The person who sets up your Fan page can delete, or hijack it!

It’s hard to imagine the impact Facebook Fan pages have had in a little over a year.  In March of 2009 Facebook, ramped up the Fan page to provide more tools and services and make it easier for businesses to create and maintain it.

Now, nearly two million organizations have created Fan pages to communicate with, listen to, engage and gain access to their fans’ networks of friends. These organizations are working hard to use Facebook as a marketing channel.

However there is one little known secret that few are aware of.  Are you ready?  That secret is…

The personal profile that sets up the organization Fan page, owns the Fan page!

That’s right.  So if you are the administrator of a department and you turned to the most Facebook savvy

person in your department or neighbor kid to create it, they own it.  You might be an administrator on the page, but you don’t own it.  They can make you the administrator, but they will always own it!  That presents some significant, security, branding and marketing issues!

Google, ‘Facebook Fan pages deleted’ and you’ll find examples like:

• Both of my company’s Facebook FAN PAGES WERE DELETED without warning or explanation. Does anyone have experience with this kind of problem? How can we get back our pages which have accrued more than 3,000 fans?
• Hi all, I just had my business page reinstated yesterday after an employee who left the company deleted it. Source, Facebook Help section

As your Fan page becomes a more important asset you don’t want to have to go to your boss and let him or her know you need to fire an employee, but you are concerned that employee who created the Facebook Fan page might:

1. Delete the page
2. Take everyone else off as an administrator and high jack the page
3. Ask a fee to get it back!

You’d be lucky if the employee deleted the page because there is a way to get it back.  But imagine the damage someone could do if they high jacked your Fan page! They know the inside story about customers.  They could use the fan page to:

• Tell customers what some employees have said about them (demanding, pain in the ass, idiot!)
• Share problems the company has covered up
• Start promoting competitors products and services

Ouch!  Sounds a bit messy doesn’t it.  But it’s already happening.  See for yourself, Google - Facebook Fan page deleted -and you’ll find your own examples of companies who’s Fan page has been deleted.

There are two ways you can solve this issue:

1. Have the person who created the page, add you or someone in the organization, as an administrator.  (You must be friends with that person first)  Then have the creator of the page delete themselves as an administrator of your page.  You can continue this process to pass it on to the next person.
2. Include in your employee and social media use agreement that any employee that creates a social media site for the company, will pass ownership of the site over to an administrator when requested by company officials

These are relatively painless and easy steps to take to prevent rather embarrassing and or costly situations later.

Here’s what to do if your Fan page is deleted!

But if you find your Fan page deleted, here are a few steps you can take.

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/developers/developer_help.php
2. Share the following information

• Full name of the Page(s)
• The username of the Page(s)
• Web address (URL) of the Page(s)
• Full name and network of any other Page admin(s)

Also, if you’ve received weekly reports from Facebook about your website, that will also help Facebook staff identify your specific Fan page

Kelli Brown of PixelPoint Express also reminds us:

As Facebook’s Terms of Use prevent you from having multiple personal accounts or having a business registered as a personal account, there isn’t a way, within the rules, to avoid the “creator owns the page” issue. The issue becomes even more complex if the company hires a social media company to do the page building process for them. When hiring a company, ensure that the contract stipulates how the accounts will be managed, transferred and maintained, especially when the monthly retainer ends.

Summary

You are investing time, talent and treasure into your Fan page.  As it continues to become more important to your customer service, product development and marketing efforts, make sure you have a transition plan in place!

Got a story to share?  Let us know!

My little secret will make updating your Fan page effortless and fun

I’ve talked to hundreds of organizations and businesses who are cautiously adding a Facebook Fan page. But beyond the fear and trepidation of setting it up, there is an enormous anxiety about “ what’s next?.”

1. What do we say in our News Feed?
2. How do we get people to Fan us?
3. What if someone says something we don’t approve?
4. Worse, what if they bash us?

And most importantly they say, “How am I to find the time to do this?” And it’s not just that, most people are not sure how to organize the process of becoming an editor and publisher of their Fan page.

So I’m going to share with you a little secret.

The good news is this secret is free and it works.

In fact it’s the simplest technique I could find to create a process to organize this so you don’t have to fret about it. This process will enable you to spend 10 – 20 minutes a week updating your Fan page with content that will keep people commenting which will get the attention of their friends and increase your fan base.

You only need one piece of software to make this work. It’s your gmail or Outlook calendar. So here’s the secret.

Create a reoccurring event in your outlook and let it run for say, 90 days. I set mine up to occur at 7 am Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And I call the calendar event, Facebook Fan Page Update. So now that I have 36+ on my calendar I can sit back and let Outlook remind me to update the Fan page.

But wait, wait, there’s more to this secret!

