After receiving a multitude of complaints regarding Facebook’s lack of privacy, they have instituted new privacy settings. Those settings are now available. But before accepting them as they are, you should review each one to make sure they fit you and the way you use Facebook.

Facebook Privacy Setting

So the first step is to go to privacy settings under your account tab in your Facebook account. The first thing to review is the basic directory information. To begin, click on view setting. The things you’ll find here are the basic information that you want to make public.  For example, whether you want to allow people to search for you on Facebook, send you friend requests and messages, or see your friend list. By default, these are set for everyone to see and probably you won’t need to change these. If someone that you want to connect with searches for you on Facebook, this will allow them to find you and request you become friends. The next sections under the basic directory information are your work and education, your current city and hometown, and your interests and other pages. Once again, this is your choice, with your interests and other pages being the most questionable.

With the integration of Facebook and the search engines, your interests and the pages that you like can be used to design targeted advertising for you. While this isn’t new, it will become more prominent in years to come. Other websites you visit and searches you perform, may accumulate information about you and your patterns and habits so that marketers can laser target your interests. For example, let’s say you went on a website like BestBuy.com to shop for a 52 inch HD TV. A few days later, while reading an article on CNN.com, an ad appears for a 52 inch HD TV on sale in your area. Or maybe a text message gets sent to your phone with that sale. Instead of shopping for products or services, products and services will find you in the future.

Okay, so we covered the basic directory information. The next section on your privacy settings is “Sharing on Facebook.” You have the choice of allowing everyone, friends only, friends of friends, or customizing, who can see your information. There is also a recommended setting. What the recommended setting does is allow everyone to see your status, photos and posts, your bio, and your friends and relationships. It allows friends of friends to see your birthday, religious and political views, and photos and videos your tag in. And it allows friends only to post to your wall, to see your e-mail address, your phone number, and any other address or IM name.

In my case, the settings are not ones that fit my needs. Since my Facebook profile contains my business information, I want my contact information available to everyone. So I chose the custom option which allows me to pick and choose who sees my information. At the bottom of the list, you will see a pencil with the words “Customize Settings” beside it.  That will bring up the menu list of the things you share, as well as what others can share plus your contact information. For me, I want my website, my phone number and my e-mail address visible to everyone.

If you have younger children, you should probably choose to make family only visible to friends. If you are a parent of teenage kids, you probably want to monitor their Facebook page, but not have others see who your kids are.

Another setting on this same page is your album privacy. Click the “edit album privacy” link to open all your photo albums. Once again, if you have small children, you probably don’t want pictures of the family vacation visible for everyone to see. But you don’t care if your friends see them. After all, that’s why you shared them. So change this setting for each album as you need.

The next section is applications, games and websites. Applications such as Farmville, Mafia wars, and the various quizzes, polls and other activities, all are created by third-party developers. They are not associated with Facebook. But, you agree, when you set up the application, to their terms and conditions, which means they have access to all of your profile information. But what is even more intrusive is the fact that these applications have access to your friend’s profiles as well. So even though I don’t take any of the polls, play Farmville, or send hugs or hearts, my profile information is available from my friends sites that do.

With the new privacy settings, you have the option to control what information is available to applications and websites when your friends use them. I chose to make none of my information available to third-party applications. You also have the ability to easily remove applications and websites. I recommend removing any application that you no longer use.

Under the same applications section, you have the option for instant personalization. On Facebook partner sites like Pandora and Yelp (with more being added all the time), your profile information can be pulled in to help design your browsing experience on that site. For example, you login to Pandora, and when it retrieves your Facebook likes and sees you are a fan of 60s rock, it can customize the music it serves up to you. By disabling the instant personalization you eliminate that.

Public search is another choice under applications and websites. This determines whether your Facebook profile is available for search engines like Google to read. Once again, in my case, I don’t have a problem with my profile being searchable. My company information is already all over the web. Also, from the search engine optimization standpoint, my profile provides another inbound link to my website, which improves search engine positioning. However, you may choose to be less visible online, and if so, disable the public search feature.

Do you have a friend that continually sends you invites for applications? While you don’t want to block the user, you now have the choice to block an invites that come from that friend. To do so, choose the  Block Lists section at the very bottom. Here you have the option to block users by name or e-mail or to block invites from a friend.

