Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Top 10 Facebook Business Uses

Over the last couple of weeks, I have done several posts relating to Facebook and how businesses and organizations can take advantage of its easy community-building and networking capabilities. Not to mention that it’s free.

Here’s a synopsis of the highlights (so far), with links to the posts with fuller discussion. I started to do a top 10, but then realized I’ve done a dozen. No extra charge for the last two.

Crisis management – creating “dark” sites in Facebook (or on a WordPress.com blog) that can go live quickly to communicate effectively with affected constituencies. Communicate meaning two-way conversations.
Limited profiles – how to set a division between what you reveal to close friends and family vs. business and professional networks.
How Facebook makes everyone a “connector” and why Facebook has reached a Tipping Point
Facebook vs. “White Label” social networking software, and why and when organizations should consider each.
A case study of a group spontaneously formed in Facebook surrounding the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
How Facebook can put the “relations” back into Media Relations
Examples of organizations with Facebook groups, official and otherwise
Why organizations should get in on the Facebook groups land rush
A vision for how Facebook could become a “Cheers” for industry-specific journalist and newsmaker interactions (which is related to the “putting relations into media relations” post.)
And another related post, Toward a Medical News community
The Facebook/social networking session at the Frost & Sullivan MindXChange
The WordPress.com application for the Facebook platform, which ties what I put on this blog into my Facebook profile (and you can “friend me” here)
To make it a Baker’s Dozen, here’s one more, my initial thoughts as I started this Facebook trek.

Technorati: Facebook, business, PR, news media, crisis communications, social networking, 35W, bridge, collapse, WordPress.com, Facebook platform

The Only Free Thing in Las Vegas

As I am sitting at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, coming home from the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention and job fair, I’m enjoying one of the few inexpensive services in Sin City: free wireless internet access.

At the airport that is. At the Paris hotel it was the customary $12.95 for 24 hours. It’s only free at McCarran.

It’s funny that the higher-end hotels charge for wireless, while the budget motels on the interstate put up big banners advertising their free wireless service. Funny, but not surprising I guess. The budget motels are using it as a differentiator, to draw in weary travelers making snap decisions on where to stay. For the pricier hotels, people have usually made reservations in advance, and may be business travelers getting reimbursed for expenses, so it’s not a barrier.

It’s just funny because the cost of the wireless service to the providers is so negligible.

Congratulations to the folks in charge of the McCarran airport, LAS, for not gouging on the wireless service. More airports should be like this. They are publicly owned, and we pay taxes to support them. They should make wireless access free for all travelers.

By the way, the Rochester, Minn. airport (RST) offers free wireless, too. Makes me want to say Rah! Rah!

Technorati: Wireless, free, wifi, Las Vegas, LAS, RST, Rochester, NABJ

B2B Facebook: Limited Profile

Note: I originally wrote this post in August, 2007. Facebook has significantly improved its privacy options since then, and now you have the ability to create a better separation of your personal and professional networking. Feel free to read the rest of this post for background, but be sure to check out Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy for more updated information.

I’m distancing myself from some of my Facebook friends.

Really, I like you all, and if you want to be my friend friends, I’ll be happy to open up more access. Just let me know, and I’ll take you off “restrictions.”

My opacity is for the greater good. It’s my part in helping make Facebook a vibrant B2B tool. Not that Facebook really needs my help; but if I can help nudge it along the business adoption curve, I’ll take some satisfaction.

And whether I actually have any influence in helping to break down resistance to B2B Facebook uses or not, at least I’ll be on record: I believe it’s inevitable that Facebook will increasingly be used for networking in the B2B environment, and that those who start using Facebook for interactions with business partners will be leaders in a trend that will seem obvious in hindsight.

Facebook makes it easy to build or renew relationships. I’ve used it to find several former classmates, even though our age group isn’t among the highest users. And I’ve made some interesting new friends through my blog, and Twitter and Facebook.
Business is all about relationships. And so a tool like Facebook that makes it easier to create, maintain and strengthen relationships will become widely used for business relationships, sooner or later. With people increasingly spending time forming and cultivating personal relationships there, sooner seems more likely to me.
But sometimes, too much information can color perceptions and perhaps even poison a relationship. Some employers may be concerned that employees’ personal actions or beliefs may turn off potential customers.