So your next step is to set aside 20 minutes to find content on others websites that your audience would be interested in, and that validates your message, product or theme. It might be videos from YouTube, serious research, a blog article, an article in a major news source or something fun and interesting from Wikipedia. In 20 minutes you should be able to find 3 interesting, relevant pieces of content that you can copy the link and write a short intro to for your News Feed.

The next thing to do is simply copy the link and the content into the day of the week you want to share it. Then on that day, drop it in and it’s posted. I know what you are thinking! Wouldn’t it be great if there was software that would let you post content for an entire month and walk away from it? There is, but, for the moment – you don’t want to pay for it!

So that’s it. It’s simple fast and it provides you a framework to fit this additional responsibility into your daily life, but more importantly change your behavior so you actually do it!

Now, that you have mastered updating content, we’ll need to circle back around and evaluate how people are responding to the content with Insights. You my friend are just getting started on a process that is going to suck more and more of your time, but research is suggesting it’s worth it.

Check out some of the latest posts that confirm this at:

www.facebook.com/internetstrategiesgroup

Fans not only will BUY MORE from you, they will more likely RECOMMEND YOU!

Too time consuming! Less impact than a Fan Page!

I’m blogged out! This 547 word blog took 37 minutes out of my life!

I started blogging in 2004 with a blog called WiredCommunities. My focus was on organizations who were doing ground breaking and/or unique things in building online communities. Each article required time to research, write, edit, contact the organization for quotes, publishing and finally handling the spam that tried to get on the blog. It was a huge undertaking. After writing nearly 200 articles, I just pooped out!

So I wrote a book!

And then realized I should promote my book with a blog. So the blog you are reading now is designed to continue the discussion I started in my book Internet Dough! But I’m stressing again. Once again each article is requiring me to take time to research, write, edit and publish. While I love to write, there are times I feel a slave to the blog. It’s another thing that gets added on my “Things to Do” list. It nags me on weekends! And why? Well, if I do enough articles and get picked up by other blogs and share it frequently with my customers and fans, then I build my social credibility!

But is it worth it?

For some yes! But like anything else, only a few bloggers/organizations will have the stamina and consistency to be able to reach a sizable audience. Based on the over 100 million blogs just in the United States, I would wager that 99.5 bloggers start off with good intentions and lose interest. Life and their current job and family responsibilities get in the way and they slowly lose interest.

So, to me blogging is Dead. It’s over rated and it’s too difficult to scale.

So what do you do?

I’m leaning to our corporate Facebook Fan page as a faster way to educate, share and develop a conversation with people interested in what we are interested in.

Think about it.

Our attention spans are short. We consistently wrote 400-600 word blog articles which for the typical reader requires 4-5 minutes to read. But do readers really have the time to read them? If they are like me, they have a fire hose of news, content and information streaming into their mail boxes daily.

Instead of fretting about writing an article, we check our Google News Reader/Alerts for interesting content. We then write a 100 character summary and attach a link to the article and publish it on our Fan page. It gives us the same effect. But with an extra twist.

Now we can offer our opinions and use third party sources to validate them. To us, our Facebook Fan page is also our eNewsletter. Once a month, we dump in the summaries of the last 3 status updates in our News Feed and fire off our Newsletter. It’s fast, easy and repurposes content and information we have already produced.

So for us, our blog has been demoted!  It’s not a primary communication channel.  Maybe considering it dead is a little over stated, eh?

We’ll still blog, but not fret about it.  We’ll do an article every other week or once a month. In the meantime, our focus will be on building our readership on our Fan Page and using Facebook Insights to better understand what our Fans want to know.

What about you?

Oh, follow us at www.facebook.com/internetstrategiesgroup

FBI, Electronic billboards, Social Media & MORE “wisdom of the crowds”

The FBI is at the beginning phases of using social media and the “wisdom of the crowds” to solve crime.

I was working out today and watched as the FBI unveiled a new crime fighting strategy.  They unveiled on Time’s Square a massive electronic billboard that will list America’s most wanted!

NBC did a great job covering the story and providing additional background to show how their strategy emerged.  It appears they picked up on the Amber alert technique and started working with Clear Channel and other electronic billboard companies to post information about wanted criminals.   The program proved effective for them when they posted an image of a South Carolina bank robber that led to his identification.  They then posted his name and information which led to his arrest.

So let’s fast forward this and go “back to the future”

In my book, Engage Customers Online I shared a story how the car company - Mini Cooper used RFID to communicate with Mini Cooper owners through select billboards.  (They called Motorboards).  Mini owners that were interested completed an online profile and were then sent a “key fob”.   When the driver came within range of a Motorboard, the LED readout on the Motorboard displayed a customized, often humorous message that related to the owner’s profession, name, or roof design. Examples: “Nice roof graphic, Rocket!” to an owner with a car nicknamed Rocket, or “Moving at the speed of justice!” to a lawyer.  That was about 3 years ago!

