Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

When you set your Facebook profile to "Friends-only" are you confident that it is only being seen by friends? Do you just assume that your settings are etched in stone and will never go awry?

How about photos? Do you think they show up in search results even if you don't want them to? Are people tagging you in photos that you don't know about because you're not being notified, though you expressly put a little mark in the check box indicating that you wanted to be notified?

I'm not picking on Facebook here. Insert the name of any social network in it's place and you can ask similar questions.

This topic came up at lunch with a co-worker a few minutes ago. We were discussing whether or not a brand that you fan, can automatically delve into your profile and other content simply because you became a fan.We talked about it at length but that's not the point of this post.

Her follow-up comment is what stood out and inspired me to put this question out there for all to consider.Here is what she said:

"I just don't trust privacy settings."

Hmmm, why do I trust them, I thought.  I decided that I trust them becasue I need to. It's probably a false sense of security though. But in my case it's not a big deal because I'm not living a double-life via FB, hooking up with ex-beau's or wishing my boss a speedy death.

What you will find on my page are pictures of my kids and some personal things about my family life that I don't typically share on other social networks. And that's information worth protecting, I think. 

This is why I pay close attention to privacy settings on every network, becasue it's up to us to manage them. But how much contrrol do we really have? Blind trust is never a good thing, is it? 

I guess time will tell.  

 

Have you ever read posts in your Facebook feed that seemed a little too private for your liking?

I know I have. I thought it was cute at first when my best friends husband was lamenting his love for her for all to see. But then it got a little risque, and I got very uncomfortable.

I called her immediately and told her what was happening. Needless to say she was mortified and I ended up talking to him at length about managing his privacy settings.

Perhaps some people do want their friends and the friends of their friends to see all of their activity, but I bet that many don't. And they probably don't know how public they're business really is.

While my best friend had a few minutes of embarrassment and has long gotten over it, that is probably not the case for the professor who posted these two messages on Facebook:

• "Does anyone know where to find a very discreet hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day ..." 
• "had a good day today, DIDN'T want to kill even one student :-). Now Friday was a different story." 
  

Well, thanks to her privacy settings, she is now on administrative leave. Some of the very students she was referencing happen to be "friends of her friends" and guess what? They felt threatened by those posts. She thought that not accepting their friend requests was enough. It wasn't.

Yes, Facebook did make some changes that required users to go back in and adjust their settings but if you missed that news, you too could be vulnerable.

All the more reason to get to know your privacy settings.

You can read more about the story referenced in this post on Inside Higher Ed.

The options for social media seem endless nowadays. The ability to connect with the broader world - as well as the groups you really care about - is becoming easier each day. Every new device we get comes loaded and geared for making just those types of connections. But as pervasive as they are, as much as they are part of my everyday life and those I interact with, I can't take for granted everyone cares or even understands.

I recently tried to convince a client to run targeted ads on facebook to support a public affairs project. My thinking was this is part of the suite of services we should be using for this project. Their response was this is not relevant. The connection seemed so obvious and targeted, how could they not see this? But, digging a little deeper I find out they're not using facebook. Matter of fact, they've never even seen it in use. So instead of convincing them about the benefits of facebook and other social media, I am now offering an introduction to social media.

The point is they - and many of our contacts - are very busy people. Their work continues as it has for many years, regardless of blogging, facebook ads and fan pages, or Tweeting. Sometimes it's not about communicating the value of a specific tool from the social media toolkit. Instead, it's communicating what social media is and why it is valuable.

As options and the number of sites continues to grow in a seemingly exponential way, maybe it is time to dial back the clock and reassess what people really understand about what we think everyone already knows. This was a great learning experience for me because it reminded me that we need to not only think about what's next, but help ensure the people we touch know what's here.

We've all been snowed in the past few days, and pretty much all of the churches in the area canceled services today. But, I learned this morning that one local church decided to move their Sunday service online. I woke up, saw some information about their Facebook service on my news feed (from my aunt) and thought - this is genius. What an amazing use of social media!

So, I just went to the church's fan page on Facebook (props to them for having a fan page and a blog!) and was inspired by what I saw. Surely, there was a service to read along with - complete with a link to a video for the hymn, prayer requests and participation from others via prayer requests, Amen's and comments. They even included the fellowship that usually follows a service (chit chat's in the parking lot, etc.) and people posted photos of their snow adventures and other celebrations.

(You may be wondering - how did this get on the news? Apparently, the pastor invited a friend who is communications director for the Methodist conference and he sent out a release. I think more media outlets should pick up this story!)

This makes me smile. I applaud the church's creativity and outreach. Today, many area residents were able to get in a little worship from their couch - safe and sound - and on Facebook! Perhaps we'll see more of this type of service in the future. I, for one, would be fan!

