3 Reasons You Shouldn't use your Personal Facebook Page for Business

At work I was speaking to a client the other day who told me that he had a Facebook account already and was just planning on using that to market his business services. "OK," was my reply, "but let me send you some sample pages from Facebook for you to take a look at, just so you can see the range of what's out there." I emailed over some links and pondered how best to address this with him.

Then later today I was in a discussion group online and saw a thread that was asking the question about using a "personal" Facebook for "business. Since it seems to be in the zeitgeist these days, I thought I'd share my ideas here.

It is my belief that if you use your "personal" Facebook page for "business", you limit yourself in some crucial ways.

First of all, Facebook sets a finite number of friends you can have (5,000) as an individual.

Secondly, one cannot "like" a personal Facebook page so you will have to consistently generate content (i.e.: work harder) in order to show up in your "friend's" news feed. If someone has "liked" your page they will see your content automatically.

Finally, there are so many fantastic third party apps for Facebook "business" pages that are not available for "personal" pages. I have clients who have tabs linking to their newsletters, YouTube or any number of resources that further relate to their business. These tools are readily available, easy to implement and cost nothing but the time it takes to set up - often just a few minutes.

If you remain unconvinced as to why you should have a business page on Facebook, consider this: do you really want the public, clients and people you do business with making assumptions about you based on the content that gets shared on your wall by your kids, personal friends, college roommates and others?

Just because you know that red plastic cup you're holding in a picture has soda in it, doesn't mean someone else looking at the photo will assume that. Yes, there are some sharing controls on Facebook, but they can be difficult to locate and therefore implement.

Why risk the potential pitfalls when you can readily set up a "Business" page on Facebook which can be managed by using the Use Facebook as Page switch under the Account drop down menu?

You already have a built-in set of "fans" for your page in all of your personal friends. The "average user" has 130 of them. You can easily share your new page with your personal friends, asking them to "like" it - thereby getting you the 25 likes for the custom URL. You can have a page dedicated just for "business" - increasing your social media footprint, SEO and number of eyes on your product or service.

Women and Social Media – Playing to our Strengths

Marketers are always looking to influence women. While we (still rather appallingly) don’t earn equally to men, in many ways our spending power is greater. Why? Because we often have more influence than our spouses/boyfriends in what is purchased. Women have high influence on the purchase of groceries, home goods and furnishings, and clothing. In families, women’s choices influence children’s toys, entertainment and the petty cash expenditures that make up teen entertainment, allowances and tooth fairy money. We carry brand loyalty, we search for deals, our gender’s proclivities practically program us to be social. Combine that with shopping and you have a marketing home run. 

We are the Social Gender

Because women are by and large expert natural communicators companies have been constantly looking to engage us across multiple platforms and sectors both locally and globally. Rather than selling us something we might not need, but find attractive, now we are approached via social media to not only share our opinion but to sometimes beta-test or even evangelize for products and services before a single sale takes place.

The Good Gossip

Take for example a traditionally female market – baby products. Every new mother is looking for the best products that bring CPQ - Convenience, Price and Quality. If they have a cachet to them as well, so much the better. Who will these new moms listen to? The “Varsity” mothers, those with older children who can share their wisdom from a “been there, tried that” perspective. An entire cadre of “mommy bloggers”, our own version of 21^st century “god-sibbs”, is out there sharing their opinions in real-time and building brand authority for any number of products. These days with social media, it’s not 4 out of 5 doctors recommending, it’s 4 out of 5 of the women in your child’s neighborhood preschool, at your job, on Facebook, in the pew and 6 timezones and perhaps a cultural divide away.

Leading Ladies

Because women are so driven to build relationships, we have a breadth and depth of opportunity to become social media leaders and sisters to one another. Advice driven sites on where to find the best bargains, deals, and coupons continue to grow. The addition of “gaming” techniques to deepen the engagement expands and amplifies our participation.  We have a gender-based advantage in communication and relationship understanding that can be used to effect change and create innovation by aggregating user value and harnessing the power of collective intelligence.

All Access Pass

For women who are trying to start their own businesses, the numerous free tools offered by social media are a huge boon for marketing and promotion. Social media done right is an all access backstage pass – you can build a stream to venture capital, industry experts and key players who can help along the way. Just a few years ago, this would have been much more difficult to gain without an MBA and/or a well-connected friend. A marketing campaign of Facebook, Twitter and a blog about your business costs nothing but your time. Social media enhances our relationships to one another, broadens our spheres of influence and levels the playing field. Women who aren’t using social media successfully are missing out on flexing our social muscle.

