Patrick Barbanes

Facebook’s new Offers is sneaky.

Facebook introduced another version of it’s own online coupon-deal thing. It’s first version was called Deals. The newest is called Offers. And it’s pretty sneaky. Here’s how it works.

An update will show up in your newsfeed. It will say something like “[Your Friend's name here] has claimed an offer”, and it will show your Friend’s picture with a small line item about the deal – say, $99 condo rental!” It won’t have much detail, see the screenshot here.

I don’t know about you, but MY first impression was that a) my friend “claiming” the offer really meant that my friend BOUGHT the offer, and b) that she wanted to share it out to let others know about it.

But neither of those was true. She neither bought it, nor explicitly said, “This deal is so good I want to share it with my friends, so let me click a Share button!”

No, what happened to her was what happened to me: she saw the same sort of message in her timeline – that one of her friends had “claimed” an offer. She clicked on the “claim offer” in order to learn more, and guess what happened? A message went out to HER friends that SHE had claimed the offer. I saw the message about her and I clicked to learn more about the offer. But instead of learning more, an update went out to MY friends that I had claimed the offer. When I’d really done no such thing, I just wanted to learn about the offer. And in fact, when you click, you don’t learn more. You get a pop-up box telling you that an email has been sent to you with details of the offer.

Sheesh!

This is like one of those viral scam video links where there’s really no video at all, but just by the link being clicked on by you, it sends out an update to all your friends that you watched a video. The social proof that you clicked the link is there, and some of your friends will click the link, too. And that all happens BEFORE you even learned what it was you were clicking on.

That’s about as under-handed as it gets.

Sure, somewhere in the depths of facebook’s settings, there’s a way to turn these Offers off – or even keep the Offers on, but turn off the sharing part (that you “claimed” an offer, when all you did was click to get more information about it). But here’s facebook again forcing users to go figure out a way to turn something off instead of just being upfront about what’s going to happen, and offering an opt-in. Something that would say, Yes, I want more information about this Offer, and yes, I want to share that with my friends.

It’s facebook’s world, and we live in it.

The Top 5 Biggest Wastes Of Time In Facebook Timeline for Pages

Social media can be a time-suck. But there are different kinds of time spent in social media: a good kind, and a bad kind.

One kind is the good kind: creating good content, and engaging with people. You know, being social. So among other things that includes spending time on Twitter actually initiating some conversations based on something you’ve seen in your tweet-stream, as well as creating good blog posts that will deepen an existing reader relationship or engender comments, and sharing stories on Facebook.

The other kind is, obviously, the bad kind. That includes obsessing over your twitter profile background (there was a time when providing custom twitter profile backgrounds was a huge business!) or mastering the use of a feature of these incredibly feature-rich social sites that you’re never really going to actually use anyway.

Facebook, of course, can be a huge time-suck. For good reasons (it’s fun!) and for bad (it keeps changing!). The change to the Timeline format is a great example of the bad, because it’s filled with features that professionals are urging you to spend time on in order to fully take advantage of this new “canvas” upon which you can “tell your brand story.”

So to save you some time, here’s my list of the five biggest wastes of time in Facebook’s Timeline. Yes, they can be advantageous. But no, depending on your business and your strategy, they might not be worth the time it takes to even learn about them.

1. The Cover Photo.
Frankly, this is definitely an area where I think the whole “Timeline thing” is overrated. I don’t recommend spending much time on designing or picking the absolute best cover photo, as I’ve read many guides to Facebook do. You’ve got more important things to do – like run a business! The stats are that only a small percent of people ever re-visit your Page at all after Liking it. That means that only a small percentage of your fans ever see your cover photo more than once. OK, first impressions count, sure, so it’s important to have an appropriate cover photo for when people do arrive there. But that’s like telling a man to keep his zipper up on his pants while he’s out in public – it’s pretty obvious. I wouldn’t tell him to spend hours designing a perfect zipper. Make sure it zips up, and he’s good to go. Same thing with the Cover photo. Don’t obsess over it, unless you think yours can create and maintain some amazing “buzz” about it that will drive flocks of new visitors to your Page.

2. Backdating.
When blogging, depending on your blogging platform, you could usually go in and change the date that you published a blog post. You could actually write and publish a blog post today, but change the date to make it look like you had published it yesterday, or even last year. Now you can do that with your facebook status updates, too. I’m going in search of a use for this, but a few come to mind quickly: instead of making people think that the picture of my amazing dessert at the restaurant represented the dinner I had TODAY, I can change the date to make it look like I had that awesome dessert last month. Or I can post a happy birthday update to someone, belatedly, but then backdate the post so it looks like I really said happy birthday on their actual birthday. I hate being late with that kind of stuff.

