Sharing Content – It’s the Little Things

Colorful fall scene reds and yellows on a gently curving paved road

When we sent our Happy Thanksgiving email using Mailchimp it was shared on Facebook. After all, why should our email of gratitude and holiday wishes only be limited to our mailing list? The pesky auto-post-from-one-online-service-to-another. It posted with Mailchimp’s logo from the email.

Mailchimp_Facebook_post_image

Perhaps you’ve done something similar. In fact, you may have abandoned some tools in their early releases because they transfered your well engineered blog post to a lousy text-only-link  on Facebook or elsewhere.  It sounds finicky, persnickety or some other thing that ends in “y,” that means workflow on social tools that just works like my toaster.

There is a bunch of little stuff and getting it right takes time.

Social media managers, community managers and many more are fiddling around with getting all of the details right that can contribute to making things work in concert.  And they break. And they change. The mistakes are public and need to be acceptable.

These days, the learning happens live. Right there in front of you. Hopefully it’s something small and annoying like this and not a contribution to the book of digital cautionary tales.

Of course, after seeing the post appear as it did to the right, this help, How can I choose the image thumbnail that shows up on Facebook was easy to find (Mailchimp has great support ). So, we can do it right the next time.

We’re still grateful. Have any of your own tips or mistakes to share?

 

Continue Reading

Letting Go

Let it go

I posted a status update on Facebook yesterday. I suppose it was part of a New Year’s renewal to state that I was,”Letting Go.” You might guess that this evoked some response. I’m grateful to loving friends and family that thought to reach me. I was encouraged by the messages I received.  Some wondered what it was I was letting go of…others were concerned. I considered the context, and, there really wasn’t one. A few friends said, “It’s about time,” or “Of what?” I had a quick education on the obscure post in need of clarification.

Facebook dialogue about letting go

I am letting go of stress, worry and the past. I am also letting go of the need to react or be affected by others, especially if they are not focused on the present or the future. Did you ever get a dirty look from across the room? Did you feel compelled to say “What’s wrong?” or “What did I do?” Well, my choice is to no longer address an issue until there is one. When confronted with an issue or an objective then address it. When brushed by passive-aggressive (or even aggressive) dissatisfaction or anger, don’t call attention to it! Let it go! Maybe it’s about you, maybe it’s not. Don’t invite the confrontation – it’s not likely to be a healthy one.

Especially in today’s fast paced, mobile, social, inter-webbed world it’s even more difficult to not let public opinion and judgement take the place of our true selves. I am letting go of frustration with myself and my life, letting go of anger and bitterness in an effort to focus on what matters most. My commitment is to choose joy and have a wonderful productive year. I hope you do the same and I’d be grateful for your thoughts!also best to assume that someone’s post or comment isn’t about you and isn’t personal.  If it is, let them choose to say so. Otherwise, don’t sweat it.

Thank you to Lori Deschene, Author of Tiny Buddha, Simple Wisdom for Life’s Hard Questions and founder of the Tiny Buddha website.  Her “40 WAYS TO LET GO AND FEEL LESS PAIN,” post in particular encouraged me to make this my mantra for the new year.

Continue Reading

NLRB Signals Retreat On Cases Involving Employee Comments In Social Media

Social media regulations and social media risk managementThis post is an Alert/Advisory published by law firm Franczek Radelet on the Worklaw® Network, an international association of independent labor and employment law firms.

In three recent cases, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has indicated that employee comments about their employment on social media web sites like Facebook may not be protected under federal labor law.  These cases signal a retreat from the NLRB’s trend in late 2010 and early 2011 to issue complaints involving employer discipline of employees who posted complaints about their employment online.

