Putting the new rules to work

Amazon has announced that its Kindle software will be available on Android handsets this month — a move that will likely clear the way for the Android-based tablets that are expected to appear in the coming months.

It’s a big move, because it means that manufacturers of Android tablets will have a ready-made application that lets users buy books through the app itself (something Kindle doesn’t allow in its iPad and iPod versions for competitive reasons) and begin reading them within a minute or so. Perhaps more importantly, it will allow users to do the same with hundreds of newspapers, magazines and blogs in a touch-screen interface similar to that of the iPad.

Some industry observers predict that up to 50 tablets will be introduced in the near future, powered by a variety of operating systems including Android, Windows 7 and even Blackberry. The Wall Street Journal also reported recently that Google and Verizon are working on a Google-branded tablet. With Android handsets outselling iPhones during the first quarter, the time seems ripe for some new rollouts.

Facebook is the undisputed king of the Social Media mountain for now. And while it’s important to remember that it’s built for interactivity rather than reach, it can be a worthwhile tool for a lot of businesses.

But recent changes in Facebook have created major privacy concerns — many of them well founded. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that privacy is pretty much Facebook’s last priority, so it’s pretty much up to users. The tools are there to control who sees what (for the most part), but they’re scattered in several different places and less than intuitive. So here’s an unofficial guide to those tools with some suggestions on how to use them.

Who can find me, and how easily?

Depending on your settings, anybody on the Internet may be able to find your profile, look through all your photos, know who your friends are, know your email address(es), birthday, and find out a lot more. But people aren’t your only problem, or even your biggest. Facebook has authorized a huge number of “apps” that prowl about looking for data they can use or spread around. So let’s start globally and work our way inward:

Search Engines:

Click Account | Privacy Settings | Search

Settings Available:

Facebook Search Results – This setting governs who who can type in your name and find you on Facebook. If you’re certain you don’t care who locates you, you can leave this set to “Everyone.” I have mine set on “Friends of Friends,” figuring that if somebody knows somebody who’s already on my friends list, chances are good that I’m willing to hear from them. I may not want them to see anything, but we’ll fix that in a few minutes. The most restrictive setting for this is “Friends,” which means only your Facebook friends can find you.

Public Search Results

Amazingly, a lot of Facebook users aren’t aware that their profiles now can be found through Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines. This one’s easy. Just make sure the “Allow” box is unchecked.

What can they find out?

There’s a shortcut to finding out what shows up in your profile. Click:

Account | Privacy Settings

You’ll see a list of six categories. We’ve already visited one (Search). For now, let’s just click “Personal Information and Posts.” To see what’s visible now, click

Preview My Profile

in the upper right part of the screen. The screen you see is the one non-friends see. If you see more than one tab, be sure and click them all, because they’re all visible.

Now, let’s see what your friends can see. After all,not all Facebook friends are created equal. My friends include family, clients, friends and people I’ve barely even heard of. We can customize our settings so that you can share stuff with your family but not necessarily with the virtual strangers we all add in our weaker moments. Near the top of your screen, you’ll see: “Preview how your profile appears to a specific person.” Type in the name of any Facebook friend (assuming you haven’t set up any lists yet) and you can see what’s visible to them. Be sure and click through the various content tabs (e.g. Wall, Info, Photos etc.) and start thinking about whether everybody really needs access to all that.

Lists: Different access for different folks

If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking at this point that you’d like to be able to share some things with close friends and family and other things with clients. You may not want the world to know what your children look like, or you may not want your dear old mother looking at photos from some beer busts from your frat days. So let’s group our “Friends” into some lists. Go to

Account | Edit Friends

To see them all, look in the column to the left and click “All Connections.” Now you should see all your Facebook Friends in alphabetical order (starting with the first name – no, I don’t know why). To the right is a column that probably has “Add to List” next to most of them (unless you’ve already set up some lists). I recommend trying to fit everybody into a group – e.g., family, colleagues, clients, college, high school, Kiwanis, church etc. Going through all your friends and fitting them into groups will almost certainly cause you to wonder why some are on your list to start with. If you see somebody on your list and have no reason who he or she is, as I did, feel free to use the little “x” to the right and delete them. See? It didn’t hurt a bit.

