Category: Social Media

This is another installment in the Facebook Business section, which provides background on how Facebook works that is particularly geared for those born before 1982 and who therefore may not be familiar with social networking sites.

Facebook’s News Feed is what you see when you click on the Facebook logo in the upper left corner of the page:

Facebook’s News Feed gives you a slice of life from your friends, including groups they’ve joined or left, applications they’ve added or deleted, notes or other items they’ve posted, status updates, photos they’ve uploaded or in which they have been tagged, and more.

The News Feed isn’t exhaustive; depending on the number of friends you have and their activity levels within Facebook, you may only see something like 1 percent of their actions in your News Feed.

But I have found the News Feed exceptionally helpful for learning about neat and new things on Facebook. For instance, through my friend Jeremiah I learned about the Facebook WordPress application because the fact he had added it was in my News Feed.

So what if some of your friends are hyperactive and are overwhelming your News Feed? You can adjust settings for your feed by clicking the “Preferences” link at the top of your News Feed:

Clicking it brings up this control panel which lets you say “I want to see less from these friends” and “I want to see more from these friends.”

You also can adjust the sliders to see more or less of different story types.

The News Feed is one of the most important ways Facebook connects friends. If you want to be mine, click here.
Technorati: Facebook, Social Networking, News Feed, Business, WordPress

Part of the great appeal of Facebook is that people mostly use their real names instead of creating avatars with psuedonyms. While you can find a dozen George Jetsons and a handful of Mickey Mouses (or is it Mice?) in Facebook, in most cases the names you see are genuine.

So doesn’t that increase the likelihood that Facebook users will become victims of identity theft, because your name is “out there” on the internet?

And can you protect yourself?

I’m not convinced that the answer to the first question is “Yes.” I’m fairly certain the second can be answered affirmatively.

Like Naven Johnson, your name is already “out there” if you’re in the phone book. The question is whether identity thieves can piece together enough other information so that a sub-prime lender will grant them credit in your name.

I guess it’s theoretically possible for someone to use information about you that they get on Facebook to open credit card accounts in your name, but a few basic precautions will go a long way toward stopping identity thieves in their browsers:

1. Don’t publish your Social Security number in your Facebook profile. Did I really need to say that? This admonition ranks right up there with the “Do Not Eat” labels on the dessicant packages you find when you open your new electronic equipment, but obviously somebody did ingest them once and now, thanks to our tort system, this is a standard warning. But if you’ve published your Social Security number on your Facebook or MySpace profile, please just deactivate your account immediately and refrain from using the internet. Web 2.0 isn’t for you. Neither is Web 1.0.
2. Don’t get hooked by a phishing scam. I haven’t heard of this actually happening in Facebook, but considering how the crooks have used eBay and various banks as fronts to gather information, I expect it’s only a matter of time before someone starts sending emails like this: “Dear Daniel A. Nimrod: It has come to our attention that someone may be fraudulently using your Facebook account. We need you to verify that you are, in fact, Daniel A. Nimrod. Please click the link below and enter your Social Security number to prove your identity.” Solution: see #1 above.
3. If you choose to show your birthday in Facebook, have it display just the day and not the year. I read some articles in which a computer security expert recommended this, and I decided to take his advice. I still can get birthday greetings on my wall from my Facebook friends next May 15 (or you can just mark your calendar now, so you start saving for my present), but if my year of birth isn’t available, I guess that makes it harder to steal my identity.
4. If you’re really, really concerned that some evil genius might use your Facebook data to steal your identity, maybe you should refrain from mentioning your mother’s maiden name, your favorite pet or your elementary school in your profile. Those are the security questions web sites often use in their “forgot password” functions. I personally think this is a little paranoid, but it would be an additional safeguard.

The most important fact to remember about identity theft is that if someone uses your name and personal information to set up credit card accounts or secure loans for the purposes of stealing money, you don’t owe the money. If you didn’t apply for the loan or credit card, you are not liable. The criminal is. See Dave Ramsey for some good advice on this, including insurance protection you can buy that pays for someone else to go through the hassle of cleaning up the mess.

The other key thing to realize about identity theft is that most perpetrators are relatives; most cases don’t involve a stranger trolling the internet for Social Security numbers.

