Adding Your Organization to Facebook Places

29th August 2010 in Facebook

There’s a great How-To post written by nonprofitorgs on adding your organization to Facebook Places. If you haven’t seen the post, check it out here: How to add your nonprofit to Facebook Places and claim your new places page.

The steps for adding your organization to Facebook Places are relatively simple to follow, however you will need to physically be at your organization in order to add the location to Places.  This was a hitch I ran into as I was trying to claim a Places page for a client. You will “allow” Facebook to use current location data to generate your exact location and plot it on an online map.

Accessing Facebook Places

Since Facebook Places was launched for iPhone users in August,  it is really easy to access and update your location from an iPhone. If you do not have any iPhone, you will need to access Places by going to http://touch.facebook.com from a web browser.

Once your location is added to Places, you will be able to click, “Is this your business?” at the bottom of your Places Page. This is where you will need to claim your page in order to be able to post updates and admin info.  To verify your claim, you’ll enter a phone number and provide one of the following: 1) Articles of Incorporation, 2) business license, or 3) BBB Accreditation. Another think to be prepared for if you are working on this task for a client.

Once you have verified your business with Facebook, you are then asked whether you would like to merge your Official Facebook Page with the Facebook Places page. If you’ve done so, please let me know. I’d love to see the results.

Is it time to test Google Voice?

25th August 2010 in Voice

Mashable’s recent story “Google Voice Telephone Booths Coming to an Airport or College Near You“, highlights Google’s creativity in promoting its Google Voice product. Retro phone booths will be set up in airports and colleges as part of this campaign where people can make calls over Internet connections.

Got Gmail?

If so, you may be getting an email invitation to join Google Voice. Google Voice is integrating with Gmail accounts so you’ll be able to make and receive phone calls right from your inbox. Like Skype, phone calls in the U.S. and Canada are free.

Before you get started with Google Voice, you’ll need to decide whether to use full version (with new phone number) or just some of the features with your existing mobile phone number.

Here are some of the features of Google Voice (with a Google phone number)

  • Use one number to manage all your phones
  • Your voicemail is like email where you can save your messages, search messages and flag important ones
  • Your voicemail messages can be automatically transcribed to text. You can then have messages sent to you via email and/or text messaging

Anyone using Google Voice? Let me know what you think.

More on this from Joining Google Voice

What are you doing on your site to enhance social traffic?

23rd August 2010 in Facebook |Social Media

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Are you creating a balanced social media strategy by integrating your social media efforts with your corporate website?

If you’re not, you’re not alone. The Gigya webinar, “Social is the next Search, is your website ready?” points out many large brand sites (look at the Apple Store site) are not integrating their social presence with their corporate site.

Perhaps this is intentional, or maybe not. What is clear is that trying to incorporate your social networking strategy with your existing website presence is a balancing act.

To begin, ask yourself these questions:

  • Have you joined social networks but are not integrating them with your website?
  • Are you currently connecting your website content to your social web presence?
  • Can customers share part of your corporate content onto other social media sites? Are you allowing your corporate website content to go viral on social networks?
  • Do you integrate social interaction into your company website to foster greater participation or are you just sending traffic from your site to social networks?

Why is social media integration important for your corporate website?

There are many reasons why you may want to consider marrying social interaction with your website including onsite social optimization (more on this in a moment), however the numbers below are reason enough to start making those connections happen within your corporate website:

  • Adoption rate of social networks continues to increase. For example, Facebook is becoming more of an attention site, traffic is outgrowing sites like Yahoo. There are 50 million tweets a day from Twitter.
  • Nielsen data shows time spent on Facebook increasing – people are spending more time talking to each other on social networks. This is where your prospects are today.
  • The marketing funnel is changing. The top of the funnel is where your prospects are spending their time – in social media. This is where you need to pay attention to get prospects to move down the funnel to interact with your company inorder to create a dedicated community of buyers.

Onsite Social Optimization

The way you approach social media optimization is the same way you approach SEO. Similar to submitting your sites to search engines for indexing and ranking your site pages, you need to connect your website to a social platform.

According to David Yovanno, begin by optimizing for 3 main user experiences:

  • Getting people register or sign into your site
  • Getting people to easily share using social connectivity
  • Getting people to engage with your content in social ways

A best practice for onsite social optimization: Integrate your site with several social network platforms in order to maximize participation on your site. This is where tools like Facebook Connect come in. Rather than directing traffic away from your site to the social networks, you bring the social network functionality to your site. Benefits include the ability to use a single system for registration and sharing. If the person has come to you, have them authenticate with your website and then integrate with the other social applications. Also, allow users to simultaneously share to multiple networks.

Ready to learn more? Check out this Webinar from AdAge: Social is the next Search: Is your site Ready?

Facebook Places Privacy Features

22nd August 2010 in Facebook |Internet Security

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Facebook’s new geolocation app – Places – allows you to use your cellphone to check in to a particular location, letting your Facebook friends know where you are.

How does Facebook Places differ from Foursquare? With Places, not only can you see which of your friends has checked in to a particular location, you can also tag friends who are with you at a location. Once you’ve used Facebook Places, any Facebook friend can check you into a location, just as if you had checked yourself in. Even if you’ve never used Facebook Places, any of your Facebook friends are able to tag you as being at a location. This information is then able to be seen by others based on your friend’s privacy settings (not necessary your settings).

Privacy Settings

The default setting on Facebook is that only people on your friends list can see your check-ins, otherwise you would need to proactively change the setting to open it up to “everyone”. For youth under 18, the setting can not be changed to “everyone” – only people on their friends list can see their check-ins.

Keep in mind, you are able to opt out of Facebook Places altogether by changing your privacy settings.

For more information:

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