Posted by Gabe on March 12, 2010 under Facebook, Kids are Heroes, Social Media, Twitter | 
I always get a kick out of remembering when my first day on Twitter was. If I forget I can go to the site that tells me when I did. For me it happened to be Christmas Eve, 2008. I almost feel guilty for being on the computer that day and cannot recollect my motivation, but at least I didn’t tweet too much on the day I should have been spending with my family. It wasn’t long until I was addicted to the concept of getting to know people through this platform. As I progressed I learned a lot which I have tried to share in this blog. Sometime mid-2009 I created a Facebook fan page for Kids Are Heroes and now I had two platforms to manage. So what is the point of all this social networking, anyway? Is it just to pass the time and comment on what we all had for breakfast? Absolutely not. It’s about connecting with people. Period. Funny thing is that I thought I was connecting with people all along. I would converse with them, ask about what they do, give them #followfriday mentions, help them in any way I could, the whole nine yards. But it wasn’t until fairly recently when I took these connections to the next level.
You may know that recently we have partnered with Levar Fisher, an ex-NFL star who travels around the country motivating youth and speaking about Kids Are Heroes. I was introduced to Levar by Mary Kurek, who works in Levar’s behalf by helping him to connect with people like me. I watched how she works and that is how I learned to really connect with people. Connecting means more to me now than just #followfriday mentions on Twitter. Thanks to Mary I learned that it’s about taking action. It’s about seeking out people who might complement you and you them. It’s about picking up the phone and really connecting. From those conversations both parties can then take action and actually do something to further each other’s causes. I have been on the phone for the first time with people I met on Twitter more times in the last three weeks than I have in the year I have been involved in social media. I believe that this works just as well with businesses as it does non-profits. I had a long phone conversation with Tom Tuohy of Dreams for Kids yesterday and the word that came up often was ‘collaboration’. I am so looking forward to seeing what unravels from that connection. This week I also connected with Blake Raab of Bears on Patrol. One would think that non-profits would keep their cards close to the vest and not share anything, because we are all competing for donations that are out there. That’s the old way of thinking. It just so happens that I love Blake’s mission and I really want him to be successful. That is why I am trying to come up with ways that our kids can support what he does. I have learned that a great leader is one who makes people who work with him (or her) successful. This is what I aspire to be and hopefully something that I am working toward every day.
So take action and leave a comment. I might just arrange a phone call. :)
Posted by Gabe on January 16, 2010 under Facebook |
You would think that because I am a software developer by trade I would be the first to know about all the latest and greatest technologies. Unfortunately that is rarely if ever the case with me. I think it is because I see that many times technology is created more for technology’s sake and less for its practical use. I see technology at its best when it improves our lives in one way or another.
So maybe that is the reason why I have been largely ignoring the “Facebook Connect” technology. Maybe yes and maybe no – I guess I never really understood what it was and what it could be used for. So this morning I set out to learn more about it.
I still must admit I haven’t fully explored all of its capabilities, because when I saw the “Facebook Share” button I absolutely had to implement it on our web site. It allows users to easily share your content on their Facebook walls.
Here’s how it works. You place a Facebook Share button on one of your web pages. We did it on the “shout-out” pages which are individual pages parents can send to their families that highlight just their hero. Here’s an example:
When a user clicks on that button, something similar to the following appears:
The user is able to add a comment and share it directly to their Facebook profile. How cool is that? The good news is that it is not that difficult to implement. Just follow the simple steps provided on the Facebook Share page.
Now if you are a Wordpress blogger (like me) and you want a plug-in that will do the same thing, go to your Admin page, under Plug-Ins click ‘Add New’ and search for ‘Facebook Share’. You will get several results. I tried a few of them and wasn’t perfectly happy with any of them. The reason being is that I wanted it to be able to pick up a particular image (not make the user select from whatever is on your page). This was relatively easy to do when I implemented it on our site because there is a “linkrel” option that determines the picture you want to go with it. This is more difficult to set in a blog environment (especially for me) because I try and have a picture on every post and there is no way to assign a particular picture directly to the Share feature. It would be nice if they implmented a custom field for this.
So I settled on the AddThis plug-in, which not only shares to Facebook but it also allows the user to share it with other platforms.