One privacy issue that was already available is the publication of your birth date.  While it’s okay to show your birthday (everyone likes to get the birthday wishes), you should display only the month and date, not the year.  You can change this in your profile page and click on edit profile (right under your picture.)  Next to your birthday, there is a dropdown box that gives you the choice of showing your full birthday, the month & day only or not showing it at all.

All in all, the new Facebook privacy settings should provide much greater control over your online privacy. But remember, this is only one site. There are hundreds of sites that capture your information, either through cookies, through giveaways or when you register to use the site. So unless you plan to be a web recluse, your information is probably are the out there in dozens of databases all over the web.

I hope this gave you a little insight into how you customize your Facebook privacy and the reasoning behind the vigilance needed to protect yourself online.

Tags: facebook, online security, privacy, security, social media

What's Your Social Media Game Plan

Every sporting team has a game plan, a series of scripted actions that hopefully will lead to the outcome they desire, a win.  For a football team, it’s inside handoff, a safety blitz or a post pattern.  In basketball, it may be a pick and roll or a triangle and two defense. Baseball players practice, the suicide squeeze while pitchers and catchers go over the pitch sequence for each batter.

The goal of having a game plan is to have a successful outcome, winning the game. And of course it doesn’t always happen, because the opponents have their own game plan. So it comes down to who can execute their game plan the best.

Isn’t the same true for your business? You have a desired outcome, either making more money, selling more products or providing a better service. So shouldn’t you have a game plan?

But the question is where to start? The first step in the process should be defining what outcome you want. Making a ton of money isn’t an outcome, it’s a fairytale. So the first step should be defining the goals for your business. Beginning by setting SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. There are many resources that discuss SMART goals and how to set them, so I won’t cover that here, other than to say, it is critical to know where you’re going and be able to measure your progress along the way.

So now that you have your goals set and know what outcome you want, its time to design the plays to make those happen. The first step is defining who is your target market. The second step then, becomes how do you reach your target market.

That’s where social media comes into play. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin have very broad demographics. Facebook currently has over 400 million people with the fastest growing segment being over 35 and female. In fact, Facebook is now the number two most trafficked site on the web. In March of 2010 during a one-week time period, Facebook actually got more traffic than Google.

If your business targets professionals with 100,000+ income, LinkedIn might be your best choice. While not as social a community, the LinkedIn users are categorized by their business and professions. So if you want to target marketing officers in the healthcare industry, for example, you can do that.

The incredible power social media offers to create a buzz in the marketplace is really at the heart of its strength and popularity. You can spend thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, in advertising, and only hope your message reaches your targeted customers. But with social media, you can target those customers, where they’re spending a lot of time with very little cost.

I’ve always said, if I could sell word-of-mouth advertising, I would be sitting on a beach somewhere with a cell phone saying “send me a check for $100,000, and I will deliver the customers to you”. But now, that’s not far from the truth (at least the part about word-of-mouth advertising.) Social media has elevated referral marketing or word of mouth advertising to a viral state. Now, we don’t have to be on the phone or at a party talking to a friend to recommend a business. We do that on our social media sites. And while we only talk to a handful of people on the phone or, at that party, our entire circle of friends will see a recommendation posted on our wall.

So unless your business game plan includes a social media plan, you’re more like the sandlot sports team drawing plays in the dirt. You might occasionally get lucky and throw a touchdown. But if you come up against a team (business) with a well practiced game plan, success will not likely be in your future.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com have over 10 years experience in website design, search engine optimization and social media marketing. With over 30 years in business and consulting, we understand your business needs and partner with you to grow your business.

Tags: facebook, linkedin, social media, twitter, youtube

One of the biggest challenge is I face when creating a website is the copy, what the website says. It’s almost funny but also tragic to see that most businesses don’t know how to explain what they do.

I think the issue is that we’re taught to be modest, not to brag or boast. But that is precisely what we need to do when we talk about our website. If you don’t tell the browser why you are special, where your strengths lie, how do you expect them to know? And when they go to your competitor, and they do, guess who’s getting the business? Not you!

But the secret lies a little deeper than just telling people what you do. The key is to tell the browser, your potential customer or client, why what you do best is exactly what they want. Where so many businesses fail in their copy is in the “We” syndrome. We offer the best widget. Our service is second to none. Our attention to detail,  we treat customers like family. Blah blah blah.

