Facebook 106: Inviting Friends to Join Facebook

Facebook without friends is like… well, I’m not sure exactly what the simile would be, but it would certainly be lonely.

But you don’t need to remain friendless for long. If you’re a SMUGgle, I for one would be glad to be your friend. Just indicate your SMUGgleness when you send the friend request.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…or maybe ahead of you. What if you don’t know how to invite a friend?

That’s what this course is about. It’s easy.

Continue reading “Facebook 106: Inviting Friends to Join Facebook”

Facebook 104: Intro to Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are a great way to gather people with a common interest, and have a common space for them to interact.

There are three basic kinds of groups in Facebook:

Open Groups – Anyone can join these, and they can form on a whim. In fact, as you are categorizing you group, one of the choices in the drop-down menu is “Just for fun – Totally Pointless.” Later in the curriculum (Facebook 120) I will show you just how easy it is to create a group. That doesn’t mean it will have any members, but starting the group is simple. And of course if you’re a SMUGgle you really should join the SMUG Facebook group.

Closed Groups – A limited portion of these groups can be seen by non-members, and they can request to join, but group administrators have to invite new members or approve those requesting access. This, for example, was the group type we used to share video and photos of my new granddaughter, Evelyn Grace. So if you want a moderate level of privacy, a closed group is a good option.

Secret Groups – These are quite private, and are not displayed on any of their members’ profiles. As I said here, don’t store bank account numbers or nuclear launch codes in a secret group, but for a fairly secure way of interacting with a defined group of Facebook users, a secret group can work. These are a little harder to form, in that you have to invite Facebook friends; they can’t request to join because they won’t be able to even have access to make the request. A good way around this is to form the group as closed, but then change it to secret once everyone has joined.

Members of groups don’t need to be “friends” in Facebook, so a group can be a way of allowing people with a common interest to interact. So I established Facebook groups for my daughter’s basketball team last year and her volleyball team this year. We’ll do this again for basketball season. So we can share links to news stories and upload video and photos, all without a bunch of high school students needing to be my “friends.”

If the people who are part of your “target population” are already in Facebook, a group can be a great way to bring them together, as we did for this Mayo Clinic Career Festival group, where we added about 350 members in a single day.

If you’re forming a group entirely made up of people from your workplace, a Yammer Group is a much better option than a Facebook group. But if you need to mix people from your workplace with others outside your company, a Facebook group can be a good solution.

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Why Every Business Should Use Facebook

As I previously mentioned, I had an opportunity a couple of weeks ago to distill my thoughts on the business benefits of Facebook for an article Julie Sartain was writing for Computerworld. It was a really useful exercise for me, and an opportunity to encapsulate what I’ve learned in the 10 months or so since I first wrote about Facebook Business Uses.

You can find many of these thoughts expressed, described and demonstrated in more detail in posts linked to SMUG’s Facebook Business page, in its Facebook category or in the formal Facebook curriculum, but I’m posting my full essay here.

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From telephones on each salesperson’s desk to fax machines in every work unit to the hundreds of millions of workplace personal computers connected to the Internet, U.S. business leaders have invested incalculable billions of dollars over the last several decades to connect their employees with the outside world and with each other.

They’ve justified these investments because of increased productivity and greater organizational agility. In 1990, for example, being able to receive customer purchase orders by fax instead of via FedEx or local courier was a huge advance, well worth several hundred dollars for the device purchase and the monthly charges for the requisite extra phone line.

And if AT&T had offered its business customers a free fax machine and dedicated phone line, can you imagine anyone declining?

Social networking sites like Facebook are a much more profound communications phenomenon than the fax, and Facebook’s functionality far surpasses the transmission of black-and-white document images. Yet not only are many businesses failing to take advantage of the free communication services Facebook provides: some actively block their employees from accessing it from their workstations.

What’s wrong with this facsimile? Can you even conceive that business owners and managers would not only reject the mythical free fax offering, but would call security to have the AT&T representative escorted from the premises?

Many managers misperceive Facebook, and therefore fail to appreciate its benefits. I’ve listed some practical Facebook business uses below. While every category won’t apply to every business, if you can’t find some way to profitably leverage a free communications network that has more than 70 million active members, your main business problem is likely lack of creative thinking and vision.

Here are five free Facebook business uses you should consider, plus a low-cost bonus:

Directory Listing: You can establish a free “fan” page for your business or organization in Facebook, complete with links to your Web site, photos, videos and contact information to key employees or salespeople. It’s like a supercharged multimedia white pages listing in a telephone directory. Here’s the Mayo Clinic Facebook fan page.

Word-of-Mouth Catalyst: When people become a “fan” of your organization, or when they write on your wall, it shows up on their Facebook profile and in their friends’ news feeds.

Collaboration Networks: Facebook allows you to form an unlimited number of free groups. They can be open to anyone, closed (you must invite or approve new members) or even secret (their existence doesn’t show up on your profile.) The latter two types could enable your employees to collaborate with each other and with external vendors or agencies, without providing them VPN access behind your corporate firewall.

Free Intranet: Speaking of corporate firewalls, if you run a small business, Facebook could be your intranet, through a secret or closed group. You can post important updates from leadership, invite discussion and even use Facebook Chat for instant messaging, without any expense or IT support. Each work team or unit within your company could have its own secret Facebook group for collaboration.

What about data security? Let’s face it: you probably have a hard enough time getting your employees to pay attention to your corporate priorities. Do you really think it’s likely your competitors will A) Find out that you have a secret Facebook group, B) Have the technical sophistication to engage in strategic espionage, and C) Effectively share the information from your secret group with their employees to put you at a significant competitive disadvantage?

Don’t use Facebook to store your bank account or credit card numbers or other information that could have serious legal ramifications if released, but understand this: most of your corporate information just isn’t all that interesting.

Focus Groups: Groups also let you invite current or potential customers or clients to interact with you and share feedback on your products and services. You can bring them together without travel expense or schedule coordination, and your group can be much larger than what can be managed behind the one-way mirror of a focus group.

The Non-Free Bonus: With 85 percent of college students having profiles, Facebook ads could be a great tool for employee recruitment. You can target pay-per-click ads to students at particular schools, with specific college majors and to undergrads or those who already have their degrees, with a link to a Facebook group or your recruiting site. The extra bonus is that by showing openness to social tools like Facebook that are part of how today’s students interact, you’re more likely to be perceived as a desirable place to work.

I’m not advocating diving into Facebook without first thinking exactly what you hope to accomplish, and whether Facebook is the right fit. But given its power (and the new privacy settings, demonstrated in Facebook 210, which enable separation of personal and professional networking), the burden of proof in the discussion should be on those who oppose its use.

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What do you think? What other practical uses for Facebook have you found? I’d love to hear your stories. And if you disagree with anything I’ve said, I’d be glad to hear your reasons.

Social Media University, Global

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:

Social Media University, Global

(or SMUG, for short.)

In some future posts we’ll cover:

  • Why SMUG? How is it different?
  • Administration
  • Applying for Admission
  • Advanced Placement
  • Accreditation
  • Curriculum
  • Faculty
  • Tuition and Financial Aid
  • Attendance Policies
  • Auditing Classes
  • Majors and Minors
  • Graduation

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.