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

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

If you had to choose a entry point to get your business in the social media, why not choose one with the highest possible traffic and the least amount of work? YouTube is where you need to start.

Almost everyone has a video camera these days. Even some cell phones have video capability. And if not, you can purchase a video camera for less than $80 (need a good source check out www.shop800biz.com) There is no need for studio production for small businesses. The purpose of the video is to give browsers a feel for what your business is all about. People like dealing with “regular folks”. If your business is relaxed and fun, let your video show that. If your business is more upscale or serious, convey that idea.

Once you have created your Speilberg masterpiece, the easy part begins. Create a YouTube account if you don’t already have one. That will take you a whopping 5 minutes. Then upload your video. Be sure you put a title and description in that tells people what your business is. The description should always start with your web address. It should be list in this format – http://www.yoursite.com . That will make the address a clickable link and take anyone (including the search engines) to your website for more information about you.

The only thing left to do is embed the video in your website. When the video finishes uploading, you will see a link and an embed code. Cut and paste (or send to your webmaster) the code. When people are browsing your site, they can click on the video and watch it within your site.

So Action, Camera, Rolling!!

Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, social media, video, web site, youtube

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve heard about Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The social media phenomenon is the hottest thing on the web right now. Three of the top 5 sites on the web are Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. Everyone wants to be on top of Google, but consider this. The average time a person spends per day on Google or Yahoo is 8-9 minutes. The average time a person spends per day on Facebook or YouTube is over 22 minutes. (Source: Alexa)

If your customers are spending almost 3 times as much time on social media sites, why wouldn’t you want to be where your customers are? Okay, you want to be there so maybe a better question is, why aren’t you there? The truth is most people don’t understand the social media or don’t have the time. Over the next few days, I will address both questions and give you some ideas on how to tackle the social media beast.

If you don’t want to wait, or would like help creating a social media game plan, contact me at www.800biz.com or call 520-861-4821.

Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, social media, web site design