3. Milestones.
Somewhat similar to backdating, milestones are events (or actions or “stories”) that you can backdate into your Timeline, and which show up as huge banners across your Timeline. So a brand can fill in it’s company history – true, or in the case of Captain Morgan’s Rum’s Timeline, partly fictional. This allows ardent fans to scan through a Timeline and learn amazing facts about the brand, such as the introduction of it’s first solar water panel heating system for it’s corporate offices, or the demotion of one it’s vice presidents to branch manager. Milestones can be thought of as those pretty boring lists of corporate, well…milestones…that many corporations put in their annual reports. And we all know how people love to read annual reports. So unless you’ve got staff sitting around with nothing to do, I don’t really recommend spending much time going back in time to flesh out your brand history on Timeline.

(On a side note, this blog post was inspired by the now-ongoing (May, 2012) 30-day Really Simple Blog Challenge. Learn more about it by opening the really simple blog challenge facebook tab – it will open in a new window – right now, then coming back to finish reading this post!)

4. Pinning Posts.
The ability to “pin” a post to the top of your Timeline activity has gotten a lot of publicity, mostly favorable. The problem is, those few people who DO come to your Timeline (see #1), will look at your activity and see an old-dated post (it can stay pinned up top for as long as a week) and get the impression that you’re not really all that active. So whatever great impression you made with your incredibly amazing cover photo (see #1 again) could get ruined by a pinned post. Be honest, MOST people are not going to notice that little “pin” icon on the post or understand that it means there could be more recent activity beneath that post. Sure, there can be advantages to pinning certain posts, but for the most part, a waste of time.

5. Ability to message with fans.
Previously, the only interaction a brand page could have with someone who Liked the page (a fan) was by posting an update and hoping the fans saw it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, or otherwise engaged with it. But along with the mostly-visual changes of Timeline came an operational one: now a brand page can actually go one-on-one with fans. The fan has to initiate the interaction, but this is a dramatic change. But how can you encourage private messages between a Fan and you/your Brand? (What if you just ASKED for messages?) Now, it’s not just you posting and your fans reading, commenting or liking – which is one kind of relationship. It’s actual one-to-one dialogue, which is a whole deeper level of relationship. Imagine the possibilities! Some of the suggestions I’ve read have been to ask fans who are leaving negative messages on your Timeline – let’s say they’ve had a bad customer service experience with you – to please message you privately so you can deal with their problem more intimately and make them feel more important. That could work, but now your customer service reps who are busy fielding angry tweets are also having to read and respond to angry facebook messages, which are harder to ignore than angry facebook posts. Because, really, if I post a complaint on your wall and never see a response, I’ll just shake my head and sigh at your lack of engagement. But if I leave you a private message and I get no response, now you’ve really pissed me off even more.

So there you have it.

Again, there are and will be positive uses for these things, but currently I see way too much attention being paid to them. My advice? Stay away from them, and continue to focus on posting engaging content that will reach into your fan’s newsfeeds and be shared by them with their friends to get you new fans; reach out and engage on OTHER pages, to be seen as one of the people who doesn’t just broadcast but also goes out and responds (kind of like commenting on other people’s blogs); and create useful custom tabs that you can drive visitors to through direct linking and advertising.

So those are my Top 5 most important changes in Facebook Timeline for Pages. What do YOU think? Do you see other changes that would fit in that list?

If You’re Not Using LinkedIn…

Read the brief blog post I’ve linked to below and the comments on it (only three as of this writing). It’s by a Recruiter but I want you to read it from your business and career perspective – whatever that perspective might be. Take note of how the author and his commenters view and use LinkedIn versus how they view Facebook or Twitter. How they view it is not confined to just Recruiters. Then ask yourself if you are using LinkedIn a) at all, b) in a way that could potentially put you in front of or get you engaged with these kind of users, and c) if that would be valuable to you. Could spending time on LinkedIn help you find a job or a partner or an investor faster and more effectively than spending time and effort on Twitter or Facebook?

Go read this now: http://t.co/pQnTOEe

And I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: linkedin, recruiters, recruiting

Getting More “Likes” Of Your Facebook Page

Here’s an example of how a business can use a contest to increase Likes to their Facebook Fan Page.

But is it sneaky, or is it smart marketing?

The scenario: A professional photographer holds a photo contest. She announces the contest and gets some of her current fans to submit their amateur photos, which she will post in an album on her Page. She offers a prize to the person whose photo gets the most Likes. In this case, the prize is a valuable photo-shoot.

The prize is incentive for the people who submitted their photos to start telling their Friends to go Like the photo they submitted, so they can win. Easy enough.

But the catch is, someone has to Like the photographer’s Page BEFORE they can Like the photo. That’s just how Facebook works: you can’t Like something – a post, a link, a comment, a photo, etc. – that is on someone’s Page until you have Liked the Page itself.

