like RSS feeds and the like, and I guess this made him feel like a social media expert. So when I finished my presentation, he said “Why do I need all that? I’ll just create a facebook group.”

I made a facebook group; so why am I all alone here?

What? Is he kidding me? I tried to explain until I was blue in the face that creating a facebook group is not a social media strategy, but it’s really difficult to explain concepts to people who have no knowledge of the field you are talking about, so they all believed the facebook-group guy, and that was that.

Needless to say, no all-encompassing web presence was created in honor of Israel’s birthday, and I don’t know what happened to that philanthropist’s offer.

A real social media strategy starts with goals, not tools

To create a serious web strategy, you should not start with the tools. “I’m going to create a blog,” or “I’ll join twitter” is not a strategy, since these may not be the right tools to use to achieve your goals.

I would like to build a house. These look like good tools to use.

Here’s an outline of the general steps needed to create a successful web presence:

1. Identify your goals: what do we want to achieve? Who are we trying to target?
   Part of this stage is benchmarking: analyzing current statistics; identifying what you hope will be different as a result of your social media efforts; defining parameters that you want to change most and least.
2. Next, work out the strategy: how are we going to achieve these goals? Where do we need to be to reach our target audience, i.e. based on their demographics, where are they hanging out on the web? What type of content will they like? What manpower considerations do we need to be aware of (i.e. the need to hire a Community Manager, etc.)? Do we have legal considerations?
3. Once all of that has been prepared, then and only then can you choose tools and technologies. A facebook group may not be the best strategy for your goals, or it may be appropriate, but maybe it won’t work on its own. Tools and technologies are just the medium, not the message (sorry McLuhan). For example, in the world of print marketing, you know a rollup is exactly what you need to get your message across at the upcoming trade show, but you’d look mighty strange schlepping it to pitch a new client at their office.
4. Implementation. Now you get to have fun with your shiny tools, because they’re the right ones.

Forrester has laid out a similar approach to creating an effective social media strategy by putting technology last, which they coined as POST: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. (Here’s a link to the original blog post, but it looks like Forrester is trying to wipe out any memory of Charlene Li since she left, so you can only access the cached version on Google.)

Like most things in life and business, you need to know what you want to achieve before you decide how you are going to achieve them. And that is why a facebook group is most definitely not a strategy.

Lonely girl image from willgame on flickr

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Bill Gates

Before the changes were made, having a LinkedIn profile was like being at a party where everyone was deaf and mute. You could wave at people and/or shake hands (i.e. create and view connections), but aside from moderate signing (“I recommend you,” “Will you be my friend?”), nothing much happened. You couldn’t see your friends’ activity, the groups feature was weak-to-non-existent, and communication was sparse. The open bar (free membership) could only keep people interested for so long.

Now, LinkedIn has added a lot of the features that people look for in social networking sites, thanks to the innovations made by facebook in this area. As a result, LinkedIn is now a full-fledged social networking site, with all the goodies that can make it fun…I mean a good tool for developing productive business relationships.

Here’s an overview of the new features and design:

A more usable interface

With two simple menu bars, one horizontal and one vertical, the LinkedIn user can now reach all the information and participate in all the social activities with ease. You can find people, jobs, ask and answer questions, and find and recommend service providers on the top menu bar. On the sidebar, you can manage your profile, contacts, Inbox – which has many more features (see below), and groups.

Network Statistics

This page is under Contacts on the vertical sidebar, and gives you an overview of your network. You can see your first degree, second degree and third degree connections, where your network is located, which networks you have access to, and more. This information is cute, but not really useful. For example, my Network Statistics page told me that my connections are in 23 industries, but my network gives me access to 147 additional industries, such as…Ranching. If I ever buy a farm, I’ll know where to turn.

Better organized Inbox

Your Inbox is now organized according to sub-topics. The most interesting and useful ones in my opinion are Introductions, Invitations, Profiles, Q&A and Recommendations. Introductions is a way for people to get introduced to people they’re not connected to on LinkedIn via that person’s direct connections. Invitations is where requests to connect appear. Profiles enables people to send other people profiles of people they think they’d be interested in. Q&A allows you to organize and track your questions and answers, and Recommendations is a place to see who has recommended you, and easily recommend them in return.