The Nitty Gritty: Who gets to see what

Now we’re done with the preliminaries and can get down to serious business. So let’s go to:

Account | Privacy Settings | Personal Information and Posts

For each of these settings, you’ll want to customize who has access. If you have “Everyone” on the right column all the way down the page, you’ll probably want to do some serious tightening up. On the surface, it appears that your choices for each are limited to “Everyone” (which means EVERYONE!), “Friends of Friends” or Friends.” But if you’ve set up your friend lists correctly, you have a lot more flexibility. For example, I post a lot about media, and I had a couple of extremists who used my posts as a launching pad for diatribes about the “liberal media.” I just put them in a list (I won’t say what I really called it, but for our purposes, let’s just call it “intrusives”). For those, I just customize my settings for who can read my posts or my friends’ posts by clicking Customize, then selecting All Friends but putting “Intrusives” on the “Hide this from” line.

Note that you can customize who sees each of your photo albums. Just do each the same way – selecting Customize and specifying lists of people who can see or not see each album. Be sure to check the “Preview” using the names of different lists to make sure each is seeing only what you choose to reveal.

Applications

Whether you realize it or not, you’re almost certainly using a lot of applications. Every time you click a “Facebook” or “Share” button on a non-Facebook site, you’re probably opening up your profile to a new application and a lot of people and machines you don’t know. Here’s the official statement of what applications and non-Facebook sites have access to:

“When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs.”

If that’s not scary enough, remember too that once you use an app, it can now take information from your profile and pass it on to another party to “make the experience more social” – i.e. to sell you something. A good experience is passing on your birthday to sell birthday greetings for friends to send you. But it can include anything on your site – gender, marital status, family, relationship details (“looking for …” etc.), and religious and political views. That can get pretty scary, so I just made sure none of the boxes were checked, so apps can’t share that information about me.

Pages: Nowhere to hide

Finally, there’s the matter of all those pages, causes and organizations you “liked” (using the current term). At the moment, you can’t hide them from anybody. This is really ironic, because the big thrust now is to recruit business pages. But if you can’t hide them, the only thing to do is delete them all (like I did) or not “like” any more pages. Otherwise, it’s the equivalent of publishing all your bookmarks.

What you do is your business! I just want to help you do it with your eyes open.

IMPORTANT!!!

OK, I wanted to get your attention, because this is a biggie. Did I mention you really need to pay attention to this? If you’ve drifted away, let’s make sure you’re in the right place:

Account | Privacy Settings | Applications and Websites

Look for the setting for the “Instant Personalization Pilot Platform.” This has created such an uproar that Facebook may eventually have to back off on it, but just in case, you’ll want to make sure you’re opted out. Here’s the Orwellian language introducing the progam that “helps you connect more easily with your friends on select partner sites”:

“You’ll find a personal and social experience the moment you arrive on our select partner sites — currently Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp. We’re working closely with these partners in a pilot program so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information.”

There’s a single box at the bottom to allow these (and future) partners to dig into your Facebook information posts and use it to “personalize” their offerings. It may be something as inoffensive as noting that you’re an Allman Brothers fan and suggesting some of their music. But the truth is you just don’t know. I opted out. You do what you like, but at least give it some thought.

Application Settings

Before we quit, let’s take a look at your applications. I thought I avoided most apps because I don’t take those quizzes and play Farmville, but I still found more than a dozen applications – mostly things I’m willing to put up with, like Digsby, which lets me use Facebook for instant messaging without being on the page, and Hootsuite, which lets me post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. But I did spot a few that were up to some mischief. One news site had me “opted in” to access my Facebook data when I wasn’t using the application, and to pass it along. I said “Oh no, you don’t!”

That’s not nearly everything, but if you lock down these areas and review your settings every month or so, you’ll probably be OK. No promises.

