Instead, Facebook hopes to build the same sort of success with businesses that they have had with people’s personal pages. They want to be the one place where people go to look for, learn about, and engage with businesses. To accomplish this goal they need to encourage businesses to join Facebook, and that is why they created the Fan Page.

Facebook doesn’t even call them Fan Pages anymore. Instead, they are simply called Pages. Your page lets you build a presence on Facebook, engage with your audience, spread your message, connect with Facebook users on your website, and encourage conversations. Custom tabs can be created to feature coupons, promote specials, share videos, and set up events. It’s a full palette of features, and it’s just for businesses, brands, and non-profit agencies.

The dangerous side of your business presence comes in the way customers perceive your presence. When they are connecting with your business, they may think they are connecting with you. If they have a bad experience with one of your representatives, they may take their complaints to your Facebook Page because they expect this to be the online equivalent of asking to speak to the owner.

To add another complication, what if the person they are complaining about also happens to be one of your Facebook page administrators? That complaint could be deleted and you wouldn’t know about it unless there was an even bigger backlash because of it. Large businesses have marketing, public relations, or customer care groups to handle these situations. But for smaller businesses, there are only two courses I see to this situation. You either need to be your own Facebook Page administrator, or you need to bring in help from outside. This is where the social marketing experts come in.

Social marketing experts can set up your page for you, develop guidelines for Facebook engagement, monitor your presence, promote your brand, and provide a direct channel of communication to the top when there is a problem that needs your attention. This service isn’t free, but in the context of a marketing budget, you should be able to identify a level of service that suits any business.

How is Facebook going to make money with Pages? Nobody knows at this point, but you can be certain that once businesses are engaging with their customers on Facebook, they will not want to stop. In the future, a Facebook Page will likely come with a price tag. But for now, the time is right to add your business to the mix and start connecting with your customers.

Share this post/Save for reference

With Facebook, massively multiplayer online games, Twitter and Skype, chat remains a popular means of communication, though it’s usually referred to as “texting” now. If you’re new to text messaging, you might be confused by some of the acronyms you encounter. Here’s a glossary that will get you started on the right foot.

AAMOF – As A Matter Of Fact
AFAIK – As Far As I Know
AFK – Away From Keyboard
ASAP – As Soon As Possible
BBL – Be Back Later
BRB – Be Right Back
BTW – By The Way
CU – see you
CUL8R – see you Later
EZ – Easy
F2F – Face to Face
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
FWIW – For What It’s Worth
FYI – For Your Information
GG – Good Game
GTG – Got To Go
HAND – Have A Nice Day
HTH – Hope That Helps
IAC – In Any Case
IIRC – If I Remember Correctly
J/K – Just Kidding
IMHO – In My Humble Opinion
IMNSHO – In My Not-So-Humble Opinion
IMO – In My Opinion
IOW – In Other Words
IRL – In Real Life
LOL – Laughing Out Loud
NRN – No Reply Necessary
OMG – Oh My God
OTOH – On The Other Hand
ROFL – Rolling On the Floor Laughing
ROFLMAO – Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Ass Off
THX – Thanks
TIA – Thanks In Advance
TTYL8R – Talk To You Later
WTF – What The F**k

Share this post/Save for reference

Today I tried an interesting experiment. I googled “social media expert”. I wanted to see who would take Google’s #1 spot.

It wasn’t Chris Brogan, whom I would have guessed. Today’s top dog is Giovanni Gallucci. I had never heard of Giovanni, and unless you’re from Texas, it’s probable that you never have heard of him either. Giovanni lives in Dallas and over the last couple years he has made an impressive effort to position himself as a social media maven. I can’t knock that. It’s what anyone who wants to create an independent career in social media should be doing. If you look at his efforts, there is much to learn. Giovanni shows what it takes to gain traction as a social media professional.

To the established social media pros, the A-list, Giovanni Gallucci appears to represent everything that they warn people against. Self-proclaimed rock stars, experts, and ninjas do not present the perfect picture of credibility. There are plenty of articles about what to look for in your social media expert and what to watch out for, and it seems that they all caution us about guys who look very much like Gallucci. He calls himself an expert and a ninja. He alludes to press coverage but doesn’t show examples. He lists clients but doesn’t offer specifics on what he did for them. These points that do not stand up to suspicious scrutiny, and I recommend changing those aspects of his website, but I would not write the man off because his approach is more aggressive. His formula is working. He is the #1 social media expert in Google’s eyes.

How did Giovanni Gallucci steal the top spot from the likes of social media A-listers like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, and Peter Shankman? He did it with focused SEO. Giovanni decided to optimize for “social media expert”, so that is the title given to his website. Within the content, you’ll find social media mentioned numerous times, along with words like “ninja”, “buzz” and “marketing”. The man understands on-site SEO and he has used it masterfully. He also has massive offsite SEO through profiles on more than twenty social networks, content on sites like SlideShare, YouTube, and Flickr, and an active presence on Twitter and other sites. He presents a focused and consistent picture of himself, and knows what he wants people to remember about him. This is personal branding at its finest. Gallucci seems like a smart, hard working, likable guy and I expect that he will continue to work his way toward a position on the social media A-list.

