By Jeff on June 17, 2009
Pages for companies, they are a boon for marketers online, 
but how many of them are tied back to personal profiles? I ask because if you are thinking about setting up a page on Facebook for your company, you should think about creating a business account on Facebook. The best part is that they are free & they aren’t connected to your personal profile on Facebook.
Not being connected to your personal profile is extremely important for a couple of reasons. The first is that sometimes people make mistakes and it could lead to having your account on Facebook deleted. It is sad, but it does happen. But then do you know what happens to all the Facebook pages you created? They go with you… to nowhere. Since they are tied to your account, when your account gets deleted so do they. This can be very bad for companies large and small.
The second reason why you don’t want it tied to your profile is what happens if you leave the company or the companies page that you set up for them no longer does business with you. By setting up the page under your personal profile you will always have access to those pages. There is no way to transfer ownership of a page or to remove the creator from being an admin of the page. You are effectively stuck with it. Facebook may be able to alleviate the situation by contacting your sales rep, but it remains to be seen if they can or not.
The third reason you shouldn’t tie it to your personal account is that if you are the owner of the page you can never post comments to the page without looking like you are the mouthpiece of that company. Try it some time if you are the owner/admin of a page. You can’t post anything to the wall without looking like you are speaking for the company. It is easy to forget this sometimes and accidentally post something to the page. People are people after all.
The best situation is to make use of the business accounts on Facebook. When you set up a business account on Facebook you can tie it to a new email address on gMail that you can easily transfer to another company or person if you stop working somewhere.
Here is how you do it:
- If you are logged into facebook, log out.
- Go to facebook.com
- Under the “Sign Up” form there is a link “To create a page for a celebrity, band, or business click here”.
- click on that link
- you will then be presented with a screen so that you can create your new page
- create your new page here and use your email address that isn’t tied to anything on facebook
- after completing the form and verifying your email address you will be brought to the page you just created so you can edit it.
You can add as many pages as you want to a business account, but if I were you I would have a seperate business account for each of your clients. It not only keeps them separated and easy to manage, but allows you to have a way to turn the account over to them if you have to.
The homepage of your business account is a basic ad and page manager screen. I hope this proves useful to you. Enjoy!
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Posted in Flash, Social | Tagged FaceBook, Facebook Pages, Social |
By Jeff on June 16, 2009
Recently Facebook unveiled their new vanity URL scheme to the public. It was a great plan and quite a bit of time overdue for Facebook. The problem in my opinion was that they opened it up to profiles and pages at the same time. This has created a bit of a problem with trademarks and copyrights on Facebook.
Lets say you were a brand that had a page with less than 1000 fans as of May 31st. You weren’t eligible to sign your brand up for a vanity page. Come saturday night a user comes on and sets up a vanity URL for their profile. Now there is someone essentially squatting on your trademark and potentially confusing consumers of your brand. Lets say you are XYZ company and you have a page, but didn’t qualify for the May 31st cutoff and someone else registers your URL. Whenever a consumer comes to facebook/xyz they will see a user’s profile page instead of your product.
There is also the issue of got there first. This happened with a brands that I know who are in the public space. Someone got on, started a new profile and registered that brand’s vanity instead of it actually being that brand. Now that brand also had a fan page that they had more than 1000 fans on and had intended on using that vanity URL for their fan page. They now find themselves out of luck with someone infringing on their brand name and having to wait for facebook or for their lawyers to act on it.
What facebook should have done in my opinion was take a staged approach to the issue and opened the gates up to pages first and then opened it up to the general public. It may have alleviated some of the problems that we are now seeing, some of which may have to be fought out in court.
On the downside, if you did register a vanity URL that is a trademark of another company, you will probably loose your account and everything you created… FAIL for users as well…
Here is the link to the trademark infringement form:
http://www.facebook.com/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1
Posted in Facebook Development, Social | Tagged FaceBook, Facebook Pages, Social |
By Jeff on June 8, 2009
Now, I am a mac user and have had my MBP for about 2 years now. I have enjoyed the machine greatly and have used it everyday during my commute to New York City. I was thinking of upgrading to a new machine and giving my wife my older computer, but with the recent announcements from apple, I am thinking twice.