For at least a couple of centuries, quality newspapers kept a “Chinese wall” of separation between advertising and news. At many newspapers, reporters were even discouraged from socializing with the ad staff, lest they start letting advertising influence what they wrote.

Editors often faced tremendous pressure to bend to the will of advertisers, but they held up surprisingly well. And for PR people pitching stories, the Old Media Rule was clear: Never mention advertising. If it’s news, it’s news, regardless of whether somebody’s paying for ads about it. Seeking to influence news decisions by mentioning how much your client spent on advertising was a sure ticket to the exit.

Now, of course, everything has changed. Last year, 143 American newspapers quit printing, and 14,775 newspaper employees lost their jobs, according to Paper Cuts. To a city editor worried about his job, the principle of resisting pressure from advertisers can seem academic.

This issue rarely gets brought up in discussions about the future of journalism, but it may be the most insidious threat we face, because it goes to the heart of the process: Integrity.

Until fairly recently, it was virtually unheard-of for a newsroom editor or reporter to say, “We can’t do a story about you unless you buy an ad.” When it happened, it was usually at a “Mom & Pop” weekly with a circulation of about 1,000 in the middle of nowhere.

But a mid-sized daily? Never.

Now, it’s happening, and it’s happening a lot. What this means, of course, is that newspapers are compromising their coverage. Once we know that money talks in the newsroom, how much confidence can we have in the objectivity of business news? What happens when a major advertiser has a scandal or product recall? Will it get the same treatment a non-advertising business would receive? And how will the newspaper treat a new business moving into town to compete with a long-time advertiser?

This bleeds over into the public arena as well. How might ad dollars from a major insurer affect the newspaper’s editorial policy on health insurance?

The Old Media Rule maintaining separation of advertising and editorial content is on life support at best. What’s the New Rule? It’s not entirely clear yet. I’m still not ready to start asking for coverage (or favorable coverage) because a client bought an ad. But where in the past I made it a point not to even know where a client was advertising, I now keep a a copy of the ad budget handy in case the question comes up. It stinks, but for now, one of the New Media Rules seems to be that advertising and news are linked.

So you’re on Facebook, Twitter and the Web. Congratulations. But what about the consumer’s phone?

That’s where a growing number of consumers are getting their news and other critical information. And the numbers are reaching a point that communications professionals can no longer overlook. A recent major study by the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism found that:

• One-third of all cell phones users use their phones/handsets for getting news.
• 18% use some type application for news content.
• 11% get news via email or text.

Still not convinced? Here are a few other “straws in the wind”:

• Google exec John Herlihy says most of Google’s online sales now target handsets, saying that “in three years time, desktops will be irrelevant.”
• Comscore reports that access to mobile Facebook access jumped 112 percent in the past year, and mobile Twitter access soared 347 percent.
• As of 2Q 2008, monthly texts outnumbered cell calls by 357 to 204 — per person.

It looks like Twitter is finally ready to generate its own revenues. The company says it will soon (in about a month) launch an advertising platform that apparently will look a lot like Google adwords – text ads that resemble and relate to the actual content on the screen.

Twitter already stabilized its financial situation with lucrative deals with Google and Microsoft, but executives clearly hope the advertising platform will answer the question many of us have had for a couple of years: Where’s the money? CEO Seth Goldstein talked about the “imminent” launch of the ad platform Monday in a panel on interactive advertising in Carlsbad, Calif.

Google’s Buzz looks like the first volley in what might turn into a war with Facebook. At least, we have to wonder if that’s the case, because the one glaring element missing is any connectivity at all with Facebook. Of course, it could always come later, and we have to assume it will. I mean, heck, everything interfaces with Facebook, doesn’t it?  But nobody seems to know yet. Buzz does seem to make it very easy to integrate posts, photos and videos from Twitter, Picasa and Flickr. But the Google folks aren’t making it nearly so easy to update other systems. Photos uploaded go into Picasa, Google’s photo sharing product. But your Buzzes (is that what we’ll call them?) won’t go to Twitter, probably because they’d have to find a way to go from the Buzz capacity (seemingly unlimited) to the 140-word Twitter limit.