Share your thoughts. Are women better at social media than men? Are we truly playing to our strengths? Does gender have any bearing on social media success?

Feel the link love: Images courtesy of Virology, Perfectlyspaced.com, Zazzle.com and the University of South Florida

Some thoughts on the Knowledge Economy

In 1969 Peter Drucker popularized the phrase knowledge economy. The idea of a knowledge economy is that knowledge is viewed as a product versus knowledge as a tool. The knowledge economy is based on the economics of abundance. I touch on this in Open Source: The End of Scarcity Means More. Information and knowledge increase through the act of sharing. The more data/information shared, the more growth in knowledge results. Knowledge flows as water, it drips then becomes a steady stream or torrent where ever there is demand and few barriers. In the knowledge economy, wealth is based on ownership of knowledge and information.

Forty-two years later Drucker’s children are the knowledge workers – the Gen X and Yers, the Millennials and Digital Natives are established or entering the workplace. As suggested in my post, What If Work Were Fun?, the worker of the 21st century is becoming a knowledge worker. Schooled in new media, the brightest of them are capable of both convergent and divergent thinking, they can be collaborative, evaluate priorities, make connections, establish and nurture relationships, and be flexible enough to both create new paradigms as well as modify existing ones.

Social media has risen in importance and currently drives the knowledge economy because communication is a fundamental component to the stream of knowledge and information. Social media highlights the importance of relational capital – one based on interactions and relationships. The act of transforming information into knowledge is the creation of value.

Just a few years ago we did business differently. The rule was - I offered a product/commodity for sale, you bought it (or not), end of transaction. It was an even exchange, a closed system. But the knowledge economy has changed that. The open sourced, new way of doing business also values expertise and the concept of “know how”. Meshing social with business creates an emotional bond. It’s about more than just selling, these relationships foster an interactive and cooperative exchange.

The old way of doing business doesn’t work effectively anymore because more social effort needs to be invested to get people to listen. Business must engage and be present vis a vis their customers who now demand openness, flexibility and a willingness to embrace change.

I have an actor friend who used to believe that once he landed an agent, he could just sit back and the jobs would come rolling in. He believed that an agent would do the heavy lifting for him, bring him work so he wouldn’t have to hustle. This didn’t happen, so he fired the agent. But once my friend realized that he was his own best representative - his career started to take off because he was creating value for himself. He was giving to get. Now he’s got several agents chasing him.

“What you give is what you get.”

I used to talk about this concept a lot when I was a fundraising executive. We rallied our board members around the Give/Get principle because we expected them to create value for the institution.

It’s not really that different in business. By giving value for the people around you, you will get value in return. Value creates thought leadership, someone who people want to know and do business with. People want to give business to those who give them business. This is not a new idea, but it’s one worth being mindful of because emphasizes reciprocity, an exchange which creates a relationship.

I try to create value everyday because I appreciate the community I inhabit. For me, it makes for a full and fulfilled work life. Who doesn’t want that?

Photos from: Wikipedia, Teamsubmarine & Mr. Cheapstuff

TTYL - Teens build relationships, find temporal freedom via TXT MSGS

"Dad! No body emails anymore!!"

This is a direct quote from two daughters (spoken in stereo) exasperatedly exclaimed to a friend of mine recently. This caused me to conduct an informal survey of teens and pre-teens about their texting habits and social network usage.

Overwhelmingly texting as communication was the most popular for several reasons: ubiquity ("it's on my phone which I always have with me"), functional privacy ("this way mom/dad can't hear what I'm saying") and perceived privacy ("a boyfriend and girlfriend sent each other photos of themselves which was OK, until their parents found out then they got in trouble").

A mere 20 years ago, the modes of discourse for teens were the telephone, in person speech or more metaphorically and abstractly, the mix-tape. Now it's the cell phone and texting or instant messaging within a social networking platform like Twitter, Facebook or Myspace. The mix-tape has been replaced by the CD or viral video. Although it seems unlikely, teens still communicate face to face, but these situations are frequently punctuated by back-channel chat and commentary "stuff you just couldn't say aloud" i.e.: when a voice call is impractical, impossible or unacceptable.

It is ironic that fearful, helicopter parents seeking control over their children's whereabouts purchased these phones for tracking purposes only to discover that the devices are being used by their children to engage in private, un-moderated conversation.

Confiscating the mobile phone is one of the more popular forms of punishment for the behavioral infractions of misbehaving youth. Over 60 percent of parents admitted to doing this and 64 percent of those same parents admitted that they viewed the content of their kid's phone according to a study by The Pew Internet and American Life project.