Posted by Gabe on December 17, 2009 under Facebook, Social Media, Twitter |
What’s the first thing you think of when you think of social media? Is it connecting with others? Maybe. But why are you doing this? Do you need more friends? Would you really have time for all the people you connect with on a regular basis in real life? I think the main reason many of us engage in social media is that we are promoting something. I make no bones about the fact that I do this to promote Kids Are Heroes. Would I drop out of it if all of a sudden Kids Are Heroes ended abruptly? Maybe not, but I can guarantee you I would not be doing it as much. Don’t get me wrong — the “social” part of this makes it fun and I honestly do consider many of my connections strong ones. I do think there may be people who do this just for fun, but more of us do it to promote something, whether it be business, charity or something else. Is that bad? I don’t think so. However it is how you promote things that can directly affect your success.
To date I have been treating Twitter and Facebook mainly as promotional/networking tools. They are indeed a great way to get the word out about something. But lately I have found another great use for social media. I have always known about it, but for whatever reason am more aware of it now that I have been using it more for this purpose. That is, learning. This is true especially for Twitter. I have learned a lot lately from one of my Twitter colleagues whose name is @JohnHaydon. His videos have taught me how to “trick out” my Facebook page, and I discovered ClickToTweet through him among other things. I just signed up for his “31 Day Challenge: Optimize Your Blog For Social Media” which starts in January as this is a topic I am focusing on right now. I look forward to discovering more new tricks.
When we started our Kids Are Heroes venture the web site was it. Period. KidsAreHeroes.com was the entire effort. Then we branched out into social media and all of a sudden we had a blog site that supported it. Now we also have a Twitter, Facebook and Youtube presence among other things. I now look upon it as one big package. It all has the same message to get kids involved in philanthropy and we try to work on each individual spoke of the wheel to make it better. Take SEO for instance (for you ankle-biters that’s ‘Search Engine Optimization’). I know a little bit about it, but want to know more. I want people to have the best chance of finding our web site or blog when I’m not there to direct them. So what do I do? I use TweepSearch and search for “SEO” in people’s profiles. This is a wonderful tool to discover people from all walks of life. I can then subscribe to their blog to learn more or even ask them direct questions.
Another obvious way to learn is to just ask. I have a social media training session coming up and I lack in one area as I do not update Twitter with my phone. I know how to do it, just don’t have much sense of what tools are being used and which are more popular. By sending out one tweet I found that ‘Tweetie 2′ for the iPhone is a big one, and also came across a great resource to discover Twitter apps. OneForty.com is a new web site developed by my old Twitter friend @Pistachio. (You can also follow @oneforty). If you click on iPhone you will get a list of Twitter apps designed for it.
It is great to know that people are so generous with their knowledge. Google’s results can be so overwhelming sometimes. And for the record I do like to pass on what I learn and give back too. See a catalog of my posts on Twitter.
Posted by Gabe on December 11, 2009 under Facebook, Kids are Heroes, Social Media, Twitter |
I have been working on something that I’m pretty excited about. I have a social media seminar coming up next week that I have been planning for a while. I figured I’d better be organized so I started with an agenda. I thought that it might be cool if I provided an electronic document that linked the subjects to corresponding posts that I have written. I’ve been writing about Twitter for less than a year so one would think that would be rather simple. Maybe it’s the Wordpress theme I am using, but it wasn’t too easy to pinpoint exact posts from a while ago, let alone browse through them.
I ended up creating a new page that I call the guide to my social media posts. (You can also access it at the top of the page by clicking “directory” on the menu.) This was a pain to create, but I think that it may be very helpful to people. It lists the topic, title and excerpt in the order that I prescribed.
Update 12/12/09: I was so happy with this method of organization that I went ahead and classified many of my other posts the same way. Now when you click on “Directory” you get a listing of all the Kids Are Heroes related posts, and then can branch off to the Twitter and Facebook related ones. For now that should suffice, since these are the main topics I focus on.
Ideally there is a Wordpress plug-in to do this, and my friend and guru @DannyBrown suggested I try a plug-in called “In-Series“. This appears that it may be able to accomplish what I am doing, but I liked what I had set up and I know I have ultimate control over how it looks, the order and sections each post belongs in, and ultimately which posts make the directory. I also didn’t see a working example anywhere which would have been nice. Maybe someone knows of one?
Anyway I think this is an excellent way of providing readers a quick way of perusing all of our material, allowing them to easily choose what interests them. What do you all think?
Posted by Gabe on December 10, 2009 under Facebook, Social Media |
A lot of people have been asking me how I did this, so here goes. I fully admit I am just getting started with this sort of thing and hope to learn (and share) how to enhance both my Facebook page and my blog functionality.
I try to learn from the best. I will say that my friend John Haydon got me started with all this stuff. The idea is that you want your FB page to stand out from others.