If Buzz catches on, the ability to accommodate longer messages and public conversations will offer an enticing alternative to Facebook. Whether it will have the broadcasting capabilities of Twitter via something like lists or tags has yet to be seen.

Further muddying the water is the rumor that Facebook is getting ready to roll out an email service that, like Gmail, will support pop and imap. Obviously, they’re hoping that Facebook’s growing role as an all-purpose communications hub will give Facebook email some legs. But Gmail has a lot of advantages. It’s a mature, excellent product that is more intuitive than previous email systems. But more importantly, a Gmail address is increasingly playing a central role in business use, with calendar and directory functions that sync easily with Outlook (for a fraction of the cost of an Exchange server), Google Analytics and Google’s growing array of applications. Google’s Android system for handsets is an important part of this strategy, keeping the handset in sync with Google contacts and calendar in real time. (I’ve never even plugged my Android into my PC except to charge it.)

Perhaps most important is the question of whether anybody on Facebook needs another email address. Likewise, people will ask whether Gmail users need another social network. This may get interesting.

If I didn’t think it would start a riot, I’d suggest we do away  with “social media” altogether. Not the media, but the term. By lumping widely disparate vehicles together on one term, we give people the mistaken idea that they all do more or less the same thing. This seems to be especially true of Facebook and Twitter, which have just enough in common to feed the mistaken idea that they’re two tools for doing the same job.

After all, both allow only short messages (140 for Twitter and 420 for Facebook). Both let you post photos and links. Both allow people to connect with you by following you (Twitter) or becoming your Facebook friend. And indeed, a lot of the “social media” posting utilities, such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic, allow you to post to both, simply by clicking a second icon. So I guess it’s easy to see them as more or less equivalent.

But here’s the big difference: Twitter can allow you to reach a targeted group of thousands, regardless of how many “followers” you have, whereas Facebook makes reaching out beyond your “friend” base much more difficult and less certain. On the other hand, Facebook provides a far better place to have conversations and develop relationships. I find it helpful to think of Facebook as a telephone (OK, maybe one with a party line) allowing two-way conversations, whereas Twitter is more like a PA system, better suited to one-way communication.

When I hear someone brag about having thousands of Twitter followers, I just roll my eyes, because in most cases, those followers may have very little to do with what you wish to accomplish. Instead, it’s better to place your messages on appropriate channels using hash tags (you create a hash tag by putting a # at the beginning of a work, e.g. #hashtags). We’ll talk more about that later.

Yes, I know you can reach people searching for topics on Facebook, but that doesn’t seem to be the way people are using it for now. It may change later, but for the moment, think Twitter PA and Facebook telephone.

There’s a lot to love about email marketing. It “pushes” your message out to prospective customers or stakeholders. Its carrying capacity is virtually unlimited, so it can convey relatively complex messages. And it’s relatively inexpensive.

But it has one big downside: Everybody hates it. Even though the spam filters have done a good job of filtering out most the scams, the bad taste from the old days still lingers. But the usefulness of email marketing remains if you use it correctly. So here are some very basic guidelines for doing it right.

• Make it useful. Assuming you know things that others would find helpful, make this the focus of your newsletter. Let’s say you have a bicycle shop and you’d like to get people to buy more bikes. Instead of advertising a special on a particular bicycle, you might offer advice on maintaining the bicycle one already has. Tell the reader what needs lubrication, what type of oil to use, and how often to oil it. Give tips for getting the gears back on track when the chain slips. Talk about when and how to replace brake pads. Give suggestions for bicycle safety in special conditions, such as rain. This will make your newsletter more welcome and position you as an expert on quality bicycles, making your store the first one people think about when it’s time to buy.
• Use a third-party service. Using a service like Constant Contact or MailChimp ensures that your message contains the necessary “unsubscribe” links and blocks email from going to people who’ve unsubscribed. For example, if billybob@bobville.com has unsubscribed, most services won’t let you send email to him even if you try to add his address to the database again. A third-party service also protects your IP address from getting labeled as a spammer, which can result in entire companies blocking all email from your company.
• Keep the graphics to a minimum. The commercial email services typically offer lots of templates. Before you use one of them and load in a bunch of images, take a look at the graphic below. That’s a screenshot of an image-heavy email in my email client, which (like an increasing number of others) has the graphics turned off. Some communications professionals now argue that email newsletters should be exclusively plain text, with no HTML or graphics. I’m not willing to go there yet, because a small amount of HTML enables you to track who opens an email and clicks on your links. This can be powerful information. But I am now sending out some email with no visible graphics at all.