Continue Reading

Lots of Interesting Facts about Facebook

User profile

  • The average user has 130 friends (Facebook press room).
    • The average user age is 26 years old
    • returns 40x monthly and spends 23 minutes per visit
    • Likes 80 community pages, groups or events
    • creates 90 items of content monthly
    • 30B pieces of content are shared daily
    • 770B page views monthly
  • The fastest growing demo group on Facebook is women 55-65 years old. (Facebook press room).
  • Users are mostly women 57% (InformationIsBeautiful.net)
  • Facebook is the prefered social network of Baby Boomers (eMarketer via Six Pixels of Separation)
  • 57% of women members 18-34 years old say they speak more to friends online than offline (Oxygen Media 2010/07)
    • 39% say they’re hooked on Facebook
    • 34% consult Facebook first thing in the morning before going to the washroom, brushing their teeth or hair
    • 21% check their account in the middle of the night
    • 42% believe it’s ok to publish photos of themselves drunk
    • 50% have no problems being friends with complete strangers
    • 9% of women on Facebook have broken up with their boyfriend on Facebook, vs 24% for guys.
  • 23% of 50+ year olds prefer Facebook to MySpace and Twitter (AARP 2010/06).

Usage

  • 35M users update their status daily (Website Monitoring Blog and Facebook press page)
    • 60M status updates daily (Facebook Blog).
    • 10M users become fan of a brand daily (Facebook Blog).
    • 45M user groups exist (Facebook Blog).
    • 3B photos added monthly
    • 5M pieces of content added weekly
    • 3.5M events created monthly
    • 3M of active business pages on Facebook
    • 1.5M businesses are active with at least one page
    • 20M users become fan of a page every day
  • On average, youths access Facebook 16x weekly (Cossette 2009/11)
  • Facebook received more visits in 2010 than did Google according to Experian Hitwise (Mashable (2010/12) 8.93% of all US website visits in 2010, vs Google with 7.19% of visits.
  • The average user consults 661.8 pages of content monthly on Facebook, far ahead of the closest competitor Hi5 with 351.2 and MySpace 261.8 (Pingdom.com)
    • In pages viewed per visit, Friendster is the most important at 30, followed by Hi5 (29.3), Bebo (28.3), Facebook (23.6) and MySpace (21.8).
    • In total monthly visits, Facebook dominates with 28 (almost daily!), followed by Hi5 (12), MySpace (12), Slashdot (11) and Twitter (9)
  • Artists receive an average 92 likes and 17 comments per post on Facebook, vs 57 & 43 for Media and 54 & 9 for Brands (Visibli 2011/04)
    • 50% of Likes are accumulated within 20 minutes

Mobile Usage

Continue Reading

Hootsuite Recommendation for Social Business

There are a number of good utilities available for managing multiple social media and social networking properties like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Hootsuite has become our recommendation and the tool we are implementing for clients. Here are some of our main reasons:

  1. Multiple accounts: Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles and Facebook pages.  It allows posting to one, many or all accounts at the same time.  You can also organize tabs and columns to group accounts by personal preference.
  2. Browser integration: We recommend Mozilla Firefox and Hootsuite has an add-in that is required for our clients to make sharing information and scheduling tweets and post in advance an easy task.team members
  3. Metrics: skip the url shortener, Hootsuite does it for you but adds tracking for each link
  4. Security/User control: Multiple users can log-in to Hootsuite and have privileges to the same account without access to the primary user-name and password.  this is a deal-maker for any entity that wants to spread responsibility for social accounts across more than one person.
Continue Reading

How to Pull the Knife Out of Your Back

Have you ever said something stupid?  I have.  Maybe you spoke out of turn? Let something slip that you shouldn’t have?  I did.  I also know some pretty smart folks that have done the same.    What did you do?  Humbly apologized, I hope.  I also offered to do what I could to make it better, sans excuses.

It doesn’t always work, right?  We all make mistakes but sometimes you’re still at the mercy of the maturity on the other side of the table.  Granted, some open-mouth-insert-foot moments are worse than others.  Forgiveness can take time.

Here are 3.5 tips for how to act when you’re the one that got “dissed”…

Continue Reading

Feed video and posts from other sites to Facebook

A number of our workshop students have requested a quick demo of how to get videos, blog posts, yelp reviews, and photos at Flikr to post to your Facebook profile and newsfeed.

This can be done effortlessly from these sites (and many more including Pandora, Last.fm and your Google Reader) with a few quick settings on your facebook profile (demonstrated in the video).

Note: there are more advanced tools that accomplish this and send your posts to more places than just Facebook. This gets it done to give your Facebook friends access to your activity elsewhere in an easy way.

Continue Reading