Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
Here’s the “Lee’s Notes” version of the workshop I presented as Facebook 101 to the Association Forum of Chicagoland. If you want to download the PDF of my slide handout, click the link below.
For the take-home assignments I offered those association executives, click here. If you haven’t already done it, your main bit of homework, as SMUG students, is to join Facebook and friend me.
I would welcome any questions or comments you have about the slides.
In December, I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop at the Association Forum of Chicagoland, as part of that organization’s Knowledge Lab. I called the course Facebook 101. There were lots of great questions and comments, far beyond what we could get to in that brief session. For several of the questions, I joked that they would be covered in the Facebook 201 course.
I’ve also found that some of my most popular posts have been those that offer practical advice on how to get started in social media. My 12-Step Program for PR Pros has even been edited and repackaged for Association Executives and veterinarians. I reflected on this as I traveled to Phoenix for the Frost & Sullivan conference, after having said I was planning a series of how-to, step-by-step posts about using Facebook for qualitative research, I changed my mind. It seemed it was time to develop a more structured approach to these tutorials. If a 12-step introduction to the social media field has been helpful to many, perhaps a thorough, detailed exploration of particular subjects would be even better.
So to have a little fun with this I’ve decided — in keeping with my family’s homeschooling experience and the disruptive nature of Facebook, blogs and social media — to establish a new online institution of higher education. I’m calling it:
(or SMUG, for short.)
In some future posts we’ll cover:
I’ll be mixing those posts about SMUG’s structure with some actual coursework. And the very next post will be Facebook 101: Introduction to Facebook.
As TechCrunch notes, my free blogging platform of choice, WordPress.com, has increased the amount of free storage it provides its users from 50 Mb to 3 Gb. Here’s what I see when I upload graphics or other documents to my blog:
Note that a few days ago that 3GB figure in the lower left was only 50 MB. I formerly used Flickr as a storage space for my photos and other graphics (since it offered 100 MB a month vs. 50 MB a year with WordPress.com) and just pulled the graphics from Flickr into my blog posts, but now it seems I should be able to upload graphics indiscriminately without even coming close to exceeding my WordPress limits. Especially if I’m uploading mostly 72 dpi screen captures.
As Erick Schonfeld says, this is a huge advance that puts significant pressure on competing platforms. WordPress.com has had the advantage of Akismet protection against comment spam (which has saved me over 34,000 spam comments.) By offering triple the free storage of Blogger, WordPress.com takes another big leap.
When I started this blog, I made it my goal to never spend a penny on any of the services. My purpose was more than miserliness; I wanted to encourage others (particularly those in the PR field) that they can have blogs without spending any money and without support from their IT department. As I say in my “It’s All Free” section, if you see something on my blog that you like, you can rest assured that it was completely free.
Why is free such a big deal? Because it helps to drive home the ridiculousness of spending several hundred to a few thousand dollars to attend a communications conference in which you learn about social media if you fail to take the next step and actually get hands-on experience. And it’s why I developed my 12-step Social Media Program.
Barriers to entry in blogging and other social media aren’t just low. They are non-existent. Zero. Get started with your WordPress.com blog today. When you do, please leave a comment below to let me know how it’s working for you. You also can subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog, which will provide you with regular updates and pointers on issues you may find interesting and helpful. (If you don’t know what RSS is, see steps 4 and 5 in my 12-step program.)
You really should check out Facebook, too. It’s also free. Friend me if you’d like to stay in touch and learn more about social media.
If your work involves any communications, or marketing, or sales, or management responsibilities you owe it to yourself to begin to understand social media. And if you paid anything for college, or attend any career enrichment seminars for which you or your company pay admission fees, you’re seriously missing out on a great educational value if you don’t take advantage of the free hands-on education you can get through WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter (you can follow me here), Flickr, YouTube and related services.
What’s holding you back?
Nick at AllFacebook highlights an extremely important Facebook newsfeed change. Here’s an excerpt:
Facebook has announced significant changes to the newsfeed. This is part of their ongoing battle against spammy applications. As Ari Steinberg has posted on the Facebook developer blog, application must now only post active newsfeed stories. Stories such as “Nick has just been superpoked” will now longer be accepted. Instead, only actions taken by the user can be posted. This is going to have a significant impact on the numerous applications that have been taking advantage of the newsfeed for application promotions.
This hits close to home for me, because a colleague at work had noticed an item in his newsfeed that said something like “Lee Aase has a new top photo.” When he clicked the link, here’s the photo he saw:
My Facebook friend Walter Jennings (an American expatriate in Australia, whom I met through the Arthur W. Page Society meeting in September), had posted this on his FunWall. I had never seen it before. Yet it was published in a feed to many of my friends as my top photo.
I believe Facebook is uniquely positioned to be the all-purpose networking tool for both personal and professional purposes. For that to happen, though, it can’t afford to have applications that publish false newsfeed articles about a person.
I see this as just as big an issue as the Beacon controversy was. In fact, it’s one step worse. At least in the pre-reformed Beacon, updates were being sent to friends based on users’ actions. To send an update to my friends, claiming that this was my new Top Photo even though I had never seen it, is completely unacceptable.
The good news is that with Facebook’s recent newsfeed changes this shouldn’t happen again. Nick asks whether Facebook has “turned the ‘viral dial’ down too much.” I say definitely not. This is a crucial change Facebook needed to make. It’s one thing to pass along my actions virally. It’s quite another to label someone else’s actions as mine.
What do you think?
Being from Minnesota, it’s fun that on Facebook I can jab my Cheesehead friends by adding the NY Giants Fans application, as my sons Jake and Joe have.
I’ve raised ’em right.