Network Updates let you see what your network is up to

The new Network Updates that appear on your home page allow you to see what your network has been doing lately, like who has added new contacts, joined new groups, changed their profile picture, etc. This is very similar to the facebook news feed that we all love.

Status

You can now have a status in LinkedIn! This is like the facebook status, and is a way for all your connections to see what you’re up to. This can be a very powerful way to passively announce new business developments, requests for meetings, and other notifications. I just hope there’s some way to eventually import my twitter updates automatically like I do for facebook so that I can update everything at the same time. Also, it’s pretty annoying now that every status automatically starts with the user’s first name, not even “Miriam is,” so the status doesn’t make sense unless you make sure your status starts with a verb like “is” or “thinks.”

LinkedIn emerges as the true business networking site

Until now, I and many other people were using facebook for business. Thanks to facebook’s news feed, events, status, posts, and more facebook is a great way to communicate and connect with business associates. The drawback to using facebook for business is that it’s not intended for business. On facebook, my “friends” include family (even my Dad is on facebook), old school friends, and other friends, along with business connections. That means that it’s hard to strike the balance between a profile that is both professional and personal. For example, I’ve hesitated to post photos and news about my kids and family on facebook because I don’t want my non-personal “friends” to see that kind of stuff.

In short, LinkedIn has just moved up a notch in the social networking world. Based on what I find useful in facebook for business, I’d like to see LinkedIn eventually add the following features:

• Importing blog posts and other feeds - my blogs are an important parts of my business communications, and I’m sure that’s the case with many other people. I would want my connections to be able to see my new posts as they are published, as well as my activity on other social media sites. Plaxo Pulse got this right with their ability to add unlimited feeds of your activity around the web. With our web identities becoming increasingly fragmented as we participate in myriads of sites, the ability to unify it all in one place for business could be very useful.
• Events - The option to add business events, and RSVP so that others can see if you’re attending could help people publicize events to a broad audience, and connect to people they’re interested in meeting. If done properly, LinkedIn could potentially take over all business events from Meetup.com.
• Photos and videos - I love seeing pictures from events, whether I’ve attended them or not. Videos from events, as well as business related videos could provide useful content to my network.
• Documents - Here’s where LinkedIn could stand out in the business networking world: documents are an integral part of running a business. If there was a document sharing area of LinkedIn, people could share and recommend templates for contracts, MOUs, NDA, letters, emails, invoices, work orders, and more. In addition, authors could share their e-books or articles on business topics.

LinkedIn has come a long way, but it has a lot of potential beyond adapting facebook’s features in a business setting. facebook succeeded by thinking outside of the box, and I’m sure there are ways that LinkedIn could become a leading business networking site in ways beyond copying facebook.

Oh wait, is that a question for me from Bill Gates? Bill, I’m flattered, really.

So what’re you waiting for? Connect with me on LinkedIn!

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There are so many social media sites and tools out there, that it’s hard to know which to pay attention to, and which to ignore. Also, how do we use them effectively and still retain time to get some real work done?

A recent discussion took place on the CIWI (Connecting Independent Writers in Israel) mailing list about how to start a blog, and whether one should start one at all. One writer was of the opinion that blogs are passe, and that users should concentrate on microblogging mediums, like Tumblr and Twitter.

In my opinion, the microblogging tools are a nice addition to an overall social media strategy, but are weak on their own. Many of the most popular people on Twitter, for example, are those who have built up a following for themselves via their blogs. They use Twitter to drive people to new posts on their blogs, and to create a supplementary stream of information. Much of the information on Twitter is backed up by longer posts or articles on other sites.

Blog, Twitter, both, none? 

So what is the best way to create an effective web presence? Do we blog, do we tweet, or do we do both?