Let’s start with the avatar. As you can see, mine is a bit different. Facebook will let you display one that is maximum 200 pixels wide and 600 pixels in length. I did two things to be different. I took advantage of that size, and also made it appear that the top part has an invisible background. To do that, I copied the color of the Facebook background and used that as the background of my image. This piece is 51 pixels high. The color in RGB (red, green and blue) is 237, 239, and 244 respectively or #edeff4 in hex or html color. (This assumes you have some experience working with colors in Photoshop or a similar graphics program.) Below that there is one line that is 1 pixel high and its color is 188, 221, 236 or #bcddec. The only caveat with that is that the same avatar (or at least a portion thereof) is used to preface each update you have so there has to be a portion of your picture that works for this too. To select the crop area, click on the main image once you have it installed, select “Change Profile Picture” then drag the image to adjust the Thumbnail version. Make sure you save your changes. Most people recommend a 200×200 image so that the representation is the same in both areas.
Next is the Navigation bar to the left. I call it on my page “Other Stuff”. Rather that reinvent the wheel I will point you to where I first learned how to do this and that is from the aforementioned John Haydon. His post “How to Add an Interactive Sidebar” was extremely helpful to me. This is an instructional video that you will want to bookmark. (NB: John is a rocker so beware of a bit of music to start the video.) I started by doing almost exactly what John did. Later I wanted a bit more pizazz so I used images rather than simple links. This is all a function of the embedded HTML. The one thing to note here is the name of the application used here is called “Static FBML”. This inherently means that you cannot use Javascript, PHP or anything else to make it more dynamic. I would have changed the pictures when the mouse hovers over them like I do on my regular web site if I had that capability.
In a lot of my research I discovered that many people recommend a different “landing page” for fan pages. That is, when people who are not fans go to your page they are treated with something totally different than just a disjointed conversation on your wall. So I created my “Welcome!” page. It gets added to Facebook exactly the same way that we did with John’s navigation bar, with the single difference that towards the end you do not remove it from the Tabs, you remove it from the Boxes. Then you can simply drag the tab laterally to wherever you want it in the food chain. To set your default landing page, from your Fan page go to Edit Page, then Settings. Edit Wall Settings and change the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else” to your new page. You are done.
As far as the HTML is concerned, I created a page 540 pixels wide. Again, you cannot have too many bells and whistles because by definition it is “Static FBML”, but you can brand it to make it look like yours. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section and I will gladly answer them if I am able. Good luck!
P.S. Here is another gem for Fan page people. If you have at least 25 fans you can get your own “Vanity URL” (i.e. http://facebook.com/KidsAreHeroes). This number was reduced from originally 1000 then 100. It is SO MUCH easier to promote when you have your own url. To get one simply visit http://www.facebook.com/username/.
UPDATE 12/15/09: Just when you think you are ahead of the game… I just discovered that Facebook is planning a series of “improvements” to their site in the next few weeks. One of which is that they are removing the “Boxes” concept. What that basically means is if you create a Navigation Bar as described above, it will vanish when they implement those changes. The avatar and landing page concepts are still valid. Watch my blog for a replacement method once this happens. Dontcha just love progress??
Posted by Gabe on under Facebook, Social Media, Twitter |
It just seems inevitable that I start to write about Facebook. Even though six months ago I was telling people I was strictly a Twitter person, only keeping up an outpost on Facebook, I have become much more involved with it since then. I totally agree with those who are tired of all the “gurus”, many of them being far from it, so I of course do not claim to be one. But being a software developer I have a keen interest in learning the technical concepts and using them to our benefit.
Bear with me because I am still learning. I have delved into Wordpress a bit lately as well. You may see some FB and Twitter plug-ins here on my blog and I finally understand how to get the blog to do what I want for the most part. This kind of stuff is fun for me. So what I plan to do is talk about some differences between Facebook and Twitter in this post, and follow up with a technical “how-to” post regarding Fan pages as I have been getting requests to do just that.
When I originally asked my friend Bob about how to best spread the word about Kids Are Heroes, he did not hesitate to reply “Facebook and Twitter”. So I started an account on both platforms. Immediately I saw quite a difference. I find Facebook to be much more personal as people tell intimate details of their lives and post their family pictures. I did not want everyone to “friend” me. I didn’t feel it was appropriate. Then I started a Kids Are Heroes group. That’s the ticket, I thought. My nephew told all his friends to join and before you know it I had over 200 members. The problem was I was the only one writing anything. There was no participation. I had the ability to message everyone, but being a person who hates to be bugged that way I hardly ever used that capability.