I wish I could mute certain conversations on Twitter and Facebook.

I am not a basketball fan. I am not a football fan. I have friends that are complaining about increase in chatter related to Apple products that is bound to continue over the next three days.

There are plenty of things I like to Tweet or write about on Facebook that I am sure no one else cares about.

I am glad I can hide certain things on Facebook - like Farmville updates or updates from certain people BUT I wish I could be a little more specific with what I want to hide. And that my hide/mute button could happen across multiple platforms.

I don't want to hide all activity from someone or unfollow them, I just want to hide the 30-40 tweets that happen during a game I care nothing about. For the Super Bowl, I want to hear the chatter about the commercials but don't care about the football insight.

Is there a service that handles this that I don't know about? You cannot rely on #hashtags. Brizzly allows you to mute all tweets from a user. I believe I can also accomplish this in TweetDeck, by creating creating a "Group" but that is not exactly what I want to do, either. If they are multitasking they might Tweet about something I care about during that time.

(For those of you reading this, I am fully aware that some people may want to mute me from time to time - or even permanently).

Any thoughts?

Has your Facebook account gotten a little long in the tooth? Now you can pull the plug on that bad boy putting it out of its misery. Seppukoo.com, named after the Japanese ritual of honorable suicide is intended to liberate the digital body. You can create a customized memorial page in honor of your deceased account, and Seppukoo will even break the news to your virtual friends. Just sit back as Facebook pals blubber on about missing you. Meanwhile, you’re forming a new social network with others who have committed the same (sniff) honorable act.

The best part? Your digital resurrection begins next time you log on to Facebook.

Innovative viral marketing, Facebook rip off or lame waste of time? Discuss.

Who has time for all these tweets, retweets, invitations to connect, status updates, links and blog posts? I want to keep up with social media, but can't always find time. After an initially flurry of activity, I've settled on five tactics to stay reasonably engaged without losing sleep. Here they are:

Set expectations. I am realistic. I don't expect social media to work miracles but I expect to get something in return for my time. I limit my activity to three networks. I use Facebook almost exclusively for staying in touch with friends. LinkedIn is a professional networking, research and recruiting tool. The jury is still out for me on Twitter.

Listen. I get more out of social media from listening than posting. While I am skeptical about Twitter's value over the long term, I find it is a great source for news and information that I would not otherwise find. I also get to eavesdrop on smart, interesting people like Cord Silverstein, Walker Smith, Audra Marotta and Mark McNeely.

Monitor. Monitoring for me is different than listening I don't like surprises, so I use monitoring to stay a step ahead. I get alerts on news about Capstrat, clients and other groups that are important to me.

Mobile. Social media is yet another reason I love my Blackberry. Downloading the apps makes it easy to check status updates while I'm sitting at a soccer game (but not while one of my daughters is on the field) or retweet an @capstrat post while waiting for takeout.

Sharing versus posting. I don't create much original content. Frankly, I don't think anyone cares what I had for breakfast. I share articles, invitations to events, blog posts, etc. Most Web sites make it easy to share content.

Social media can take as much time as you allow. But with a few tools and boundaries you can stay connected in just a few minutes each day.

I attended an interesting panel at SXSW09 on what teens want in a web site. Unfortunately there were not many tangible strategies offered that audience members could take home and implement from this panel.  However, it was interesting to hear teens talk freely about how they use the web in general.  Since there wasn't an abundance of specific leaning to take back with me, a few interesting comments are paraphrased below for your knowledge and/or enjoyment.

1. "It's funny to see my teachers on Facebook; it shows you that they are really people too."
2. "Me and all my friends use MySpace and not Facebook, its way cooler."
3. "Us high school kids have so much drama in our lives.  It's like, why am I not in your top 20 friends on MySpace? That's rough."
4. "I use Wikipedia most of the time for my research papers."
5. "Internet explorer?  Ew please, I only use Firefox." 
   
6. "Me and my friends all just looooove Facebook Mafia Wars! (Cough, Cord.)"
7. "Wait, an RSS what?  What happened?"

When users share a link on their wall, Facebook automatically tries to grab a thumbnail image to include with the link. This image can really help get the item attention when it is viewed on other people's news feed.

Facebook scans the page and gives you a choice of a few different images. Which images it picks can seem a bit random. Our experience is that it Facebook looks for small squarish images starting at the top of the page.

Specify Your Facebook Share Thumbnail Image

You can specify exactly which image Facebook uses for the thumbnail using a link tag in the head of your page.

<link rel="image_src" type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.domain.com/path/icon-facebook.gif" />

The name is unimportant (as long as it's correct). Use a global URL to avoid confusion.

Other Meta

Make sure the page has a title and description meta tag. Facebook will use these elements when it pre-populates the link description and title.