  

• Don’t overdo it. You can quickly wear out your welcome if you send out an email blast every couple of days. If you have an established audience of people who have asked to receive your mailings, you can get away with one a week, but that’s about the limit. In most cases, anything over a couple per month will start annoying readers.
• Study the provisions of the CAN-SPAM act and make sure you’re in compliance. For example, it requires that you include your address in each email – a requirement a lot of senders overlook.

Should you be blogging? Maybe, maybe not. To figure out whether a blog is a worthwhile communications medium for your business, you need to understand the current realities of business blogging. (Note: I’m calling it business blogging to distinguish it from personal blogging, which is a different animal. The assumption in this post is that you want your blog to help build your business or promote your career in some way.)

So here are a few things your blog will and won’t do for you. We’ll start with the things it won’t do so we can end on a positive note.

What your blog probably won’t do:

• Make you famous. Sorry to say it, but it’s going to take more than a blog to turn your name into a household word. Why? In short, because as with most Internet-based media, there are no barriers to entry. You can launch a blog in an hour without spending a penny. It’s like that Monster.com commercial where everybody runs out onto the tennis court and nobody can tell who the real players are. You have to find ways to get noticed.
• Gain a large base of loyal readers. Sorry again, but that’s not what blogging of any sort is about for most people. But that’s OK. You can still push people to your blog. Keep reading.

What your blog can do:

• Keep you thinking. Your blog is a commitment. You’re creating a monster that has to be fed. It takes time, but we all need to take time to step back, look at our industry, and think through how we go about it. I have two blogs (the other one is www.overcoffeemedia.com, which focuses on media trends). They force me to stay on top of my game, because they’re always there saying, “OK, smart guy. What are you going to come up with next?”
• Establish your credibility. Know the real difference between book authors and the rest of us? Guys who write books actually sit down and write. They don’t necessarily know more than the guys who don’t write, but they use what they have. Your blog, for a much smaller time commitment, can do the same for you.
• Give you a place to send customers and prospects. While you probably won’t gain a large following, you don’t need to. Rather, think of your blog as one tool in your media toolkit.
• Start beneficial conversations. For many businesses, everything starts with a conversation. Your readers can comment or ask questions, and those can lead to selling opportunities.

Of course, none of this happens if nobody ever sees your blog. So how do you get people to look at it? By using it as part of a comprehensive media strategy. By itself, it probably won’t do you any good. Combined with other tools, it it can be powerful. We’ll talk about ways to use it with other tools in the next post.

As we saw in Building Your Media Kit Part 2, your lineup needs to include media with various characteristics, such as carrying capacity (the ability to carry long or complex messages) and reach. These days, when I see companies build entire marketing programs around Facebook and Twitter, I wonder if they’d try to build a house with nothing but a screwdriver.

• Immediacy (How quickly can it get the information out there?).
• Carrying capacity (How much information can it convey?)
• Reach (Who can it help you reach? Are they the right people for your purpose?)
• Interactivity (Is it one-way, or does it permit dialogue and feedback?)
• Cognitive impact (Does it appeal to the “right brain” emotions like TV or to the rational mind?)
• Cost-effectiveness (Does it get the job done at a cost you can live with? Do you KNOW what the job is?)

In the next few days, we’ll develop each of these characteristics. For the moment, you may want to look over this grid that follows. Everything on it is debatable, to say the least, but it may help organize your thoughts around the question of which Social Media may be useful for various purposes.