Part of the concern undoubtedly arises from the perceived “tell all” nature of Facebook’s personal profile. After all, among the questions Facebook asks (and you’re free to not provide it) are your political philosophy and religious views. And we all know politics and religion are the discussions businesses want to keep out of their interactions, because people tend to have strong opinions and knowing that a business associate is of a different political persuasion may chill some commercial relationships.

On the other side, part of the fun of Facebook is finding people in your network who share your views, whether on deeper matters or more trivial interests such as TV shows like 24 or Monk. There are even 93 others in my Minneapolis-St.Paul Network who are, like me, fans of Raising Arizona. Some people think that by interjecting too many business relationships into Facebook, we’ll kill what’s wonderful about it.

I remember some of the same concerns about the internet when it began to be used for commerce. Just after Al Gore had his Big Idea, a significant group — and I don’t know whether it was a minority or a plurality or even a majority — thought the internet should be forever preserved as a pristine digital version of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But as web access became democratized, people found the web was really useful for commerce. So commerce happened. The purists got over it.

The limited profile probably was first started because of kids not wanting parents to see what all their friends were writing on their walls. But it can work to limit personal information shared with business associates, too.

That’s why I’ve started using the limited profile feature on Facebook. Not because I want to hide anything, but lest I alienate potential work colleagues or journalists who viscerally dislike Nicholas Cage, I’m not letting anyone but close friends and family see my full profile.
So here’s what I recommend: Create a limited profile in Facebook. Deselect everything except Contact Info, Work Info and Status Updates, and also deselect the Mini-Feed.

Then, when work colleagues or internet strangers ask to add you as a friend, you can accept like Scoble, but instead of two clicks (accept, skip this step), you’ll have three, including checking the box so they only see the limited profile. So in this way, as Scoble says, Facebook becomes the new Business Card/Rolodex, but much more powerful because it also is the new media distribution network.

That way your business network members can know how to contact you, where you’ve worked and what you’ve last updated as your status, but other things of a personal nature will be hidden.

This gets a long way toward creating a wall between personal and professional Facebook profiles. The only sticking point is that applications in the Facebook Platform still show up in the limited profile. I can turn them off for all of my friends, but not just for those in the limited profile. So everyone who is my friend gets to see my favorite Weird Al Yankovic videos.

There is a simpler option, and that is to decline friend requests from people who aren’t your family or kindred spirits. You can still use Facebook to send them messages, and you can belong to the same groups. You just won’t see each other’s personal information.

Everything above can be done right now. For a complete and more satisfying solution, a bit of programming will be needed by someone, likely in one of two ways.

The first is for application developers to enable users to block display of the applications in their limited profiles. The better way would be for Zuckerberg & Co. to develop another level of “friend.” Then the existing privacy mechanisms could be used to block these professional associates from access to information from applications like iLike, Twitter or Mac Lover.

People could even set their defaults so that when new friends are added, they are accepted as “acquaintances” or whatever the middle-level “friend” would be called, instead of being given full access.

Just as VeriSign and others developed encryption to make credit card transactions secure and increase confidence in commercial use of the internet as a whole, if Facebook can create these two tiers of friends, or maybe even multiple levels, this will pave the way for maximum B2B Facebook use.

Technorati: B2B, Facebook, BtoB, B to B, profile, limited profile, ANWR, Raising Arizona, business, marketing, pr, Twitter, iLike, Weird Al

Going to NABJ in Las Vegas

Thursday morning at 5:20 a.m. I’m leaving for Las Vegas for the 32nd annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists.

I’ll be there until Saturday morning, and am really looking forward to the NABJ convention. I’m going to be with Dorothy McConnell from Mayo Clinic’s Human Resources department; we have an exhibit booth giving information about working at Mayo Clinic, especially in our department of Public Affairs.

My team works with National Media and New Media for Mayo Clinic, so I hope to get to visit with people who might be interested in making the jump to media relations, and to networking with journalists who are and will be covering health care news.

Fortune magazine has named Mayo among the Top 100 best places to work for a few years. I can vouch for that, and I think what my team gets to do is particularly interesting, communicating about the latest medical advances and helping to provide quality health information for consumers.

