Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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Technorati: Facebook, eBay, Merlin Mann, email, Google, Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Workweek, viral video, Inbox Zero, GTD, Productivity
Many consider Facebook‘s wonderful usefulness for personal networking a liability when it comes to business use of Facebook. They think personal and professional B2B networking shouldn’t be mixed in one platform. They’re particularly concerned about personal photos, videos and wall posts causing embarassment in their work world.
I’ve written before about how the Limited Profile in Facebook can eliminate many of these concerns. One problem that remains is the presence of your applications as part of your profile. You may not want to share your 24 Quote of the Day with your colleagues and customers.
So, here’s a way that you can maintain all of your professional contacts in Facebook, without divulging any personal information.
Create a Group in Facebook, like I did with Lee Aase’s Professional Contacts. You can have all of your professional business information there, with nothing personal. You can set yourself as the only one who can upload photos or videos. If anyone “tags” you in a Facebook photo, it won’t show up in this group. I suggest you name it with that same naming convention I used, i.e. “Joe Smith’s Professional Contacts.” You’ll see why in a bit.
When people search for your professional contacts group, they will get a result like this.
By calling it “FirstName LastName’s Professional Contacts” it will be easy for people to find your group, even if your name is common, like Joe Smith.
The other thing you can do is put a link to this group in the side navigation of your blog, like I did near the top right of mine.
However they get there, by searching in Facebook or by clicking a link in your blog, people can join the group to be among your Professional Contacts.
They don’t have to become your Friend and share personal information. They can send you messages within Facebook, and you can send them messages, just by being part of the same group. Having the group merely enables you to keep a list of their names handy. And if they reciprocate by forming their own Professional Contacts groups, they can build a similar profile that has only their relevant professional information, not their favorite movies, politicans, TV shows or Whom they worship. But it can have their phone, address and other contact information, to make Facebook a useful Rolodex for professional information.
Note: If you do this you likely will want to change your “Poke, Message and Friend Request” privacy settings, so that when you send a Facebook message it won’t open your profile. I’ve dialed back my settings for this reason, not so much because I’m that concerned about my privacy, but for demonstration purposes.
Is this the perfect solution? No. Ideally we will want a separate class of “friend” that lets us completely manage what information we want to share. I’m sure that’s coming. But this is a MacGyveresque workaround that has the benefit of creating an alternate profile with only professionally relevant information.
Update Sept. 1, 2008: This post is now over a year old, and as I had predicted, the ability to group friends and assign different levels of access to your profile to various kinds of friends is now available. To learn how to do this, see Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy.
Susan Reynolds drew this Fruit of the Loom video with Vince Gill to my attention, and it illustrates several important points about marketing and advertising and how it is changed with the advent of social media and networking, in the era of TiVo, YouTube and Facebook.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjGruchlKGw]
Everything about this video is done well, from the soulful playing of the Fruit Guys to the groupies mouthing the words as they gaze at the performers to the touching home videos. It isn’t slapstick viral and it probably won’t get millions of views, but this is about underwear, after all. You need to have reasonable expectations.
Note that every step after putting the video on YouTube was free for Fruit of the Loom. As of right now the two-minute version has been seen 5,300 times on YouTube. It will be interesting to track how this does over time.
Update: Here’s another good Fruit of the Loom music video from last year. Between the two versions I’ve seen on YouTube it’s had over 90,000 views so far.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLj4YgDiRW4]
Technorati: Facebook, TiVo, YouTube, Fruit of the Loom, Fruit Guys, Vince Gill, viral marketing, viral video, advertising, TV
A recent Techmeme has it that “Facebook’s closed platform and data lock-in” make it “NOT for Business.”
Please. Of COURSE Facebook is for business.
Any place that has 35 million people spending an average of 20 minutes a day absolutely has business uses.
If Facebook isn’t for business, then neither is eBay. Except of course now everyone knows people have made hugely profitable businesses solely on eBay. Many businesses found eBay valuable as a means of finding and selling to broadly dispersed customers. Even for business-to-business sales.
Now, doesn’t eBay have exactly the kind of “walled garden” characteristics that so many find it fashionable to revile in Facebook? How does it differ?
Facebook is, as Mark Zuckerberg says, a social utility. Utilities are like heating and electricity. They do things, or empower you to do things. Right off the bat there are lots of ways businesses can use Facebook to accomplish their goals. I’ve outlined a few Facebook business uses here. But beyond that, Facebook is infinitely extensible. If it doesn’t do what you want it to do, you can wait for someone to develop the application you need, or you can contract to develop the application yourself.
And unlike heat and lights — or eBay for that matter — you can use Facebook for free.
The problem isn’t with Facebook. It’s a lack of imagination in how to use it. Facebook, Twitter and all the other web 2.0 tools are just that: tools.
They aren’t the only tools for business; but web-wise MacGyvers will find creative ways to use them – not necessarily exactly according to the user manual (oh yeah, there is no user manual) – to accomplish their organizations’ goals.