But what is it about texting? Why is it such a preferred mode and what has made it so commonplace? Is it the immediacy, the speed that mimics a face to face conversation? Does the text message encourage a sense of intimacy which in turn creates a feeling of limerence?

Ah limerence! A feeling that teens (girls especially) are familiar with. Limerent bonds manifest as intense feelings of attachment and preoccupation with the object of affection. Intrusive thoughts invade, cognitive obsession grows. Teens of both genders have reported that texting and participating in virtual social networks have an addictive quality. The need to remain connected is strong and "reachability" is highly valued. They report feeling a need to "keep up" with what was happening currently. They felt lost not knowing what people were doing or where they were while participating in a voluntary break from Facebook for a 24 hour period.

StudentSpeak Webisode 2 from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Texting also allows teens to multi-task. "It's a lot easier to be doing my homework or watching TV while I am texting." Texting also allows them to carry on multiple conversations, "I'll probably be texting five or so of my friends over the course of an evening." These interactions can range from homework questions, quick social check-ins "hi!" and complaints "my sister's being a B*tch". They have their own acronyms idk, gtg and lingo. Teens carry out conversations with one another without being expected to reply within a short amount of time, as in a mobile phone conversation where reception can be shoddy. Texting offers a flexibility and freedom from temporal constraint.

Teens communicate in this way all day long, even falling asleep in the virtual company of their correspondents -- effectively texting themselves to sleep. But the sound of a voice is just as important as one 17 year old boy told me, "I'll text a girl, but if I'm interested (in her) I'll also call her and talk on the phone too." Thus reinforcing a bond, with every call or 1 txt @ a time.

Open Source – The End of Scarcity means More

IBM has estimated that the amount of digital information will double every 11 hours in 2010.

That’s an abundance of unlimited content, access, and information. Something barely imaginable. It is frightening and exciting at the same time. It is a huge paradigm shift for a culture used to a previous world driven by scarcity, preciousness and exclusivity.

The potential here is best understood in the context of education.

At Itunes U any number of amazing and free lectures from places like MIT, the Sorbonne, Cambridge and UNC Chapel Hill can be downloaded.

It’s a remix of the traditional idea of education: get some experts, people eager to learn and start a discussion. Where it takes place is less relevant, though to draw students the content must be strong and the sense of Bakhtinian sobornost – “togetherness” or “true sense of community” must still exist.

More control and choice for learners creates a P2P environment where students are both learners and teachers as well as creators and consumers. Knowledge flows freely rather than being stockpiled.

A unique example of this is happening at Purdue University. They have designed an app called Hotseat. It functions like Twitter for the lecture hall and in fact was developed with the idea that students were already texting anyway -- why not create a faculty endorsed distraction to focus that back channel discussion? With this app, students are commenting on the commentary and asking questions. Student to student sharing has been embraced by Purdue rather than seeing it as a threat for it’s potential to encourage cheating and non independent learning. In this way, redundant academic work becomes more vibrant and open. Hotseat is remediative - a new way of showing an old media form. Ie; the "class discussion" experience.

Alternatives to Facebook -- what are the options?

Maybe you've just had enough. Perhaps your profile's been hacked, or you can't sort out the byzantine privacy settings options, maybe one of your "friends" mentioned a sex organ in status their update, (Once was enough to get me to "unfriend" you...) Or maybe you just long for something different.

Well dear reader, before FB Quitting Day May 31, 2010, here are some of your choices. Old and new soc nets (social networks) for your review.

Diaspora - the latest new, new thing. It's the sweetheart start-up developed by four charmingly geekalicious young lads from NYU and crowd funded by Kickstarter. It's not actually a social network yet. But they're working on writing the code to make it an open source alternative. They aren't the first ones out there per this link I found. (However to be honest, the Linux, Apache, MySql and Php talk starts to get a bit too techy for me and my brain melts just a little. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

Friendster - 'Memba them? I first heard of them in 1994 and even then it was a little late to be an early adopter.

Then there's Whspr, another recent entry into the soc-net-o-sphere which I mentioned in last week's Noo Yeek column.

Posterous - is a blog/soc-net hybrid you can see mine here. I know it's a bit light on the content, I'm just trying it out.

Ning is an option that I have used for an alumni network or maybe Orkut, a soc-net that is integrated into your Google-verse.

And another exile from soc-net Hipster-ville that might get a resurrection from the Facebook "diaspora" (oh those boys are clever name choosers!) is MySpace which seemed to loose steam and members once it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch.

