Too many businesses are just “doing” social without training… or worse… without a strategy.

We’re on a mission to sort that out for 2012, the first step is a week of training courses open to anyone:

The Get Social in 2012 training week is the 23rd – 27th January 2012 at the RT Media offices in Wimborne

• MONDAY 23rd: Introduction to Social Media
• TUESDAY 24th: I’m on LinkedIn, But…
• WEDNESDAY 25th: Twitter 101
• THURSDAY 26th: Facebook for Business
• FRIDAY 27th: Better Blogging

All sessions are 9:00 for a 9:30 start, finishing at 12:30.

Please contact Corli or Luke at RT Media on 01202 888192 or email Luke to book your place.

For more details, see Get Social in 2012

Extra super 2012 BONUS :: To help you on your journey here are 3 links I think are essential reading for 2012 (don’t forget all the things I bookmark as interesting can be found be clicking the delicious icon up there top right!)

1. Facebook makes up 52.1 percent of all sharing on the web in 2011
2. The psychology of social commerce explains why and how people shop together
3. Sony says choosing the right social network is critical, we agree!

This is a post I started on Feb 15th (originally titled “Is 2011 the year Facebook goes into decline”), I wrote a post about the life-cycle of social networks but wasn’t bold enough to publish it – I wish I had.

The recent changes (and impending change of profiles into timelines) on Facebook for passive sharing (read, listened) from explicit sharing have generated a lot of debate:

Is Facebook’s seamless sharing wrong or not?
(both from RWW amusingly)

…and there are plenty more discussing these changes in minute details, I’ve added my thoughts to the second of those posts in the comments.

There is a more philosophical question here that I haven’t seen asked yet – what are the factors that make people change social network?

Let’s think about MySpace vs Facebook and some of the factors that caused the exodus:

1. MySpace had the critical mass, it was the clear leader until a couple of years ago.
2. Facebook offered a simpler, cleaner interface that made connecting with your friends easier.
3. MySpace got bought by News Corp and was seen as a big company rather than a cool young upstart.
4. MySpace “got old”.

How do these stack up with Facebook?

1. Facebook is the clear leader, that could change.
2. Facebook is rapidly getting more cluttered and the volume of information is creating, in some, a feeling of information overload.
3. Facebook is now seen as a big scary, privacy dismissing beast.
4. Facebook has your mum, gran and aunty on it… it’s “got old”

If people leave Facebook it will be because:

• They feel they’ve lost too much control
• The signal to noise ratio gets out of balance
• There is another big privacy issue
• As a business user, they change the rules of the game too many times
• The early adopters move to somewhere else and people follow

So where next?

Google+ ?

No, I don’t think so – It won’t be to go to more-of-the-same and whilst some wrote it off too early (before they launched business pages, was too early to judge in my opinion) Google+ doesn’t have these key differences the next big social network needs to become the new #1.

Who does?

I thought Diaspora could of been a candidate, it needs some muscle behind it to grow into those shoes. One thing I’m certain though is that the game is changing, users are uneasy and if I was Facebook I’d be worried.

As ever, I’d love to know your thoughts.

Here are my slides:

I spoke about Brand and Reputation Management, Social Media Amplification and adding the magic to your event.

And, as a good summary here is an interview I did afterwards to WinkBall.

We have a series of Public Courses during May, at our Bournemouth training centre, that will help provide you with the right skills and techniques to fully utilise these services to the maximum potential.

• I’m on LinkedIn, but…
  Wednesday Morning, 11th May, 2011
• Twitter marketing
  Wednesday Afternoon, 11th May, 2011
• Facebook for business
  Wednesday Morning, 18th May, 2011
• Business blogging
  Wednesday Afternoon, 18th May, 2011

Places will be limited, so to book your place or to find out further information on any of our courses and secure an early bird discount, visit our ‘Course Dates‘ page at socialtech.biz, or contact myself, Danny on 01202 798098.

Here are my slides from the event, the rest are on housing.org.uk

The discussion was especially interesting, some good questions and I carried on some of the conversations through lunch.

