1) Meetdraw 5 “So Meety” is being held at Bar So on Thursday 18th March from 6:30pm. Everyone is welcome whether you work for an agency, in-house team, freelance or currently studying. A great event to meet and network with fellow tech/web people locally.

and…

2) BarCamp Bournemouth 2 – April 10/11th at Bournemouth University, a 2 day self-organising un-conference – for anyone interested in tech/web stuff.

My quick effort at an FAQ:

What is a BarCamp? Its a 2 day event, starting at 930am and going right through till 4pm on the sunday – turn up, give a talk if you want to (or not if you don’t) and learn from/discuss with / laugh at people in the tech community. (see wikipedia or barcamp.org)

Is that something to do with drinking? – No… not really… but yes, the bar will be open and used as one of the discussion spaces.

What went on at BarCamp Bournemouth 1? Lots of stuff… my highlights are here.

More info and stuff coming on the website soon – if you’d be interested in part sponsoring Bar Camp, please drop me a line – you’ll get space on the website,a logo on the Uni TV (from now till event) etc etc

Well…. I’ve noticed a new trend on Facebook recently – a lot of groups, aiming to build a million+ users, follow a formula generally as follows:

1. Create a largely pointless page as above, the more controversial/amusing/”so true” the better.
2. Seed the group to your circle and watch it grow virally (hopefully).
3. Once large enough, add favourite pages for the actual business/person that they were hoping to promote and update to all the fans – sometimes related, usually not.

If 1% of 1,000,000 fans checked out the real target, you’ve just created a huge amount of traffic to try and convert.

It’s clever, but not necessarily very ethical – I guess it’s the Facebook “bait n switch”. Maybe I should of called it “grey hat” (a term stolen from SEO) as it’s not really specifically against the Facebook TOS?

What’s the right mix for status updates (or tweets)?

I’d summarise it as the following:

• Frequency
• Relevance
• Personality
• Purpose
• Consistency

All of these are underpinned by the central question you should ask yourself – what do the people following me, who subscribe to these updates expect?

I sometimes see status updates, used for two different things, when really they should use two streams or types of resource.

A good example of this was the event that prompted the discussion, a bar in Bournemouth began posting every record played, as it happened.

• Some people loved it.
• Some people hated it so much they sent abusive messages to the bar.
• Most people were either indifferent, or switched off without saying anything.

Then the bar apologised… and the usual war of words/trolls began, but it was this bit that stood out for me:

A: “If you don’t like the updates unfollow”

B: “I want updates, just not a flood of them!”

A valued follower, taking the time to say “less updates” – I wish I could look back, or measure how many people either unfollowed or hid updates from this bar – it’d be very interesting numbers.

Anyway, the moral for me is – horses for courses – there is a place for the track-listing high frequency type updates, but maybe it wasn’t the same as the general stream – is that true for your business?

Listen to what your customers/users/followers tell you, with an eye on the quiet many – in the case above, the silent majority and the smallest minority that commented negatively were the voices that needed to be heard and not those of the vocal supporters (who interestingly mostly came round to the 2 stream idea, after I proposed it).

Have consistency with how/when/why you tweet/blog/update – occasional changes (like if you’re at a conference) can be accepted, of course.

With any business strategy, start first with the “Why?” and set some SMART goals to work towards, then work out which resource helps you to achieve it… hopefully start here, will help with the second part of that.

In part this page was also a follow up to last weeks presentation at the Poole Business Women’s Lunch Club where I felt I hadn’t covered all of the ground as thouroughly as I would of liked in the time given.

All thoughts, comment and feedback welcome.

hat tip to @tomharvey888 who sent me this:

RT @bengie Has your facebook been running slow? Go to “Settings” > “application settings” > “added to profile”. delete “unnamed application” -> spybot

Do i have the so called Facebook Application spybot? Apparently so.

Clicking settings will cause an unknown error and the application profile does not exist (it will redirect you to home).

I’m not convinced this is malicious and with no evidence to suggest it is a spybot (would love to hear from you, if you do with a source), I remind you of the SULFNBK.EXE (Symantec) fake alert inviting you to delete a file that was actual an integral part of windows.

I think the most likely explanation for this unnamed app is a leftover from a now removed function – perhaps one from before the profile view was changed.

To remove or not to remove the Facebook spybot? …that is the question.

I’d like to hear from anyone who does not find this when they follow the instructions above, so far everyone I know who has tried this did… which would suggest to me it’s more likely a remnant as above.

Thoughts, screenshots… all welcome below.

It used to be that the status updates on LinkedIN were actually quite useful, to see what people were up to, get a snapshot of what they are/were working on… but alas no more.

Given the option to link a twitter account to LinkedIN (good) most people have chosen to send ALL tweets to LinkedIN (bad) rather than use the selective “#in” option which only sends selected tweets to LinkedIN (good).