NABJ Las Vegas
I’ve put my picture above, so if you see me, stop and say hi.

For those interested in following the event, the NABJ Breaking News blog will have highlights, and students also are maintaining a fun site, ISpyVegas: Word on the Strip. I’d love to meet with Aaron Morrison or Renita Burns to talk about how they’re using social media in connection with the convention, and what kinds of social networking sites they find useful and helpful.

I hope to do a few posts while I’m there, too.

Technorati: NABJ, National Association of Black Journalists, Convention, Las Vegas, Mayo Clinic, Media Relations, PR

Facebook Crisis Communications

Organizations of all kinds need to prepare for crises, whether it be a product recall, a natural disaster or a political issue. Crisis communicators often recommend establishing “dark” sites that are not published to the web, but that can be quickly made public in the event of, well… an event.

One really easy way to do this is through Facebook. As I’ve detailed here, Facebook has three main types of free groups: open, closed, and secret.

You can prepare for events you expect to happen eventually by establishing a secret group in Facebook for crisis communications. For example, a local government agency in southern Florida could create a secret group “Fort Lauderdale Hurricane Information,” and pre-populate it with information from its pre-written evacuation plan.

When Amos, or Bob, or Carla, or Doug or whomever starts heading toward the community, they could simply update the information to reflect current reality and change the status to “Public” and it’s instantly available to anyone. Then place a link to the Facebook group from the organization’s main page to send people there for news updates and discussion. And you can establish a few administrators in advance, too.

For example, you can join my Facebook group called Social Network Options for Organizations by clicking this link. And you can “friend” me by clicking this one.
Groups like this will form in the aftermath of tragedies and crises, as we have seen with this group spontaneously created about the 35W bridge collapse. (In less than six days it’s gotten more than 10,000 members.) And in reality, it’s incredibly easy to create new groups in Facebook, so you may not want to pre-create a group for everything. That way you can name the group more definitively, e.g. with the hurricane’s name.

But what you should definitely do is practice setting up Facebook groups, so that as you develop your crisis communications plan you know exactly what settings you want. For example:

Do you want a discussion board?
Do you want to enable the Wall?
Will you have photos and videos on the site? If so, will you let users upload theirs, or only Administrators.

Then your crisis communications plan could include step-by-step instructions so you can create the new group within minutes when the crisis happens.

Possible arguments against this approach are that Facebook is a “walled garden” and that the information isn’t broadly available on the web. Someone has said it’s a walled garden with a really big gate, but I prefer the analogy of a garden that is ever expanding (by a million-plus members a week), with a six-inch wall. Anyone with an email address can join Facebook in just a few minutes, and once they’ve done that, it takes just seconds to join a particular group.

When you form a new group, for instance, you could send an email to your constituent groups that includes the link to the group. If they are in Facebook already, joining will take seconds. If they’re not, they can sign up with basic information in minutes.
The other reality is that for major public events, groups will form in Facebook. Wouldn’t you rather have the discussion about your company or government unit starting in a group that you form and promote, instead of possibly one formed by an antagonist? You can’t stop those groups from forming, but if you create a group yourself and promote it well, it will be the most relevant by number of users, and likely will have the critical mass to be “the” place people go for news, updates and discussion.

You won’t control the discussion, but at least you will have earned the right to participate. And as the administrator of the group, if you need to get a message to everyone who has joined, you can hit the “Message All Members” link and send an email to everyone who has joined. If someone else has formed the group, you don’t have that option.

Update: In the comments below and on their blogs, Kip Havel and Richard Stacy suggest blogs as an alternative to Facebook groups.

I agree blogs are another good choice for crisis communications. You could do the same thing with wordpress.com, for instance, starting it as an “only people I invite” blog, and then changing it to “public” status when the crisis hits. The advantage is it’s Google-able; one disadvantage is you don’t have the ability to proactively send a message to an interested group of members…at least not as easily as you can with Facebook.

And of course you could do both: a Facebook group (because some people will look there), but with the associated URL being to your WordPress.com blog. Maybe Blogger also has this kind of “secret” blog feature that can be later opened up; I’m just more familiar with WordPress.

Technorati: Facebook, Crisis Communications, Hurricane, disaster, dark sites, 35W bridge, bridge collapse