I doubt people will leave LinkedIn or stop using Twitter due to privacy concerns since those are more readily controlled in terms of whom they broadcast to and yes, while Twitter isn't quite a social networking site, (really microblogging) it is a soc-net tool.

The meta narrative is privacy online. What is is, who controls it, how is it filtered and layered? Clearly the cows have long since left the barn, so it's really verbum sap sat. Everything you post on FB (or the internet) becomes part of the whole. They know a lot about you, because you give it to them, everyday. As one of my Facebook status updates read this week, "all your Face are belong to us".


Thank you Hank Grebe and Mediaspin.com for such a great image.

NOOYEEK

 New and unique  = Newique

(new-yeek)

Bitter Yellow flowers, I think they are some kind of daisy. (Does anyone else feel that this color yellow has a bitter taste/smell?)

Tactical Philanthropy 
It sounds like Soldier of Fortune meets the Chronicle of Philanthropy!

Temple Grandin speaking at the TED conference about different kinds of thinkers.
Cowgirl shirts are awesome!

Transparency Now
Let's make it clear...essays on the media and popular culture

And two new places to post items online
Posterous and Whspr

Whspr is in beta and is going for the people who are fleeing Facebook due to privacy issues. There's even a Quit Facebook Day on May 31, 2010.

Is anyone else using these? Or others? The Huffington Post has a blip about this here.

Filmmaker Forum at the DGA

This weekend as a member of the Producer's Lab I was able to attend the Filmmaker Forum put on by FIND at the DGA. It began with a screening of the film The Brothers Bloom on Friday evening which was nicely shot by Steve Yedin, had great production design by Jim Clay but it just didn't grab me. I couldn't decide if it were a caper film or a romance -- but both Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz are gorgeous to look at. It's worth seeing, just not sure if I would have paid to see it in a theatre. On Saturday morning we had Ted Hope's keynote speech and in my opinion this sort of set the tone for the weekend.

We heard from the producers of Bottle Shock and Humboldt County about the ways they had chosen to self-distribute or at least be more involved in the distribution of their films.

Probably the most exciting panel I attended however was the one entitled: New Tools for Audience Building moderated by Lance Weiler of the Workbook Project and presented by Micki Krimmel and Alex Johnson all 3 very enthusiastic folks with whom I just wanted to hang out and spend more time with. It was in the DGA 3 screening room which wasn't wired for internet and also didn't have enough seats so we were in the aisles and relegated to watching only some static powerpoint pages on the screen. Micki told me later at lunch the next time she does one of these she will specifically ask for a wireless connection. Good idea. I kept trying to look stuff up on my Iphone but the DGA is somewhat of a black hole for a net connection over a mobile phone.

I have to run off to a meeting, so I have to cut this short. More later.

Monkey Mind + Quarterlife

Remember that scene in "Ghostbusters"?

Harmless pop icon turns to evil in mere moments? It's those times when you know you shouldn't think about something, try and not think about it, but oops! There it is.

That's what I'm talking about. That's how my brain is working right now. The Buddhists call it "monkey mind" and the monkeys in my mind have been quite busy typing out their nonsense transmissions.
whenwillthestrikebeoverwhatcanIdointhemeantimetoearnmoneytopaymybills
whatifthere'snopilotseason?WhatamIgoingtodoaboutChristmas?Howmuchlongerwillthis goonhowquicklywillstufframpbackuponcethestrikeisovershouldIleavethebusinessWTF?

And then: I remember what M said to me once: "Remember, we can't really DO anything else. We have to stay here." He's right. Yes I can do other things, but I've done other things and not liked it. Creative people need to "follow their bliss", tempered by economic necessity of course.

He and I have a date to meet at the big rally on Tuesday afternoon in Hollywood. It's supposed to be as large as the one at Fox. I'm going to ride the subway so I don't have to drive, sit in traffic and pay to park.

But sometimes monkey mind is what gets me thinking creatively and passionately as well. If I don't absolutely love a project, my heart isn't in it. If I'm not suffering from a type of limerence, not thinking about it, visualising it, replaying it in my mind: then I have a much harder time doing it. I want to be intoxicated by what I do because that brings work much closer to a state of flow.

This caught my eye yesterday a piece in the New York Times about "Quarterlife". The producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are AFI alumni too.

I just watched Episode 3 and was pleased to see Barret Swatek, an actress I've worked with before, playing idea-stealing co-worker Brittany.

As far as I can tell, "Quarterlife" is the second scripted series that is utilizing a social networking site. I believe Showtime's "The L Word" was the first to do so. This is where television is going, and going quickly. It's Television 2.0