Where is the lesson in this experiment? First, no matter how strong your presence is online and offline, the top spot in any search engine can still be won by someone who is fully committed to that task. Chris Brogan used to occupy Google’s number one position. Chris still has the single most recognizable name in social media marketing, but it looks like Giovanni is in the race and hungry for victory.

Second, there is no such thing as an overnight success. It takes time and effort to not only learn the trade, but to market your skills and create a reputation. Giovanni can work five times harder than everyone else, and it will still take time to grow reputation and wide recognition. But it may take less time to achieve a high level of success because there are examples to follow and an industry that is hot for expertise.

And the last lesson I take from this experiment is that even though the experts say “don’t call yourself an expert, rock star, or ninja”, perhaps doing those things is precisely what you should do because a) they’re not doing it, and b) they’re talking about it. They promote awareness of the terms and refuse to apply the same terms to themselves, creating an opportunity for somebody else. Kudos to Giovanni Gallucci for recognizing the power of calling himself a Social Media Expert.

I noticed that “social media ninja” is still up for grabs. We’ll talk later. I have some work to do.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

Share this post/Save for reference

There are now 183 million domain names registered around the world, a 17% increase over last year, but it is very likely that the web you experience is getting smaller and the reason is simple. The pace of internet growth has far out-scaled human proportions. It’s so big that without the familiarity of a consistent place, the internet would be overwhelming. Our natural response is to cull from the internet and make our individual experiences familiar and manageable. We find the places that we like, the sources that we trust, the communities that we feel affinity with, and we stick to those. This explains the fundamental reason for the success of Facebook and other social media sites.

Facebook is like an internet unto itself, but with a limited set of things you can do, and with a limited number of people you share the experience with. If the internet is worldwide, Facebook is your local coffee shop. You recognize people, you meet your friends there, you get introduced to their friends. You know what’s on the menu, and you have your favorite place to sit. While initially it feels like just another website, in a short time your friends find you and your experience becomes familiar, comfortable, personal, and participatory.

The Facebook experience can be so consuming that some web users have little time for anything else, and this is how the web gets smaller. As we cull, we limit ourselves to the familiar, where we read, watch, and participate. As our participation increases, we limit our experience of the larger web. The busier we get with our interests, the less time we have to introduce new ones. Social sites like Facebook make our experience feel complete, but manageable. This is their attraction, but potentially, also their Achilles Heel.

What would happen if your local coffee shop suddenly became immensely popular? It might become overcrowded and you wouldn’t be able to find a seat, or they could expand to accommodate their new customers. In either case, you experience would be disruptive, less accommodating, and more impersonal. This can also happen in the social web. You might realize one day that the Facebook network has grown so big that you no longer feel like it’s personal anymore. It has become like the web–and out-scaled its earlier human proportions. What then?

I believe the answer lies in micro-social communities, smaller, more focused, Facebook-like communities that connect people through some common interest, such as the community they live in, or a shared hobby or belief. Micro-social communities have the benefits of a social site, but are self-regulating in scale because of their narrow focus. By participating in a micro-social community that focuses on the place where you live, you can create connections that enhance your community experience as well as your online experience. Micro-social communities may still grow too big for comfort, it’s less likely because they are not trying to be all things to all people.

There are not many micro-social communities yet, but you can expect to see an explosion of them over the next few years as web applications for building social communities evolve. On the internet, the Next Big Thing is creating smaller, richer, more relevant experiences that connect you with your community, making the web increasingly personal.

What are your favorite micro-social communities? Tell me about them!

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

Share this post/Save for reference

Two years ago, everyone was buzzing about Second Life, the online virtual reality community that looks like a game but feels like an experiment in alternative realities. While it initially attracted the role-playing fantasy crowd, everyone started to notice when companies like IBM established a presence in Second Life. For some it offered a more immersive type of web conference. For others it was a way to get away with playing a game while pretending to work.

Second Life now appears to be on the back burner for all but the most dedicated fans in the USA with virtually zero growth in traffic over the past 18 months as attention has shifted to Facebook and Twitter. Internationally, however, there has been a noticeable increase in traffic following a surge in mid-November 2008 that came to be known as the Copybot Controversy. In the aftermath, Second Life realized an increase of about 25% in European and other international markets.

The trouble with Second Life is that it is simply too complex to be instantly addictive to a massive number of people. Unlike Twitter, where the barrier to entry is toe-stubblingly low, Second Life requires a substantial commitment of time to learn how to do the simplest things like walk in a straight line. One wrong keystroke and you’re suddenly, albeit harmlessly, flying into space. More than half of the people who give Second Life a shot don’t get serious with it. On the other hand, just 3% of their members account for half of the visits to the site. It’s the addictive nature of social interplay that accounts for a huge amount of time spent by a very small number of people.