Fast forward to today and imagine that you are driving past a billboard that is using Facebook Connect and RFID.  As you approach it, it instantly taps into your social network to see if you are in some way connected to one of America’s most wanted (or anyone wanted for that matter.  It might include child support payments, parking tickets outstanding - who knows where it will stop)

If it finds you are connected in some way, the billboard or an electronic dashboard system  instantly (says or posts)  “Don, George Lucas is wanted for making science fiction movies,  you are connected to him by Angie Dickinson.  We’re dropping an alert in your News Feed to let us know any tips you may have that will bring him in safely.”

This automated system would feed tips back to the control center where they are instantly validated and checked out.

All of us are trying to figure out how to play and use Social Media for our businesses.  There are good and bad signs we need to be paying attention to as we move along.  Those that are living “The Truman Show” on Facebook, need to rethink what they are doing.  And, those responsible for creating strategies, need to keep in mind basic civil liberties and privacy norms.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in Social Media.   You need to help shape it for the good of your organization and your customers.

H&R Block provides example college admissions can adopt!

 The headline of this blog today was inspired by an article in Advertising Age written by Beth Snyder Bulik.

H&R Block as you know, prepares tax statements for millions of customers.  It’s a very seasonal business - but its big business!  There are nearly 13,000 retail shops around the country and the company has 100,000 employees.

H&R started to notice that behaviors of consumers were changing last year when they recognized that out of the 95 million tax returns that were filed electronically, nearly 1/3 of them were from home computers.  They realized they needed to offer a home computer tax program to not only build their brand, but offer a bridge to their retail shops.

To market their program they decided to incorporate both traditional advertising and social media marketing.  Their goal was to use social media to educate customers, answer questions, build brand awareness and leverage the conversations that develop into visits to their corporate page where the visitor could select a retail shop to help them prepare their taxes or purchase their software.

To accomplish that, H&R built a 1,000 employees social media army!   They provided this team an overview of their strategy, what they wanted to accomplish, outlined their goals and offered basic training on social media.  According to Bulik:

The social-media strategy includes a Twitter account, widgets, blogs, a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan page and apps — a recent one in the form of a quiz asks, “How deductible are you?”

Why did they do that?

If the average person on Twitter has 100 friends, 1,000 employees have an opportunity to reach not only 1,000,000 people but their tweets have the ability to reach the 100 people that each of the people they know are connected to.   That’s a big number!   And they don’t have to pay a marketing, PR or advertising channel to reach them.

This army could be on any of their social networks and respond when:

• Someone mentions they have to do their taxes
• A tax question is asked
• Someone is interested in finding a place that provides loans based on taxes due to the person
• Someone is looking for a person to do their tax
• Someone shares an issue they have had with the IRS

While Social Media monitoring software catches this information, it’s people that respond.  Because even in this new online world, “people still do business with people”.

So how would your company unleash an army of Social Media?   Let’s take a look at this from the college recruitment angle.

Admissions offices could do the same thing.

Think about it, a college has thousands of students, tens of thousands of alumni (if not hundreds of thousands) and dozens of staff  that could form the core of the Social Media team.  This army of people could be create a variety of content in audio, video, text and or photographs to build the college brand, engage prospective students and maintain mindshare of prospective students.

• Students could be sharing information about events, activities and courses.
• Alumni could share experiences, career advice.
• Faculty could offer min courses, answer questions.
• Prospective students could be talking about their visits, sharing research and students, alumni and faculty they are meeting.

And of course all could be engaging prospective students in dialogue.

Why does this make sense? 

1. It’s cheap! It’s repeatable and once you’ve built the system it runs by itself.
2. Everyone I just mentioned has a vested interest in seeing the college succeed.
3. This Social Media team represents authentic voices that prospective students will believe.

Experts today remind us that you no longer have control of your brand. 

Your brand exists in the people we’ve listed above.  Prospective students no longer pay attention to the “slogans and phrases” colleges work so hard to create and market. Students today pay just as much or more attention to what people they know say about the college.

So what are the steps to implement a social media strategy within a college admissions office?

We’ll cover that in upcoming blog articles.  ? leave a comment or call 800-805-9413.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media will help you make decisions

Growing up in the 60’s was an incredible time and yet stressful time.  Everything was in flux.  The role of a father was changing from the master and ruler of his domain to one where he shared power with his wife, sex came out in the open, equality finally was put on the front burner and students learned how to collectively band together to change the world!

It was a decade that sought to give “Power to the People”.  A time in which people were actively exercising their right to be involved in decisions.

In the 40 some years since that movement started, I don’t think 16 year olds forgot about the values associated with power to the people.  As they grew up, they changed the world, made it more transparent, worked to provide equality in race, pay and ability, thought more about the environment rights and much more.

