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

I switched over to the laptop and checked GoDaddy for viralworthy.com and it was available. I grabbed it. I mean, why not? If I could easily post the stuff that I think is really worthy of attention, I become a filter for others. If people happen to like the way I filter, maybe they’ll pay attention to my website.

A few weeks ago I had stumbled upon a site called waxinandmilkin.com that was very simple, just great pictures and comments. It was elegant, simple, and engaging. I liked their taste. I liked it so much that I poked into their source code and saw they used a site called Tumblr to create their blog. I made a mental note–must do something with Tumblr.

You see where this is going, right? In less than 1 hour, http://viralworthy.com went live. I plugged in a few quick favorite videos, a quote about advertising, and set up my Twitter, Gmail, Disqus, and Facebook feeds. I downloaded the Tumblr iPhone app, scheduled a few posts for later release, and I’m rolling. Easy Peasy. Too easy.

The experience has left me with a number of unanswerable questions that can be distilled to this: When creating a web destination is so easy, does it diminish value or enhance value of the web community? I’m glad it’s easy. But I’m also glad that I don’t make my living designing web pages anymore. Both web design and programming have become a commodity. And when the bar is lowered, the noise floor rises exponentially. It becomes increasingly more difficult to find the quality among the rubbish.

The more the bar is lowered, the more filtering we need. The best filters will always be people that you trust and respect. Brands who engage in social media should take notice. The more noise in your channel, the more people will tune you out. Understand what your social media priorities are and keep them in focus. Be dynamic, be personal, but don’t make noise for its own sake. We have enough of that already, thank you.

Share this post/Save for reference

Do you believe computers can change the world? In 1992 I fell into a debate with my then-girlfriend about computer technology and online communities. To her, computers were a waste of time, a distraction from things that really mattered. She was a writer. She wrote with pen and pad. I was a computer junkie, desktop publisher, and online forum moderator. I wrote too, but my writing was conversational and with people I only knew through my screen and keyboard.

She resigned her side of the debate when I spoke passionately about how the online world could change society, education, nationalism, and everything. I argued that in the computer world, people were not judged by age, gender, economic status, accent, or country of origin. You were valued based on what you said and how you said it. That was before online video, photographic avatars, and social media sites that share your birthday and “which sex in the city character you are most like”.

Slowly I watched my revolution take place, while at the same time, I watched my utopian dreams shattered by spam, porn, gambling, big media, and online shopping. The old networks are gone, replaced by the internet, which has expanded into an unimaginably brilliant universe where the best and the worst of everything co-exists. Still, I never forgot my dream.

How we spend our time online is up to us. We can watch reruns of “The Family Guy” or we can attend lectures at Harvard or Stanford from anywhere in the world. We can shop until we drop, or we can invest in people’s future through micro-financing sites like Kiva.org. Ultimate, how we spend our time defines us.

I recently decided to use some of my time differently. I created a social networking site built around the simple idea of kindness. The site brings together people and humanitarian organizations in a new way. My reasoning is that there is strength in numbers and a community of kind people can impact the world meaningfully beneficent ways.

Are you activating social change through social media? How are you making a difference? Tell me at KindLike.Us

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

When I started blogging I had a goal in mind, to provide a healthy and unique perspective on matters that are important to our business and our customers. It seemed a simple enough task but the longer I consider what it means to participate in the conversation, the more I am drawn to write for other bloggers and social media pundits rather than the people whom our agency serves. Am I falling into the same trap many others have already succumbed to?

Blogging is about communication and recognition. The reason people blog is to communicate with others who want to listen. But once the blogging starts we all like to think that what we have to say has merit, which we measure by how many people actually read the darn things. Measuring yourself by your readership leads you down the always present path of writing to increase readership rather than writing to share original ideas. One quick way to increase readership is to make controversial statements that cannot be ignored in a forum where you will be noticed.

This technique is nothing new. People like Rush Limbaugh have been doing it for years. Being noisy and controversial agitates, polarizes, and motivates people to take action. One clever attempt at baiting social media bloggers was one where “social media experts” were clumped into several broad categories and then described somewhat unflatteringly. Calling out everyone who considers themselves a social media expert in one swipe was a small stroke of genius and it had the intended effect. People responded overwhelmingly, polarizing around whether the author had gotten it completely right or completely wrong.

Posturing makes me suspicious of an author. As a result, I pay more attention to what their motive might be rather than what they have to say and that depreciates whatever value I might have gained from their insight. If bloggers want to architect their work to gain numbers and recognition, it’s their business. But are they speaking honestly, or are they just creating a bunch of useless noise like those brainless political pundits who will say anything to improve their ratings? And are they really helping anyone understand social media any better, or are they just filling space with garbage to be consumed by readers who are attracted to the controversy the same way kids are attracted to a schoolyard fight?

I’d like to think I’m better than that, that we’re all better than that, but the straight and narrow road is long and lonely. In a perfect world, original content and a uniquely valuable perspective will always win out, but it’s not a perfect world. Originality takes time and thought for both the writer and the reader. We all value an easy idea and a quick read because it demands less of us. But once in a while, perhaps we all need to think about why we’re blogging. Are you blogging for fame among other bloggers, or is it because you have something to say that is worth the time it takes to say it, and more importantly, the time it takes to read and consider it?