It’s like the mythical poisoned Halloween candy stories, or the stories of strangers hiding razor blades in apples to maim the mouths of unsuspecting Trick-or-Treaters. As detailed in Made to Stick, the reality was that the only documented cases of Halloween poisoning involved:

• A father whose child accidentally got into his drug stash and overdosed, and who initially claimed the child had eaten poisoned Halloween candy, and
• Another parent who purposely poisoned a child to cash in on a life insurance policy, and who used the same story.

Yet for a couple of generations, kids have been warned not to take candy from strangers, and some hospitals have offered x-ray services to find cleverly inserted needles and razor blades. So cleverly inserted that none have ever been found. The real danger wasn’t from the great mass of strangers, but from a few parents.

Still, it’s probably not a bad idea for parents to carefully examine their kids’ candy stashes two weeks from now, and to sample some of the fare. Especially the Milky Way bars and the Tootsie Rolls. You know, to protect the kids.

And by following these 4 tips to prevent Facebook identity theft, you’ll help keep anonymous strangers from running up credit card debts in your name.

But watch out for your parents.

So what tips did I miss? What other advice would you give people to prevent identity theft?

For related posts on Facebook and other social networking sites, particularly how they can be used for business and professional networking, check out the Facebook Business section.

Technorati: Facebook, Identity Theft, Credit Cards, Dave Ramsey, social networking, MySpace, eBay, Phishing

Charlene Li of Forrester Research has recently posted an excellent presentation on Slideshare entitled “Big Brands & Facebook: Demographics, Case Studies & Best Practices”

The demographic information is excellent (it’s particularly interesting to see that 45 percent of users are over age 35), but I think Charlene’s main point (from slide 3) is the key: “Facebook marketing requires communicating, not advertising.”

I think that’s exactly right. If businesses see Facebook as just another outlet for their advertising, they’re likely to do themselves hardly any good, and actually may harm themselves. What’s worse, they’ll miss the tremendous opportunity for building community that is available in Facebook.

Facebook isn’t just a place to get more “eyeballs” for your messages; it’s a chance to interact with the persons behind the eyeballs, and hear their messages, too.

For anyone in a large company interested in seeing how Facebook might present opportunities, Charlene’s presentation is a primo primer.

Technorati: Facebook, Forrester, Charlene Li, Social Networking, marketing, advertising, Slideshare

Fred Vogelstein of Wired magazine has an interesting essay on Facebook in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Here’s an excerpt:

You can’t change the look and feel of your Facebook page as much as you can on MySpace, but since May you can do something much cooler: choose from a giant list of free, non-Facebook-produced programs that will run inside your page the same way Microsoft Word and Excel run on your PC. There are more than 5,000 to choose from. Zuckerberg and Facebook don’t have to anticipate all the things Facebook users want to do with their pages, but instead will let them bubble up from the global marketplace of ideas. Two of the most popular — iLike and Movies — allow users to know what music, concerts and movies their friends like best. Another, Causes, makes it easy to tell your friends the causes you care most about and solicit donations.

It all sounds way too complicated for mortals to understand until you hear Zuckerberg explain it. Boiled down, it goes like this: Humans get their information from two places — from mainstream media or some other centralized organization such as a church, and from their network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We’ve already digitized the first. Almost every news organization has a website now. What Zuckerberg is trying to do with Facebook is digitize the second.

Think about what this means. Right now, the interactions among friends, neighbors and colleagues — a.k.a. word of mouth — is still analog. You go to a cocktail party, and a friend tells you about this incredible pediatrician he’s found. You ask a few other friends to confirm that data and eventually two things happen: You switch doctors, and the physician becomes a favorite in town. Now imagine that information automatically pushed out to all your friends, tested, verified and returned to you in 24 hours, and you have Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook.

You can read the whole essay here. I think Vogelstein does a great job of capturing the essence of why Facebook is a landmark application. There have been other social networking sites, but Facebook’s combination of (mostly) true identities and an open platform upon which third parties can contribute applications is something completely new. Of course not all of the 5,000+ applications are useful. Some are just silly. But just as Windows has both Solitaire and Minesweeper (or so I’m told) as well as productivity applications, so with Facebook’s platform.

I will grant that most of Facebook’s applications to date have not been industrial strength or business focused. But as the user base continues to grow and spread like E. Coli on Topps Meat (but with much lower toxicity), and as the promised grouping of friends into different levels of familiarity (personal vs. professional vs. family) becomes a reality, the business applications of Facebook will become powerful indeed.

Hat tip: Mari Smith via (you guessed it) Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, Fred Vogelstein, Wired, Social Networking, MySpace, Zuckerberg