Why? Because of 2 things that they changed. First, no expresscard slot. Really? What about all of us users that have expresscards that we use on our MBP’s? Do we just dream ourselves into Appleland where we don’t need those silly cards anymore? What did we gain for this sacrifice? An SD slot, seriously? Most PC laptops have 2 SD slots along with the expresscard slot. Why can they do it and apple can’t? Probably because Apple doesn’t want to understand people that use their computers in the “real” world.
The real world leads into my second problem with the new laptops and that is the lack of a user replaceable battery. While I do know that it can be replaced by opening up the case and manually replacing the battery, not only does it void the warranty, but it doesn’t make sense for those that fly a lot or might be at a conference. Just having the ability to swap a dead battery for a fully charged one is one of the greatest things about laptops in my opinion. If we have to plug them into the wall for power all the time when the battery goes dead, then what is the use?
In all seriousness Apple needs to wakeup and make something consumers really want, not what they think they want. I really like OS and my current 2-year old laptop, but I don’t think I can see myself every buying another one again.
Apples new MacBook family: non-removable batteries, lower prices.
Posted in Apple, hardware | Tagged Apple |
By Jeff on June 5, 2009
Posted in ActionScript 3 | Tagged ActionScript |
By Jeff on June 2, 2009
That always seems to be the problem these days, trying to define which social network your brand should embrace. It really is an issue of what network has the most users that your brand targets. Lets say if you were the Wall Street Journal, your audience more than likely wouldn’t be found on MySpace. On the other hand if you were Sony Music and you want to capture the tween market in the social space your target would include MySpace. But you can’t just put all your eggs in one basket.
Personally I have accounts on at least 40 different sites that could be considered in some way social in nature. I do this to try and keep up with trends in the social space and so that I can see what the focus of some of the networks are. Having so many accounts is not usually the case with the general web audience. Most consumers only sign up for a couple of networks and use it to talk to their “friends”.
The fact that not everyone is on every network really means that you can’t just pick MySpace and just ignore another popular network like Facebook. You will get some people that only have a MySpace account and don’t have a Facebook account. The ideal solution is to try to use at least two networks, but again that depends on your target audience.
Some companies might choose to imbrace LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook in order to target a specific market segment. While another company might just use Twitter and hi5. It just depends on your audience.
Here is an old map from a couple of years ago… Things change though and the stats are woefully out of date…
http://valleywag.gawker.com/tech/data-junkie/the-world-map-of-social-networks-273201.php
Ultimately it will just take a bit of research to find which network or networks you should be using for your brand. The one thing you don’t want to do in my opinion is try and be on all the social networks as a brand. It will only result in watering down your message.
Posted in Social | Tagged Branding, Social |
By Jeff on June 1, 2009
If you have ever wondered how you selected specific images or specific copy to add to facebook when a user shares your page on Facebook, there are some simple meta tags you can add to your html to make sure that your site/brand is being properly represented on the site…
Making Sure the Preview Works (For Advanced Partners)
While you’re at it, you should also take the time to make sure that Facebook always gets a correct preview of your page when users try to share it.
The link we’re providing you with passes on the URL of your page to our servers, which in turn look up certain html tags within it. Those tags are used to display a preview of the page. In order to provide this preview, we always look for the title of the page, a summary of the main content, and an image. If there’s media content on the page, those media files are also important to identify.
Posted in Facebook Development, Social | Tagged FaceBook, Social |
By Jeff on May 7, 2009
Posted in General | Tagged energy, solar |
By Jeff on May 5, 2009
Posted in Google, Social | Tagged Google, Social |
By Jeff on May 2, 2009
Posted in Social | Tagged Social |