I feel we covered the brief well, with only 15 mins the goal was to encourage people to start thinking about some of the issues and not to try and comprehensively cover all legislation etc

+ sorry to those that had to stand at the back!

This was partly inspired by the upcoming (now live) changes to the ASA Cap Code:

“From 1 March, marketing communications on companies’ own websites and in other third party space under their control, such as Facebook and Twitter, will have to adhere to the non-broadcast advertising rules as set out in the CAP Code.” (Source: ASA)

A (massively) simplified version of the code would be: ensure that all your communications are legal, decent, honest and true.

We asked 4 questions:

1. Do you use Facebook or twitter? (yes/no)
2. Have you ever written about the company you work for on Facebook or Twitter? (yes/no)
3. Has your company given you any guidance on what you can/can’t write on Facebook or Twitter? (yes/no/don’t know)
4. Have you ever heard of the new ASA standards / CAP code? (yes/no)

Full details and responses to the survey in our press release on Pressitt.

The two key findings that stood out for me were:

1. Half of all employees have admitted to writing about the company they work for on a social media website, such as Facebook and Twitter (49%)
2. A staggering three quarters of those who have written about their company online either did not know of, or had no guidance from their employers regarding what they could or couldn’t write (75%)

Think about that for a minute, the implications that 1/2 of your staff are writing about your business online on social networks… and it’s not just the expanded ASA remit that needs to be considered, regulation such as the FSA could also apply to your business.

Liz Willingham, from Liz Lean PR summarises it better than me:

“The results of our survey highlight the importance of good communication from the top down. As ambassadors of your brand, employees need to be made aware and given comprehensive guidance on how to conduct themselves in all situations to protect the overall reputation of the company.”

We’re looking to put on an event for our clients after Easter, in the mean time if you’d like any guidance please do drop either of us a line.

If you want some interesting views from leading experts on the new ASA Cap code changes I strongly recommend this eConsultancy post.

In this post I am reluctantly reaching the realisation that I’ve moved from “recent graduate” to the “workplace adult” generation… damn.

Anyway… back to the topic at hand: It’s ok to get drunk & why I think that “we”, the workplace generation, need to be more accepting of people having a life before and outside work.

So… at Meetdraw I had a very interesting chat with some students. The thing that most stuck in my head was a conversation about Facebook, privacy and employment.

One of the students said that he was concerned about potential employers seeing content that friends had posted onto Facebook and how this would affect his employment chances.

Taking a photo out of context can imply a different meaning. If we are going to look online to find out more about the people we hire, we have to remember that pictures don’t necessarily reflect the person in question.

But it’s more than that, should we even be looking?

Aside from the ethics of how far it is acceptable to investigate someone generally… I’ve also been considering for a while the implication of looking at someone’s more personal (Facebook for example) information online prior to hiring them…

What if you looked and chose not to hire them, could they claim you had discriminated against them for something you found out by yourself?

Our student acted on the principle that anything online should be considered public, no matter how well you set your privacy settings. I’d always advise thinking on these lines too.

My response was simply, don’t worry too much:

1) There is a need for guidance (maybe even legislation one day?) and restraint on what employers can/should look at prior to hiring.

2) We need to be more accepting of what we find.

How to: block that annoying old friend who keeps inviting you to events.

We’ve all got one, a well intentioned… but borderline spammer, old friend. Perhaps it’s their new designer bling clothes peg business or they’re in a band, you’ve tried to say “please stop spamming me” but they don’t listen.

Removing them isn’t an option because you do still want to keep in touch with them.

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. On the “account” drop down (top right) choose “privacy settings”
3. You’ll then see a grid of privacy settings, underneath this are 3 sections, underneath the “Block Lists” heading click on “edit your lists”
4. This page has some really handy little bits on it for (un)blocking applications, people and the third section from the top: Block event invitations
5. Type in here the names of any people you want to prevent sending you Facebook event invites.

If you found this useful, please do share it on.

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?

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.