So if you wanted to vote for your friend’s photo, you’d have to Like the professional photographer’s Page, and then Like the particular photo you wanted to “vote” for with your Like.

The end result is that the professional photographer gets a whole lot more Page Likes from people she’d never have reached before. Picture many people who have photos in the contest, each campaigning to get more and more Likes for each of their photos. If there are only 15 photos in the example contest, and each photo garners just 10 Likes from Friends and family, that’s a total of 150 new Likes of the photographer’s Page!

Now, go try it. Why? Here’s my own sneak marketing in this lesson: my daughter’s photo is one of the ones in the contest, and we could use your “vote” – your Like – so she can win the photo-shoot! She’ll be so happy when she wins. And if she loses, well…let’s just say I’ll be in the dog-house for quite a while!

So here’s what you have to do, if you’re inclined to throw a few clicks around for me…I mean, for my daughter.

1: LIKE the photographers’s Page at http://www.facebook.com/photosbymavi

2: LIKE the photo of my daughter, Madeleine at http://on.fb.me/likethisphoto

And think about it this way: does it help the photographer to get people Liking her Page not because they were interested in her work, but because they were doing a friend a favor?

On the one hand, the photographer might appear more credible, because many people equate a high number of Page Likes to some measure of success.

But on the other hand, what real value does the photographer get from having a connection with people who only Liked her Page in order to help a friend out?

So, is it a sneaky way to inflate one’s Page Like numbers, or is it good marketing? What do you think?

Emerge Broward, Here I Come!

Looking forward to speaking at tonight’s event by Emerge Broward, “How To Rule Social Media”!

Facebook Pages: How to get notified of fan comments and posts to your Page.

Facebook won’t do it for you, so you have to do it yourself – figure out how to get notified when fans post and comment on your Facebook Fan Page! Here are a few ways, including › Continue reading

Help an unemployed person: a request for sponsors and donations

I’ve never charged someone who is out of work, and I never want to. For anything. When you’re unemployed, every dollar…every nickel…counts.

I’ve recently launched an online branding, blogging, and social media training program, Really Simple Bootcamp. It’s priced at $197, a very fair cost for the value. It teaches a way to brand your small business or even yourSELF (a “Personal Brand”), to get that brand online in a way that goes beyond the usual website – that is, including a blog as a central part of the site – and integrating core social media/networking activity to engage online.

It’s perfect for unemployed folks.

But I don’t want them paying $197. I don’t want them paying $1.

So what I’m requesting are donations and sponsors – people who will step up and chip in so that people who are out of work can take the course.

Donate what you can by clicking the button below. Your donation will go into a general fund (no tax-exempt status or organization has been set up for this yet, but I do intend to get there) that will enable me to give free course registration to as many unemployed as possible.

This will help me offset any costs of conducting this and other training for the unemployed. Even though it’s all delivered online – some live, some recorded – there are costs involved, from the cost of hosting to webinar service costs, aweber (email system) costs, etc. I’ve also done, and will continue to hold, free live training for unemployed people, and there are always costs involved in doing that. So any contribution you can make will help.

Likewise, I’m going to be setting up to donate part of the revenue from all registration fees to be contributed to an organization that helps unemployed workers get back to work. If you have suggestions of an organization for that, please leave it in the comments below or email me directly at patrick at patrickbarbanes dotcom or call me at 1-800-951-1156.

And if you can, please chip in by clicking the “Chip In” button in the widget below, and chip in what you can, even $1 or $5 is appreciated! I’ll probably set up a thank you page that lists (if you want) your name as a donor/sponsor, and the names of some of the unemployed people (if they want) who have taken the course thanks to your generosity.

Any ideas or advice along these lines are always welcome!

Why It’s Not About The Numbers

Government affairs can be tedious and boring sometimes – like watching CSPAN when you’re in the mood for “Three’s Company.” (What, that show’s not still on?)

But in a fascinating article (Twitter Diplomacy: U.S. Diplomacy Embracing Twitter Amid Global Crises) about how the United States government, and specifically the Department of State, is embracing, using, and proselytizing about social media, we learn that:

The State Department is tightening its embrace of Twitter and other social media as crises grip the Middle East and Haiti, with officials finding new voice, cheek and influence in the era of digital diplomacy.

Even as it struggles to contain damage caused by WikiLeaks’ release of classified internal documents, the department is reaching out across the Internet. It’s bypassing traditional news outlets to connect directly and in real time with overseas audiences in the throes of unrest and upheaval. (emphasis mine)

All well and good. President Obama’s White House is no stranger to social media, so it makes sense that his Cabinet gets acquainted with it.

