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.

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.

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.

Part of the value in Twitter for a user is the ability to communicate with a wider circle of influence than you might otherwise of been able, as the masses join twitter the danger is that the noise to signal ratio increases making it less useful – but what if they’d started charging when they hit a certain number of users?

Would it start to make some real money that so far it has only hinted at being able to earn? Would people of left the service for another? Certainly charging existing users, would create a mass exodus… but some of the attraction for early adopters is the exclusive club feel – that would be, in some ways, amplified.

This is a very hypothetical post btw – it came from being asked why twitter was anything more than “the next big thing” – in their words, “it was all about friends reunited, then myspace, then facebook… now everyones joining twitter – its just another fad, I’m not signing up”.

That conversation led me to the thought above and also to wonder, what’s the next big thing?

What if twitter IS just a fad?

Some people lose a lot of money, the cool kids move on, the spammers and randomness takes over – this is based on what some people would perceive happened to myspace as a platform, although I would argue its reverted back to its “native” state of being a good place for bands/musicians/DJs/performers.

So what do you think?

Is it a fad?

If so, what’s next?

Starting to settle into the new office, quite nice to have a 4 min walk to work!

My top tip for today (mainly because its a new feature that I’d wanted for ages) -

post notes to Facebook Fan pgaes via RSS… and/or publish them as an RSS feed back out.

No more re-posting blog entries as notes manually, or using one of the RSS apps (that never seemed to update automatically) – there’s a new option under the edit options on the fan page (see above), handy!

…and yes, I have set up a fan page for Alex’s Good Food Cafe, I liked it so much I moved into the basement

I was going to write a longer analysis of why i think this is a superb campaign, but most of it has been done very eloquently on the SEO Optimise blog.

Compare the meerkat works as a campaign for one key reason, it sets them apart from what has become a very competitive sector where the offering and price (ie free) is essentially the same for everyone.

How else would you compete in this market? Superior offering, better customer usability/feedback or huge market awareness?

A simple clever play on words, with a good social media marketing strategy (facebook fan page, twitter etc) and a simple mock website equals brand recognition though the roof.

The only thing I would of done differently would be to make it possible to link to specific meerkats on the site, if you find one that amuses you, all you can share with friends is the options that you chose to find that meerkat – people like to share the specifics too.

Connect allows you to login to partner websites using your Facebook account and for information to flow from that site into your feed and friend information to pass back to the partner site.  This is part of a wider plan by Facebook to become the standard for social interaction.

OpenID set out to be the standard for connecting people across the web, plenty of big name partners supported OpenID but yet… outside the industry, who knows it exists?

There’s another important part of the strategy for net domination, that hasn’t received as much discussion: Facebook are taking steps to reduce the amount of people using ordinary Facebook accounts as a promotional tool. They are really clamping down on fake profiles and have put in places limits for how many group messages you can send out rather than using updates or advertisements.

The real strength in Facebook is in having 99.999% of users as real people, that is what makes it stand out from most other networks.

If Facebook can keep the balance of community vs commercial messages right, people will stay. A lot of users left MySpace when the volume of messages that were “hey you’ve never heard of me but please check out my tracks” overtook the messages between friends.

Sure some people will be put out when their profiles are deleted (after being warned) BUT it won’t cause the bulk of people to move.

This brings me nicely back to my talk, the social web in 10 slides – where I talk about the importance of interacting and engaging with the community in the right way.

If you (as a business) want to promote yourself on a social network, you have to be really clear to understand how that network works and how best to mobilise that network for your benefit whilst playing by their rules.

In total my update went out to around 750 people across three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) – through a status message I sent out a simple request for people to get in touch.

I’d hoped for 10 or so, during the day…

…within 30 minutes I had 30 replies.

Wow.

THAT is the power of the network, to be able to broadcast out a simple message – in this case on twitter, which automatically updated my Facebook status (would be nice if LinkedIn status could be done via twitter too – hint hint, any techy friends listening?) and get 30 replies in 30 minutes.

An hour later, I was visiting an office space with a friend/business partner of mine which we’ll likely rent together and I have plenty of likely candidates.

In further evidence of the power of the network: I noticed a business contact had changed their LinkedIn status to mention they were working on a particular project… which I was writing an article about for here (to be published later in the week – when its finished) a quick email exchange later and a meeting is set up so we can collaborate.

Within 2hrs my network has provided:

A good group of potential employees
A business partnership
and Office space

My “Springers final thought for the day” – courtesy of GrindVision:

the most successful people are great networkers and in in this day and age the most successful businesses are great at social media

I couldn’t agree more.

That is 2% of the worlds population.

Think about that for a minute, if you take out those who dont use or have access to the internet – thats a high percentage of people.

We’ve decided to conduct a simple survey of 100 people who work in businesses around our area – how many use social networking, how many have a business strategy for it… now that’s something else to think about!

As soon as we’ve completed and compiled our survey, we’ll publish it here.