Guess what? Your customer doesn’t care! Plus, your competitor says the same thing. All your customer wants to know is what’s in it for them. How does your widget make their life easier? What is your extraordinary service going to do for them?

Use action words. Paint your customer a picture of your business your product or your service. If they can see their self in the words you say, your chances of success just improved greatly.

Let me give you an example. I recently redesigned the site for visualimagesproduction.com.  My goal here is was not only increasing search engine ranking but also generating a greater call to action and ultimately more sales. Below is an excerpt from the homepage.

“When you choose Visual Images Productions, you can be assured your video will take you back to the momentous occasion for years to come. Relive the emotions. Every time you watch your Visual Images Production video, you are magically transported back to celebrate all over again. “

The image here is reliving the special occasion over and over again, because isn’t that what a video is for.

Whether your writing a description for your website, a direct mail piece, a newsletter or any other communication with customers, make sure you speak to them.

When you’re in a conversation with someone, do you find them more interesting if they talk about themselves incessantly? Or do you find them more interesting because they listen with interest and questioning about you? I’m reminded of the story of a man on a first date with a young lady and after several minutes of talking about himself he stopped and said to his date, “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What you think about me?”

The bottom line is this. Tell people how your business can make their life easier, how your product can save them time, money, stress or whatever it might be. When you do you set yourself apart from the masses, because it’s not about you.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com have over 10 years experience in website design, search engine optimization and social media marketing. With over 30 years in business and consulting, we understand your business needs and partner with you to grow your business.

For the last 5 or more years, I couldn’t pick up a newsletter or ezine without finding an article about search engine optimization.  That is, until now.

Ten years ago, we focused on adding meta tags to our websites to get them ranked.   Five years ago, it was about linking strategies.  Then content became king.  And with each change, SEO specialists like myself adapted.  So how to you drive traffic to your site today?

The evolution of search today has taken on a real time emphasis.  Looking for the news? Today the news finds you.   Of course, you want the latest information on whatever you are searching for.  Nothing is more frustrating than going to a website and finding information from 2006.  Even if it’s still pertinent, chances are you will go on to a more current site.

Real search or live search focuses on delivering the most recent information.  And that information is frequently not from a website.  The most recent information is more likely a blog post or even a Twitter tweet.  Yes, I said a Twitter tweet.  Here’s a good example:

A Google search for “Iceland Volcano” resulted in a section for Latest News – that contains a live feed changing every few seconds.  The listing below shows results from just minutes before.

Twitter Results in Google

Directly below the Latest News is a section for Video results that displays YouTube videos of the Iceland Volcano.  What every happened to the Google we all knew that took 90 days to get your site found?

Video Results - YouTube

So should you abandon your website for a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel?  Not yet.  I look at the social media like a big funnel.  Twitter, Facebook and YouTube should be funneling people to your blog and your blog should be funneling people to your website, where browsers can find out details about you and your business and hopefully take action (but that’s another topic).

Another reason you can’t abandon search engine optimization (SEO) and your website is the permanency of social media.  You might be ranking well with your current article, post, tweet or video, but as more recent media are found, yours will either drop in ranking or disappear all together.  So you website is the anchor. A well designed, search engine optimized website should remain fairly stable (even in competitive keywords.)  For example, search for “Tucson Interior Design” in Google.  Of the top 4 results, 3 of the sites are ones that were optimized by 800biz.com several years ago.  With little or no changes, these sites have maintained their top ranking consistently.

So for now, SEO is still alive and kicking.  But today, you there are more pieces of the online marketing puzzle to put together.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Tags: 800biz, blog, live search, real time search, search engine optimization, SEO, twitter, video, website design, youtube

Now wait a minute – Wordpress is free, isn’t it.  Yes, Wordpress is an open source program that’s free (for the most part.)   But there are different versions of Wordpress, with very different limitations.

Let’s look at Wordpress.com first.  Wordpress.com allows you to create your blog and have it hosted on the Wordpress site.  You can create an account and have your first blog in the blogosphere in a matter of minutes.  No programming knowledge is needed and you blog can be visible to the search engines, Technorati and the Wordpress blog directory.  You have a choice of templates to change the appearance of your blog, it’s layout and even include different widgets.

What’s a Widget?  A widget is an add on feature that will enhance the usability or appearance of your page.  Some common widgets are calendars, images in the side bar, videos and even social media badges.  Available widgets are based on the theme you choose.  Not all themes have the same widgets available.