But to pass Second Life off as a trivial pursuit to completely miss the mark. Second Lifers are showing us a very crude view into the future, much the way HTML in 1992 gave us a crude preface to today’s web. Merge Google Earth with Second Life and Amazon.com and jump forward another decade or two in raw processing power and you will start to see that a completely immersive virtual reality is indeed possible with full support for retail commerce. The kinks will get ironed out, and when keyboards are replaced with accelerometer-embedded jumpsuits, we’ll be able to interact with the virtual world in ways that are presently difficult to imagine without smirking.

For now, it’s better to leave Second Life to the role players who get their kicks out of creating avatars and mingling with virtual characters. The audience is too small for an extensive marketing program, reaching about 45,000 US visitors each day and a little more than 100,000 daily visitors worldwide. That’s equivalent to the circulation of a small to medium-sized daily newspaper. Building a marketing platform inside Second Life is costly and time consuming. There are countless better ways to spend a marketing budget.

Share this post/Save for reference

Today I gave Skimmer a quick run-through. Skimmer is the social media consolidator conceived by Fallon Worldwide, the Minneapolis-based advertising agency. As a creative shop Fallon has done some nice work in print, television, and on the internet. Creating software is an interesting new direction and was worth giving the application some time and consideration.

Skimmer is really cool because it puts all of these social media sites in one place on your computer. It’s like a two-way RSS feed between your computer and your favorite social media sites, as long as your favorite sites are Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, and YouTube. I don’t doubt that they’ll expand the program to incorporate more social media sites if the application proves to be worthy of further investment.

Skimmer works well enough as a single platform to reach these different sites, but what I think is both truly clever and deeply concerning is that Fallon gets to track each user’s involvement on social media sites, including which ones and how much they interact with each. Marketers make money by understanding the behavior of large groups of people. The price you pay for this free application is that an advertising agency gets to scan your online behavior. Should we trust them?

I’m not especially concerned about Skimmer because it’s one thing to create an application and entirely another for the program to gain enough momentum that a significant population uses it. Many people will install Skimmer because it’s free but chances are it won’t be the one application you always leave running in the background. For those who do, they’ll enjoy an intimate relationship with the folks at Fallon.

Share this post/Save for reference

I have always held a clear boundary between my professional and my personal worlds, and it was easy until recently. There was some amount of anonymity to mail lists, newsgroups, online forums, and even social sites to a degree. There is comfort in separating my professional life and my personal life. Professionally, I am known as someone who is focused and analytical. Personally I am known as someone who plays a bunch of instruments and different styles of music, is enthusiastic about Italian cars, log cabins, and photography, and does not take things too seriously. I have got nothing on Sybil, but in some sense, I am two different people.

I have also been inclined to maintain a certain amount of anonymity on social media sites. I would create an account with a “handle”, borrowing the lingo from the world of CB radio. In some ways this was good. I could keep things separate. But it was also bad because the credibility I earned on one forum did not cross over to another forum where many of the names were familiar to me, but my handle was not familiar to them.

Facebook changed all of that, and only in the last several months. I joined Facebook at the behest of my cousin, who said “you will be really surprised who you will find on FB”. She was right. It became a place where old acquaintances became reacquainted, where my cousins could get together and share family photos, where my wife could tease me, where my music friends could talk about the great session and how much Guinness was consumed.

Then my co-workers started sending friend requests. And the guy I bought a mandolin from seven years ago. And women I dated briefly, and people I never met who randomly sent a request because somehow I ended up in their address book. I paused. Where does one stop? Do I “friend” the people I bought my house from? They are friends with a dozen of my friends. Do I “friend” the friend of my ex? And if I do, what does it say when or if I decide to “unfriend” them? I am not even sure that is possible.

I cannot say where this is going, or how far it will go. I know that for now, I am drawing a line. Linked-in is for business, including personal friends whom I have had business relationships with. Facebook is for my family and closest, dearest friends. I will even add the people whom I only know personally, who are close and dear to my wife, or my closest friends. So, if you’re reading this, we have a professional relationship, and you have sent a “friend request” on Facebook that I did not respond to, please accept my apology. I am still working out exactly where all of this social media fits in my life. I do have lines. For me it is not all about a personal brand. I want my brand, but I want my privacy.

This might be an aspect of my age. I grew up in a time when we practiced in grade school how to duck under our desks if Russia sent an atomic bomb hurling toward us. I was a teenager during the late Nixon years. Everyone I knew read 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451. We learned that putting your trust in the hands of those in power was not necessarily a good idea. I contrast that view with Kevin Kelly’s suggestion that we, collectively, through the computer networks and the information we put on them, are organizing ourselves into a system that will ultimately surpass anything we have ever witnessed in all of humanity. We will be the computer.

So, do I draw my lines, or succumb to the collective? I might give you a different answer tomorrow, but for now, I am keeping the boundaries in place. It is just a little more comfortable that way, like knowing I can always duck my head under the desk if someone hurls an atomic bomb my way.

Share this post/Save for reference