Joshua Guffey

Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

You know you want one!

Now adding a Facebook button to your WordPress hosted site is as simple as installing a new plugin.

A bit ago I posted about adding a Facebook ‘like’ button to your posts.  The process was a bit janky since no developers had yet released any WordPress plugins to accomplish this task.  Now there are about a jillion plugins to accomplish this. Hooray!

I looked over several of them and settled on WP Facebook Like. I certainly didn’t test them all, so there may be a few out there that have some extra bells and whistles, but this one seemed solid, so I’m giving it a go.

The nice thing about adding this to your posts is that as people visit and ‘like’ your stuff, that shows up in their ‘recent activity’ stream, which is nice if your trying to use social media for business.

To install it:
Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin and search for “wp facebook like”.  Click the install button.  It’s that easy.

Like I said, there are several, so if you’re trying to get this exact one, be sure that you’re not installing some variation on this name.  The most notable of which simply adds the word “button” (ie. “wp facebook like button”).

By default you’ll see the button on all posts after the post content.  some users may want to have the option to exclude the button from certain posts or enable it manually only when desired, and I’m sure either a later version of this plugin or a different one currently available will offer this, but that wasn’t important to me.

So far I like it a lot.  It’s simple. It works. Tada!  (try it out below)

[note: If you're using WordPress version 2.9.2 or earlier it seems you'll need to select "iframe" as the embedding method. The default of "xfbml" works fine on WordPress 3.0 beta-1.]

For more ways to implement social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

Yesterday at the f8 conference Facebook introduced their new ‘open graph protocol‘.

Essentially what this means is that Facebook has now made it possible to not only integrate elements of it’s interface, such as the ‘like’ button, into everywhere you go on the web; they’ve made it possible for you to bring the Facebook experience and your friends along with you wherever you go.

This also makes it possible to navigate the web as YOU; being served up web pages that are tailored specifically to your ‘likes’ from across the web.

Some of what this means now:

• Implementation of Facebook features across the web very rapidly.
• See what your friends like on websites all across the web.
• Ability to essentially be connected to your Facebook friends all the time across the entire web.
• Facebook becomes the hub for your ‘likes’ and those of the rest of the world.
• Share documents with friends via docs.com (a direct attack on Google Docs)

What we may see in the near-term future:

• Social search further threatens Google.  Facebook and Microsoft are working together so there may be some further implementation into Bing in the future.
• Expect advertisers to start to take into consideration your ‘likes’ from across the entire web and display customized ads on the pages you’re currently viewing.  This may position Facebook further as the most targeted advertising platform available. Imagine Google Adsense ads being replaced by Facebook ad panels.  This won’t happen immediately since data needs to be gather and frameworks implemented…but expect something like this to emerge.
• Increased competition for the web’s social default.  I’m thinking Google may jump in with their Gmail-based, relatively untapped, Buzz, however I’m unsure how well this would take hold.  The ideal would be an open source platform that keeps competition going, such as some implementation of XAuth.  Xauth isn’t ready (or even designed) for this type of use, but I’m still holding out hope for an open source, social web.
• This could further position Facebook as the go to location for data to fuel the emerging Social CRM trend.
• Third-party tools for accessing and manipulating Facebook’s open graph data in useful and meaningful ways.  Much like the third-party explosion of applications we’ve seen for Twitter.

Further thinking on how ‘open graph’ changes the game

This effects a lot of the web (basically all of it) and the many of the major players in the game.

First, it’s an attack on Google’s reining web-dominance.  As the web and search becomes increasingly social these two giants are pushing forward into this ever overlapping arena.  Google currently wields a tremendous amount of data about our web use and the information from its suite of services for organizing and managing our lives .  While Facebook seeks to be the hub of our likes and interest and seeks to make our daily web activities more social and personalized.

Facebook has now made itself essentially as open as Twitter while at the same time distributing itself across the web via the developer’s ability to embed certain Facebook interfaces into non-Facebook pages.  They’re counting on the rest of the web community to use this as the new standard and they seem to have significant forward motion in that direction.

Still, this poses the problem of disgruntled users who had come to expect the privacy the Facebook used to tout as central to their policy.  In March of 2008 Zuckerman, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, said “If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users”; this clearly isn’t their policy anymore.

Google could perhaps implement a similar system which enables a personalized web experience without Facebook’s vision of complete social integration; and perhaps offers a more low-key way of sharing, connecting and collaborating with friends online.

How do you expect these new changes to effect the way we use the web? Leave a comment below to voice your thoughts.

For more about social media for business or just to connect follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

When you send out tweets or Facebook updates, do you give much thought to their timing?

There are a number of interesting considerations to be made about timing with social media marketing, depending of course upon the intention of your tweets.

Ideally, if you’re using social media for the purposes of personal branding, promotion or other communication with your people, you’re also actually being social. It’s what makes it fun, connected and gives people a reason to pay attention. But that’s for another post.

How can you be more sure that the people you serve are able to benefit most from your, let’s face it, tiny, 140 charater messages?  Just broadly, I’ll give a few recommendations. These will shift depending on your specific demographics and goals, but it’s a jumping off point.

1. Promotional tweets (or Facebook messages) should be sent at times when your target market is present in that social space. Give some thought to this and if you aren’t there yourself during those times to do the posting, consider a scheduling service. Hootsuite offers a free service that includes scheduling as does SocialPing (still in private beta).

2. Think about the content of your message and if it is appropriate for that time of day. For example, if you sell pizza and you’re running a 2-for-1 special, when do you suppose you’ll get your greatest return on tweets promoting the offer?

My guess as to a good approach (mind you I haven’t done any pizza-lover research outside of consulting my stomach) — I’d think about tweeting about it once around 4:45-5:30 (when people are leaving work or just left work), then around 7:00-7:30 mention it again in a different way (avoid I’m a robot syndrome). I’d also tweet something social or fun once or twice in between the two promo tweets. You don’t want to have your profile filled with promo tweet after promo tweet.

3. It’s also highly useful to align yourself and your message around what is relavant with current trends. And sometimes to have fun heading in the opposite direction from how others are doing it.

We want to be relevant with the current happenings in the world (seasons, holidays and even events with large media coverage or anything really high profile) but ideally to do so in a way that sets us apart from the rest.

A great example of this was a ski resort commercial I heard on the radio not long ago. They were promoting their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like, but they did it completely differently and hit their target market square on the head.

The commercial was with the usual absurdly-booming voice declaring that they were now on “Twitbook” and “Faceplant”. It was a riduclous commercial and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don’t snowboard or ski, so I didn’t go look em up; but I guarantee if I were into snow sports I’d have been there following them.

So this all relates to timing in that social media is now widely accepted as a marketing channel and promoted everywhere. But the message gets stale. Their ad was on target and also refreshing change from the usual “become a fan on Facebook”.

Can you think in different ways about your timing? Are there areas that could be improved? And what can you add to this conversation?

For more ways to think outside-of-the-box about social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

We’re all very well connected these days. That’s good! But without some specialized filters the real-time web and social media can certainly start to take over our lives.

I recently posted a screencast about how Syphir can make Gmail more manageable and powerful.  Now I want to show you how you can use Syphir to delay your Facebook comments from showing up in your Gmail inbox until you’re ready for them.

Take a look at the screenshot below to see what the filters rules and actions are. Then head over to Syphir and create your own filters to manage web-overload.

Just yesterday I posted “How To: Block Facebook application invites from specific friends“.  Today I thought I’d point out that apps that you DON’T authorize can still access your information if you don’t fix it.

To fix this go to:
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=friends_share