Adopting a social media strategy can be a daunting task, particularly due to the wide range of tools and services available. Users need a strategy that is effective, yet also gives them time to have a life outside of the web.

Here’s how I have structured my social media activity. This is not necessarily the only or right way to go, but it can give you an idea as to how to get started:

1. Blogs: I use this blog to write about different issues related to marketing and business. In order to keep up with the world of WordPress, which is the platform we use to build all our sites and blogs, I also write a blog called WordPressGarage, which we use as a kind of online manual for knowledge management. WordPress’ categorization features such as categories, tags and search, are excellent for managing information. WordPressGarage has become more than just a blog: I use WordPress’ Blogroll to keep track of my links on the Links We Love page, and I’ve set up a microblogging section in the sidebar called Shorties, which is where I post really short bits of info that don’t justify a real blog post. I could have accomplished this with del.icio.us and Tumblr, but I really prefer to keep everything in one place if I can.
2. Twitter: I don’t really like Twitter, but I use it because I know it is effective. It also helps me keep up with the social media arena, and I have to admit I’ve found some pretty interesting content thanks to the twitterers that I follow. I post here short things that aren’t appropriate for my blogs, or I post links to new posts on my blogs. (You can find me here on Twitter: http://twitter.com/miriamschwab.)
3. LinkedIn: LinkedIn was really boring for a while, but it seems to be picking up, although it’s still not the type of site I’d visit on a regular basis (unlike the site mentioned in step 4). The advantage of LinkedIn is that it gives me a place to create a professional profile that people can easily find on the web. Other than that, not much happens there (unless I’m missing something). It’s like a really boring party where we all shake hands, and then sit around looking at each other. And here I am on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/miriamschwab
4. Facebook: facebook acts as a kind of aggregator for all the content that I publish all over the web. I mashed together my blog RSS feeds into one feed, and that feed is pulled into my facebook profile’s notes section. My twitters (tweets) appear in my facebook status. Any extra stuff that I want to publish or share that aren’t directly connected to marketing or WordPress are published there too, like videos, links and events.

Here are the social media sites that I would like to be more active in should the days suddenly become 40 hours long: flickr, YouTube, de.licio.us, digg, and StumbleUpon.

The above still uses up a lot of my time, but it ensures that my “online presence” stays fresh and current, and my offline presence retains some semblance of a life.

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Last night I went to my first iDrink event. For those of you who are not familiar with iDrink, it’s a party/event for Israelis in the Internet and web industries. The format usually includes presentations by startups and sponsors of the event, some free drinks, and a lot of socializing and networking. This was their seventh event, and there were tons of people there. At first, we couldn’t even get into the bar, and people were literally spilling out the door. But that was ok, cuz even the door was a social place to be. We got inside in time to hear/see the end of a presentation by a startup called KitchenBug. It was so noisy that I couldn’t hear so well, but what I saw and heard made me a little worried: a pretty presentation with really cool shiny graphics, and a concept that I think has little value (sorry KitchenBug and investors). This screams “bubble” – pretty face, no content, investors investing. Yikes.

Aside from that, I actually had fun. Despite the fact that I was the only religious woman who looked like she stepped out of Biblical times, I met some interesting people and got an in-depth explanation of a new blogging-widget being developed by one of the startups (sorry, but that one also has signs of a bubble).

So what do you think it’s like to get into a room with a bunch of web fanatics? Well, upon meeting you they immediately take out their phone and “friend” you on facebook. I’m serious. Also, I had more than one person come up to me and say hi because they recognized me from facebook. I’m surprised no one was live-blogging.

The line between real and virtual life has become very thin.

Anyways, it was an experience. Kol hakavod to the organizers – it’s really great that they provide a setting for everyone in the industry to get together in a casual atmosphere. In a bar, it’s so easy to be friends, especially after a few drinks.

Maybe real life isn’t that different from facebook after all:

• Real life – drink, be friends
• facebook – “friend me,” we’re friends

And in that spirit, Demetri Maritin on the Daily Show gives his point of view on social networking:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpcvR1tIBfQ[/youtube]

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