But what stuck out for me was the part about department spokesman, P.J. Crowley:

In recent days, department spokesman P.J. Crowley has tweeted to knock down rumors, amplify U.S. policy positions, appeal for calm and urge reforms in Haiti, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Well before he addressed the State Department press corps on the return to Haiti of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and the possible return of ousted President Jean-Betrand Aristide, Crowley took to Twitter to pronounce the U.S. position

But is anybody listening?

It turns out that department spokesman P.J. Crowley’s Twitter account – @PJCrowley had – at the time of the article – only 9,717 followers. That’s twice as many as me, but from a global perspective, that’s chump change. Heck, parody accounts of oil companies have been known to get over 150,000 followers!

But it’s not always about the numbers, and this is a great case in point.

Crowley’s reach – he has 9,717 followers – may not rival that of celebrities, sport stars or even other government officials. But those tracking his pronouncements include virtually all the journalists, pundits and analysts who deal with U.S. foreign policy, as well as ordinary citizens and foreign ministers of other countries.

Clearly, it’s not how many you know, it’s WHO you know: who is really desiring to hear and engage with you, to act on some of the information or conversations you may have.

And it’s not just the number of followers you have or don’t have that matters:

The audience for (Crowley’s) micro-blog posts also expands exponentially when his followers pass along his messages to their followers, particularly when those messages deal with pressing issues of the day.

“The number of retweets he gets relative to the size of his following is very impressive and shows that he has near-mastered the medium,” said Alec Ross, Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation and State Department “uber-Tweeter,” who has nearly 320,000 Twitter followers. “It connects him to an audience of influencers in 100-plus countries.”

Ah, yes, RE-tweets. So in this case, he’s not only followed by people who look to him for information, but who also deem his information valuable enough to pass on!

“What we are looking for is retweets, which tells us what we are saying is getting noticed and passed along to others,” Crowley told the AP. “That means we are expanding our reach.”

This is eye-opening for many reasons. Think about it. The State Department (headed by Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State). Looking for retweets. That’s mind-blowing to me!

So before you go on the hunt or even go to some twitter-store to automatically buy “Followers” off a virtual shelf, remember P.J. Crowley.

And understand why it’s not always just about the numbers.

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Over-exposed? No… Meeting New People!

It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks for me, appearing on tv and radio – but the best part about the appearances has been the people the appearances put me in touch with.

For starters, the CNBC documentary, “The Facebook Obsession,” started airing. I’m featured in it (stretching the word “featured” here, but that’s how they describe it! – my two sentences run from 25:00 to 25:39), and it’s resulting in some interesting contacts.

An old buddy of mine from the late ’70′s that I hadn’t seen since back then contacted me on Facebook. It was great hearing from him, so…yay for Facebook!. We worked together in New York City, and we used to blow our paychecks playing Space Invaders and other games in the arcade under Penn Station. One event in particular comes to mind: there was an Atari football game that we loved to play – him against me, mostly – and we were experts. He usually kicked my butt at it, though. One time, as we headed to the table, another couple of guys approached it from the other side. We all arrived nearly simultaneously. Someone coughed, and we stared each other down. “WE were next,” said one of the other guys. Gerry and I considered the situation. This was OUR turf. The tension was palpable. It was like a stand-off in a Western film. I can’t remember if it was Gerry or me that said it, but one of us did: “We’ll play you for it…” And so we did. Guess who won.

Also, a high school friend from my one year in 1972 at Locust Valley High School on Long Island, NY, contacted me through Facebook. “Was that you I saw on TV? Hard name to forget.”.

On Tuesday, I moderated a panel discussion for the Social Media Club, South Florida, about How Human Resources Professionals Are Using Social Media. A good time was had by all – maybe mostly by the panelists, as jovial a group as I’ve ever seen!

With Elizabeth Gutierrez-Saury, Regional Director, Digital Strategy, TMP Worldwide

Wednesday, I was guest for an hour on an AM radio show – “The Evening Dream Team” – to talk personal branding and social media. They’re great guys, doing good for the community by spreading messages of inspiration.

Thursday morning, I spent 90 minutes as the featured guest on Michele Loreto-Chase‘s online video show, for her training on “Back To Work Southwest Florida.” Michele is a powerhouse of a woman in Southwest Florida, connecting and developing communities of like-minded people, and whose focus is always on how much she can give and give back.

And Thursday afternoon, I co-host an internet radio show, “Social Chats” with Tonya Scholz. Tonya is small in size but huge in personality, determination and energy!

One of my beliefs is that “If you want to be in the right place at the right time, be in a lot places a lot of the time.” And while it was great being able to talk about what I do, how I am, etc, etc, it was even greater making contact with people who matter.

How To Check Your Applications On Facebook

You probably have applications installed on Facebook that you don’t even remember. Some of them have more access and control than you probably want. In any case, here’s a short screencast on how to check them, and WHY! (you’ll want to read the article that I’ve linked below the video, too)

Read more about the Dr. Pepper fiasco!