There are several limitations to a Wordpress.com site.  One limitation, your blog address is www.yourname.wordpress.com.  You can have your own domain name attached for an additional charge

The limited number of themes available is another limitation of a Wordpress hosted site.  You have less than 100 themes to choose from and editing the theme requires knowledge of CSS Stylesheets and purchasing the custom upgrade.

Another limitation is access to plugins.  Plugins are like widgets since they add to the functionality of your blog.  How a plugin differs is a plugin can be added to any theme.  Wordpress.com sites do not allow plugins

Finally, your content is not in your control.  Your account is controlled by Wordpress.  You are subject to the terms and conditions of Wordpress and if, for any reason, they choose to remove your account, all your content will be lost.

Now let’s look at Wordpress.org.  Wordpress.org is also free but it requires a website  hosting account.  A large percentage of hosting accounts include a Wordpress add on.  If not, a free version of Wordpress can be downloaded from Wordpress.org.  To install, you will need FTP (file transfer protocol) to your hosting server.  FTP is a program used to upload web pages, images and other files to your server so they will be web accessible.

A Wordpress.org site is attached to your own domain name so you have full control of your content and site.  Many domain registrars, like Godaddy, also offer web hosting.  For someone that doesn’t understand the whole web hosting and domain process, many companies, like 800biz.com, offer a inexpensive package that includes domain purchase and configuration, web hosting and Wordpress setup.

Regardless of where you decide to host your site, you can expect to pay a monthly hosting fee, ranging from $9 up.  But remember, you get what you pay for – the lower price sites offer less support, no automatic backups, limited access to your site and more.  So choose your host wisely.

With a hosting Wordpress site, you have hundreds of templates you can choose from, many of which can be modified with your own graphics.  You can also modify the colors and appearance by changing the CSS stylesheet.

With your own site, you also have access to the entire Plugins Library.  There are plugins for just about everything – social media, search engine optimization, videos, polls, site review, keywords and much more.  A word of caution – read the review of any plugin before you install them.  Some plugins have not been thoroughly tested and may cause problems with your site.

My favorite plugins are:

• All In One SEO – This adds search engine optimization to your blog post
• Askimet – This helps cut down on the spam comments
• Share to Any (Add To Any) – This is one of my favorite plugins.  This plugin lets you or your readers share your blog post to hundreds of social media site and social bookmarking site.
• Socialable – This adds the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc to your blog, making it easier for people to share your content to their friends and followers.

As you can gather from this information, my recommendation is to host your blog on your own domain.  Yes it will cost you a little money.  But unless your blog is for personal use only and not business, the small investment a blog and a hosted account requires should be a no brainer.  Because you do get what you pay for.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

You Don't Need A Website UNLESS...

Wait, did I just read that right, you’re asking?  A website designer saying you don’t need a website – something must be wrong.

Well, there are cases where a website is a waste of money.  First of all, if the goal of having a website is just to check off the appropriate box on your business plan, you don’t need one.

You don’t need a website just because your brother in law, the unemployed college drop out says so.

You don’t need a website if you think a website is the new yellow pages and everybody looks there.

The bottom line is, you don’t need a website if you not committed to making it the important marketing vehicle it should be.  So where do you start?

During the last 10 years, I have seen the evolution of websites, from simple 3 page sites with a waving cactus graphic, to multi-media sites with intricate flash graphics, to the mobile web we see on our phones.  Search engine optimization has been the buzz word for the last several years.  And it remains a critical element of your website.

But in today’s internet landscape, SEO is only a piece of the puzzle.  Does your website content call browsers to take action?  How are you building your brand?  Are you the expert in your industry?

In the coming blog posts, I will discuss online marketing and how to create a comprehensive program to get maximum exposure.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Tags: online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, Tucson Search Engine Optimization, website design

The mighty giant has fallen.  Well at least fallen to #2 for this week.

According to Hitwise, Facebook managed received more visits than Google during the week of March 7th through March 13th, making it the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

While this in no way sounds an alarm about the Google search dominance, it does reinforce the idea that social media, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are important elements of an online marketing program.  With Facebook and YouTube as the numbers 2 and 4 overall sites on the web (according to Alexa.com), can you afford to ignore that  kind of traffic.