Now as we enter the next decade, technology is going to take “power to the people” to a whole NUTHER level.  Technology is giving individuals, corporations and non profits the ability to reach out and use the power of the people to accomplish things that would not have been achievable.  Today we call that “Crowd sourcing”  (…More…)

Crowd sourcing spells trouble for wedding photographers

You might have noticed that I’m writing more articles on crowd sourcing lately.  It’s because I’m beginning to see how fundamentally it will change the way our businesses are structured and our society if functioning.

Web 2.0 tools like Flickr and YouTube started to teach us how we could interact and engage with each other around photos and video.   As our behaviors changed and we understood the value the technology provided us, the next stage of innovation is using Web 2.0 thought processes to develop ways where people can share ideas, concepts and effectively get work done faster with less effort.

Today I ran across a site called Kedai, “smile, snap, share”.  (Would love to know what Kedai means)  Kedai and future incarnations of it creates enormous financial pressure on wedding photographers.

Now a wedding with 100 guests can have the power of 100 cameras snapping away capturing their unique view of the day/night/week for the wedding party, friends and family.  It’s a shared experience.

Here’s how it works. (…More…)

Who do you believe?

What’s social media, excessive content and entertainment news doing to us?

What is the proliferation of news and information doing to us?  What is all this content coming from all different sources, that has been repackaged, regurgitated and driven through wires, microwaves, satellites doing to us?

A new survey by the Pew Research Center show that trust in the news media has reach a new low, with record numbers of American saying it is inaccurate.   This year’s poll suggest 63 percent of the respondents said news articles were often inaccurate. Seventy four percent said news organizations favor one side or another in reporting political news.   News (entertainment) programs are starting to align with party lines.   If you are Republican, your news fix probably comes from Fox.

There’s something happening today that is making a growing majority of us skeptics and not sure what to believe.  The public is starting to lean toward the feelings John Lennon shared in his song “God”.  In it he says:

I don’t believe in magic,
I don’t believe in I-ching,
I don’t believe in bible,
I don’t believe in tarot,
I don’t believe in Hitler,
I don’t believe in Jesus,
I don’t believe in Kennedy,
I don’t believe in Buddha,
I don’t believe in mantra,
I don’t believe in Gita,
I don’t believe in yoga,
I don’t believe in kings,
I don’t believe in Elvis,
I don’t believe in Zimmerman,
I don’t believe in Beatles,
I just believe in me,

While John was working out a painful breakup of the Beatles and trying to move on with his life, my interpretation of the polls are this;  there is so much information available through so many different channels that ALL pose as credible news sources, that it’s hard for anyone to know what to believe. (…More…)

Find out what others are saying about your company or product!

Daily I see more products and services that automatically search the web for people talking about products, services, issues and then aggregates this information and delivers it back to me in a variety of methods to help me make decisions.

So what do you do with that information?

Well in the case of the stock market, you can take mentions of companies, analyze the mentions as positive or negative and then graphically display for others to interpret and use to make a better decision.

Interesting way this blog started.

I wrote a blog article about the “wisdom of the crowds” and the next day a tweet showed up in my Twitter account:

@Philabaum Check outhttp://www.piqqem.com for another example of wisdom of crowds.

Wow, pretty smart!  Did the system automatically find me and post that information, or is someone sitting at a computer somewhere in the world being delivered mentions of words, concepts and ideas who then puts a human spin to them and who then sends the message off?

In my case this really worked.

Not only was I intrigued, I followed the link to the product piqqem and signed up!

Think about how you could use Twitter to watch for mentions of terms and keywords that might identify who you are, what your customers like, attitudes and or locations.    You too could have a business process that would deliver frightenly  fast and relevant information to people who are out there talking about services they like or need.

I’m just starting to get a handle on this.  Would love to know your take!

Life is too complicated. No one person or group has the answers!

You know how-  from time to time - you get a song stuck in your head, and it just keeps playing over and over and over!  I’ve never looked at it too seriously, occasionally I have wondered if the content of the song was something my psyche or soul needed to help it adjust to a situation or to get an “attitude” adjustment.

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ve noticed that I’m stuck in a rut writing more and more about the “wisdom of the crowds” or as some refer to as “crowd sourcing”.

I’ve been greatly influenced by Don Tapscott’s book, Wikinomics, (not just because he’s also named Don) because it really awakened the reality of how the Internet has changed the way we run our lives, businesses and organizations.

In the past, the person at the top of the organization had a phone to the outside world, a very small group of advisors and his or her gut to make decisions.  Today, that same person at the top has a Twitter account,  Facebook account, etc,  which provides them a million points of view on a subject or feedback on a proposed idea or new product. (…More…)