The result?

The status updates are all RT’s (the twitter version of forwards) and off topic, no where near as useful as it used to be.

To me, it devalues the activity stream quite a bit – which is kind of a pity as the other things on there are still great – Q+A, groups, events…

Have you noticed this too, or is it just my network of people?

Please, if you link twitter and Facebook together use the selective updates function – make sure your messages are “fit for purpose”, does everything you tweet, really need to be on LinkedIN?

Select “edit my profile”, then click on the “edit” link next to your twitter username and select the option highlighted below.

Next time you want to send something to LinkedIn just include “#in” in your message.

Thanking you in advance… Luke.

———

Luke Williams on LinkedIN – I run 1/2 day LinkedIN courses in London and Bournemouth if you’d like to make more of this great business platform.

1) Set friendly URLs (pagenames), ie: facebook.com/yourname – facebook.com/username – Works for personal profiles and pages (once you have 25+ fans).

2) Widgets, fanboxes  and other cross site badges are all on the widgets page.

3) Link twitter accounts to pages or personal accounts facebook.com/twitter – also use this page to change the way your updates are linked and what kind of items are shared.

4) Set up your adverts at facebook.com/advertising – alos handy to see how large a given demographic is, try stepping throughmaking an advert up to the advert target seletion – it will tell you the number of users you could target.

5) Its also very handy to be a “Fan” of Facebook pages (or subscribe to the RSS feed) so you see any updates or new features when they’re announced.

One for my fellow geeks: If you’re thinking of customising the look and feel of your page, or would like to build your own applications, you’ll need the developer resources page for all things FBML.

Handy tip for mobile users: If you use the touch.facebook.com site, choosing friends and then pages gives you quick access to send out updates to your pages – any you are admin for will appear at the top of the list. On m.facebook.com (older non-touch-screen phones) this still works except pages you admin are not listed first… I don’t know why, they just aren’t!

If you find these links/hints helpful, please take 2 seconds to bookmark it somewhere (I use delicious) or share it on with someone else via email, twitter or courier pigeon.

I’m making a few, one of which is a change i’ve pondered for a while – a split in my twitter persona.

@socialtech is now going to be purely web technology based hints, tips and discussion. It’ll also focus more on the startup and Magus things that I’m involved with.

@alukeonlife is for my personal messages, local info and other off topic stuff like #uksnow.

I’ve felt for a while that I needed a split for a number of reasons, mainly:
Some friends were reluctant to follow as the tech stuff made no sense to them and there wasn’t enough personal messages (where I am, what the snows doing, OT articles)… and conversly, whilst no-one had said it, @socialtech had more personal and OT messages than I’d originally intended and as such watered down what I had to offer (especially to people I’ve trained who just want tips etc).

I also had a lot of local messages sneaking into @socialtech which must of been annoying to tech folks who follow me, or people out of the area – these will all now be from @alukeonlife

Both accounts are open and I’m happy for anyone to follow either, @alukeonlife will also be information on my radio DJ alter ego (Luke Dubyah) with details of radio shows and gig dates.

This does slightly dilute the “Luke Williams” brand, but I think it offers the best of both worlds and I’m a big believer that a twitter stream should be useful – keeping it all together, I felt, had reached a point where it wasn’t as good as it could be for either – jack of all, master of none.

And yes… for the astute amongst you, I did used to use @warpsauce for Luke Dubyah messages, this will now purely be tweets about our warpsauce startup. (our music technology based project)

I’d love to know what you think, do you have one identity on twitter? Do you feel sometimes it dilutes your personal or business brand? Maybe you think I should leave it all as one? I’d love to hear from you in the  comments…. or on twitter!

Wishing all of our clients, customers, partners, friends and fellow geeks a very merry Christmas and a prosperous new year!

The eco-warrior within discourages me from sending actual cards – so we’ve made a donation to Shelter instead.

LinkedIn is changing its homepage quite a bit – there’s a good write up on Mashable – it’s not live for all users yet, so if you don’t see it, you will soon.

Really though, this post is more about….

Change #2

Since August, I’ve been delivering most of my training under the joint venture I set up with Web Matters (as Web Matters Training) – it’s worked very well for both of us and I’m proud to say we’ve now partnered up with 2e2 to provide a range of Social Media for Business Courses (launching in Feb ‘09) based at their London (Victoria) training facility.

In line with this, I felt I should add “Trainer at Web Matters” to my LinkedIn profile, as the 2e2 venture is a partnership with WMT and it would make it clearer for anyone looking at my details via that site.

I’ll post again once the course details are live. Its a great opportunity and if it goes well, we’ll be looking to expand to their other centres around the UK – exciting times.