For those concerned about mixing their personal and professional selves, I offer this: You can have lots of interaction with people with common interests in Facebook without becoming their Friend. You can just belong to the same groups. And for non-family members, you can use the limited profile to avoid divulging an information about yourself that you think others might find controversial. More on that in a future post.
Technorati: Facebook, eBay, business, marketing, PR, Twitter, MacGyver, walled gardens, social networks, social utility
I reviewed Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero talk at Google in this previous post, and suggested that Facebook could help create a new class of messaging, in keeping with the recommendations in The 4-Hour Workweek
But first, let’s look at the past. Merlin was full of wist as he recalled his first email account in 1993, and how special each message felt because only a dozen or so of his friends had email. Email was a much more personal experience then. Now it threatens to overwhelm everything, with many people living most of their lives in their email inboxes. This should not be. There’s much more to life.
In his New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek
One of his key recommendations is to check email no more than twice per day, and to facilitate this and reset expectations among those sending you messages he suggests creating an auto-responder for your email along these lines:
Greetings All,
Due to high workload and pending deadlines, I am currently responding to email twice daily at 12pm et and 4pm et.
If you require help with something that can’t wait until either 12pm or 4pm, please call me on my cell phone at 555-555-5555.
Thank you for understanding this move to greater effectiveness.
All the best,
Tim Ferriss
But what about people who need to be more available, whose success depends on timely response to key customers? What if responsiveness is one of your important priorities? For example, if you work in PR and a reporter with whom you are developing a relationship sends out an email to several potential interview sources, you don’t want to wait a few hours to find out about it. Someone else will have responded and will be in the story.
And sometimes you’re not at your computer. You’re in a meeting or otherwise having a life. News doesn’t happen in a predictable 8-5 schedule. So how do you stay in touch?
One “solution” to prevent missing an important email message when you’re out at a meeting is to have your Blackberry set to vibrate each time you get a new message. I used to do that. It was extremely disruptive. And it’s rude to have the Blackberry on silent mode, and then just pulling it out every so often to check messages. It tells people with whom you are meeting that they don’t have your full attention. Because they don’t.
With Facebook, you can recreate Merlin’s Edenic email world of 1993 all over again, and establish a priority level for your messages that goes beyond flagging in regular email.After all, if you’re only checking email twice a day, it doesn’t matter whether the message is flagged as highest priority or not: you’re not going to see it until you log in. That’s why you need an alternate way for people to get in touch when they really need you urgently.
If you use the Mobile application in Facebook, you can receive a text message delivered to your phone whenever someone sends you a message, or pokes you, or writes on your wall, or sends you a friend request.
So, I’m thinking I might adapt Tim’s autoresponder as follows:
Greetings All,
Due to high workload and pending deadlines, I am currently responding to email twice daily at 11 am CT and 4 pm CT.
If you require help with something that can’t wait until either 11 am or 4 pm, please call me on my office phone at 507-266-2442 during regular business hours, and ask to have me paged if I’m not at my desk.Another way to reach me quickly any time is though Facebook (www.facebook.com). If you’re not in Facebook yet it’s easy to sign up, and 150,000 people a day are joining. Search for Lee Aase in Facebook (I’m the only Lee Aase there…one of the benefits of a unique name), and click Send Message. I will get an alert text message sent to my cell phone, so I’ll know you’ve sent me an urgent message. I’ll get back to you right away.
Thank you for understanding this move to greater effectiveness. I hope it will mean that I will be able to completely respond to the non-urgent messages on that regular schedule, and give everyone the service they need.
All the best,
Lee Aase
Michael Hyatt says his experience with the 4-Hour Workweek method has made him more productive, and he’s the CEO of a major publishing company. If you click the link above you’ll see how he’s tailored the Ferris formulation of the email autoresponse.
Even someone as promiscuous is accepting Facebook friend requests as Robert Scoble is would not likely be overwhelmed by text messages in this system. I’m one of Robert’s 4,701 friends, but I’m unlikely to send him a message unless I think it will be REALLY interesting.
If someone sends you a message in this way through Facebook that you don’t think was urgent, you can let her know that this was one that could have waited. And if she persists in not respecting the boundary you’ve set, you can block further Facebook contact.
In this way, Facebook can be not only the Spam Killer because it lets you segregate personally meaningful messages from everything else, thereby turning back the clock toward Merlin’s email Camelot; when combined with your cell phone and Facebook Mobile it also can serve as a 24-hour pager that alerts you when someone truly needs to get in touch urgently.
If you’re one of the self-employed “new rich” Tim Ferriss describes, giving your cell phone number may be the best and simplest way to let people reach you urgently. If you work for a company where someone answers your phone when you’re not able to take a call, maybe this work phone/Facebook message option will be a good option, instead of giving your personal cell phone number to anyone, including spammers, who sends you an email. We’ll see.
What do you think?
Technorati: GTD, PR, Media Relations, 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, Merlin Mann, Facebook, B2B, Business uses of Facebook, email, e-mail