Another thought-provoking stat – The average visitor to Google spends about 9 minutes a day on the site.  The average visitor to Facebook spends almost 40 minutes a day and the average YouTube browsers spends over 22 minutes a day.  This is like having a billboard on the freeway with traffic whizzing by at 70 miles per hours or having the same billboard on a busy street during rush hour where a driver is creeping along and has time to look around and actually read the billboard.

Google is for hunters on a mission.  Bag the site your searching for and move on.  Social media sites are more like home – prop your feet up and relax.

If you aren’t using social media or are totally confused by it, take heart.  There are painless ways to ease into it without taking the head first plunge into the abyss.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Tags: facebook, google, social media

One of the biggest road blocks facing small businesses when addressing social media is the question of return on investment. With so little time devote to what’s crying out to be done, adding something else or something new like social media can feel like a real burden. Sometimes the only way to rationalize and prioritize something new is to understand the benefits in relation to everything else your doing and take a new view based on that understanding.

So much of what’s written on social media amounts to lists of things you should do, get on twitter, blog, create a Facebook fan page, and not enough on why you might consider doing it. While all those tactics may indeed be wise, I would like suggest a number of ways to use those actions to do a better or more efficient job doing things you’re already (or should be) doing.

Start to think in terms of doing more with less effort, not simply doing more. If I can let small business owners get a glimpse of social media through this lens, they might just decide to go a little deeper. Here are five ways to look at it.

1) Follow up with prospects

I love using social media tools as a way to follow-up with prospects you might meet out there in the real world. So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Then you offered to show them how to create a custom RSS feed to get tons of information about their industry and their competitors. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do.

2) Stay top of mind with customers

Once someone becomes a customer it’s easy to ignore them, assuming they will call next time they need something or, worse yet, assuming they understand the full depth and breadth of your offerings and will chime in when they have other needs. Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well.

This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Recording video stories from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online.

3) Keep up on your industry

Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. With unparalleled access to information many clients can learn as much or more about the products and solutions offered by a company as those charged with suggesting those products and solutions. You better keep up or you risk becoming irrelevant. Of course I could extend this to keeping up with what your customers, competitors, and key industry journalists are doing as well.

Here again, new monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches (see more about how to do this) or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know. (Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.)

4) Provide a better customer experience

It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying.

Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match.

While some might not lump this tool into social media, I certainly think any tool that allows you to collaborate with and serve your customers qualifies. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking.

5) Network with potential partners

Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. One of the surest ways to attract potential partners is to build relationships through networking. Of course you know that, but you might not be viewing this kind of networking as a social media function.

If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool (and you should) you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly.

If you know how to set up a blog already, offer to create a blog of network partners so each of you can write about your area of expertise and create some great local SEO for the group.

So, you see, you don’t have to bite into the entire social media pie all at once. Find a tool, a technique, a tactic that makes your life easier today and provides more value for partners, prospects and customers and you’ll be on the path to getting some real ROI on your social media investment.

What social media tactics have you discovered that allow you to do more of something you’re already doing?

Article by John Jantsch on 03/16/2010 – Reprinted from Duct Tape Marketing

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in website design, hosting, search engine optimization and social media marketing for small and medium businesses.

Tags: blog, facebook, linkedin, search engine optimization, social media, Social Media Marketing, twitter, youtube

Aren’t you impressed by those work flow charts with all the bubbles so nice and orderly?  Well, prepare to be the “impressor”.  A new tool I just found called Bubbl.us does just that.

My clients often get bogged down in the layout of their website.  Visually being able to see how their site will layout is a huge time saver.  By creating a flow chart of the pages in the site and how they interconnect, Bubbl.us makes the transition from concept to reality much smoother.

Maybe you want to create a work flow chart for a new project your planning.  Start with the main theme and build sub categorie until you have everything in place.  Create an account and you can save your work, then go back and add to it as needed.

Put your ideas on paper

If you are just brainstorming an idea, use Bubbl.us to organize the ideas into a visual presentation.  No more chicken scratching on a napkin or the back of your old electric bill.

Once your done, export your masterplan as a jpg image that you can either embed in an html document or insert in your Word or Powerpoint document.

Feel like a Fortune 500 CEO with your very own organization chart.  In fact, give yourself a raise.  You’ve earned it.

Gary Wagnon and 800biz.com specialize in online marketing, website design, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing for small and medium size businesses.