Share this post/Save for reference

Over the last several years I’ve seen different types of websites come and go. You might recall the era when auto-generated indexes dominated Google’s search results for a short time until Google figured out a way to delist them. More recently I’ve noticed blog sites that have content that’s been obviously scraped from legitimate websites and the words modified to make somewhat awkward phrasing. These various websites are built with one purpose in mind–gain high rankings on key search terms, and then make the most pertinent content on those pages the advertisements that Google serves up. The idea is to make money on pay-per-click. I always knew how it worked in theory, but I decided that I’d like to better understand why these people work so hard at what they do.

I spent the better part of my day recently exploring black hat SEO tools and techniques. It’s not that I want to become one of them, I simply wanted to know what I could learn from their approach that might also work in legitimate SEO. Much of what I saw was clearly disreputable. People try selling all sorts of gimmicks from putting together bundles of free software and some documentation on how to use it, to selling electronic books on topics like dog training and “how to” guides. There is software for spamming blogs and forums, hundreds of thousands at a time, and software for stealing content from other sites and republishing it on your own. These are all unscrupulous pastimes.

On the brighter side of this underbelly I did see a verification of approaches I do recommend to clients. Article marketing, link building, videos and podcasts, social bookmarking, blog commenting, and participation in social media sites all came up as things anyone must do, black, white, or purple hat, in order to promote your web presence.

There are far fewer bad guys than good on the web, but since most of them are scavenging an income stream from a few dollars per site, it takes many websites to make it worth their while. And though Google’s programmers are smart, the accumulated intelligence among black hat marketers is a force to be reckoned with.   There is a huge and hungry market for products that help these people get around the normal defenses that us bloggers and forum creators have in place.

We’re always going to have black hat marketers mixing in with the good content on the web. The ones that provide quality original content will at least be the group who lead that crowd because in the end, it’s the content that wins, not the page rank tricks.

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

It works the same with any social media site. First the trailblazers come in, and figure out that there’s a new frontier–a place where they can be themselves, make their own rules, put up posters on the walls, do what they want.

The trailblazers are followed by the adventurers, who enjoy the relative anonymity. They stick around because they’ve found a communication channel with a relatively high signal and very little noise. They invite their friends with whom they can communicate in relative peace.

Pretty soon, having heard stories about the adventurers, along come the pioneers, the Seth Godin and Neil Patel types. They love adventure, but they’re also entrepreneurs. They see the possibilities of building a bank and a hotel. Then they advertise. They get the word out about this hot new pioneer village where you can be yourself, make your own rules, and do your banking all at once.

At this point, the trailblazers and adventurers start to move on. It’s no longer what they were initially attracted to. But that’s okay, because now we’ve got a nicely growing community. The influx of new members expands at an exponential rate, and the folks who capitalize on it are the pioneers. Others try to move in and share in the wealth, but mostly, they simply serve to enlarge the audience even more.

All of this growth attracts great numbers of people who have little investment in the original ideas, but are attracted to any place they see a huge crowd of people they can engage. By engage, I mean advertise to. At the same time, there is a huge surge of people who join the community because they’ve heard its a great place to visit, much like a theme park.

And the more it grows, the more it ripens as a platform for marketing, and the more difficult it becomes to find the stuff that the community was built on in the first place. The noise buries the signal.

In the end, the pioneers, having grown rich, insulate themselves from the larger community, stepping out in public only when they have a message to share that serves their interests in some way. The marketers generate most of the content, and the population generates most of the commentary, but without any of the incision that characterized the early settlers. Eventually the community may even turn into a neglected slum.

This may sound like fiction, but it’s not. It happened on Compuserve, it happened on Usenet, it happened on the web, and it’ll happen to Twitter. The lower the barrier to entry, the faster it happens. Social communities die from overpopulation.’

Share this post/Save for reference

There are ways that you can address this problem, but first you need to chill. Let your emotions wane so that you can address the issue with a clear head. Evaluate your position in the community. How long have you been a member? Are you a recent arrival, or have you been engaged in conversation for years? How about the other member? These distinctions matter and dictate the best course of action.

It’s never a good idea to take up the challenge. You will get sucked into a battle that you cannot win because it will polarize and alienate most members of the community regardless of who’s right. Don’t even acknowledge that a gauntlet has been thrown.

If you are a recent arrival, the best thing you can do is to let it go. You’re better off not responding at all than to engage the other party and risk an ugly scene. Some people tend to impose their hostility on communities where they feel they have nothing at stake. If you allow yourself to sucked into a flamewar with one of these individuals, you will lose credibility. The other member might have a reputation for being a hothead or a bigot but also a respected authority in good standing with the community. If you’re new, you wouldn’t know that. As the custodian of a brand, you have much more at risk than the other person. That’s why it’s best to let it go.

Assume you are a member in good standing with the community and the other member is new, that might also be a good time to sit back. Other senior members in the community will most likely come to your aid and interject themselves into the situation. You  might even appeal to one or two in private, asking them if they might intercede on your behalf. While this won’t work when you’ve newly joined a community, it’s a very effective way for established members to preserve the peace.

If you are both long time members of the community, then it’s likely that someone made a mistake. One of you said something and it came across much harsher than either of you intended. Your best action is a direct and graceful admittance that somehow you got off on the wrong foot and to offer an apology–regardless of whether you believe the other person was wrong or right. Again, you have more at risk, and a willingness to be diplomatic will improve your standing among the general community.

Conflict is a part of online conversation. At one time or another, it happens to everyone. But gentle humor, attention toward the community as a group, and diplomacy can guide you through any conflict without damage to your reputation or to your brand.

Share this post/Save for reference