Twitter on the other hand was entirely different. It seemed to be a much easier way to connect with people. There are several ways to find those that share your interests. WeFollow.com and TweepSearch.com are just a couple. Follow people and voilà, they more often than not follow you back. Strike up a conversation and you are on your way to making a connection. All of a sudden guess what? I was actually starting to get comments on my blog. The number of Twitter ”followers” was increasing much quicker than the number of Facebook “friends” or group members. So I focused most of my efforts on Twitter.
I’m not saying you can’t use Facebook in the same way — many people are far quicker to “friend” others than I am. For some reason I was less comfortable with that.
Then along came the Facebook Fan pages. At first I didn’t pay much attention to them until I “fanned” one or two pages. Wait a minute — the updates go to my wall automatically! Very “Twitteresque” I thought. When I realized this I immediately dropped the group and started a fan page. I messaged everyone in the group to come over and a good portion of them did. I was left with a hundred and some fans and more fans were just trickling in. Ok, I thought — just like everything else regarding social media, this isn’t going to happen overnight. Patience is the best virtue you can have when it comes to things like this. So I hunkered down and kept up both my Twitter account and my Facebook fan page equally. I tweet more than I update my FB status, only because I have a sense that people don’t want to fan pages to clutter up their walls all day. I may be wrong — this is just a gut feeling. So I make sure I have at least a couple of updates a day on my fan page and tweet whenever the urge comes over me.
The Fan Chart
As you can see by this chart, things got started in late July and the numbers crept up ever so slightly over time. Then you can see a big jump in fans in November. Ironically, this was a result of me going against my own principles. (Kind of like George in the Seinfeld episode where he does the opposite of what he normally does and eeverything works out for him.) If you have been keeping up with my blog, you will know that I try and follow my own rules of social media and I also sort of preach them. I often say do not ask for votes or ask people to follow or fan you. I still go by those rules, but I also admittedly break them from time to time. I just went through my status updates and found this posted on November 18: “Hmmm… Wondering what would happen if all fans of this page suggested it to their friends. ;)”. This is totally against what I tell people to do. “Patience is so important”, I say. “Rome wasn’t built in a day!” Well my friend Eri (who is also a Twitter friend) did just that. She suggested my page. So did Amy. Neither of them have their number of friends listed on their profiles, but let me tell you they have a lot. Eri is from Indonesia and as a result Jakarta ranks as the top city of fans with 83. Chicago, where Amy comes from, ranks 3rd with 31. So as of this writing I have close to 1300 fans. To some that might be a lot — to others that’s chump change. But I will say that this is one of the biggest differences I have seen between Facebook and Twitter. I get #followfriday recommendations on Twitter every week and they never amount to an onrush of followers. As a matter of fact, the additional followers are negligible. Since I put out that FB request my fans have increased by 400%.
So what does all this mean? As of this writing we have 1289 fans and 16,403 followers. Do these numbers mean anything? Not really. It’s the amount of interaction you receive that’s important. Dialog is what you want on both platforms. Connections – even making new friends is what this should be all about.
So getting back to the main topic, which aims to list differences between Twitter and Facebook, I will relay a few gems as they have applied to us.
1) You are much more vulnerable to spammers on Twitter than in Facebook. This is truly a drawback in my eyes.
2) Followers seem to be much easier to get that fans. The difference here is that fans are there because they truly have an interest in what you have to offer. Followers, at least some of them, are more interested in getting you interested in them.
3) It is much easier to have a conversation in almost real time on Twitter.
4) You are born with a “vanity url” on Twitter. Facebook requires at least 25 fans to get this. It used to be much more, so now it’s not as bad as it used to be. Vanity URLs, like http://facebook.com/KidsAreHeroes, are much easier to send out and put on business cards, etc.
5) Twitter seems to have a lot more applications that replace the native web interface. Seismic Desktop, Tweetdeck and others offer an alternative to viewing and interacting with your tweets. As an afterthought seemingly, Tweetdeck now allows you to read and update your Facebook page, but at this time doesn’t seem to have any way to access your fan page. Tweetdeck is the only one I have experience with, so I may be wrong on this. But the convenience of not having to refresh the browser every time is nice.
6) For fan pages at least, at least so far for me, fans mostly react off of what we write as opposed to posting original material. Many fan pages don’t even want you to post original stuff for fear that the other fans will be subjected to spam of that the message might somehow become diluted. At this point I haven’t experienced that so it’s totally all right if fans start up a conversation, as long as it is related to the theme. On Twitter most of the posts are written by others. You select those that interest you and interact with them.
7) Twitter makes it much easier for you find new people and to get to know them, at least at a basic level, before you decide to follow them. Even if their tweets are protected you can see their profile, where they live and what they say about themselves if they have filled out that info. If they are not protected you can see all their tweets and get a good sense if you might have a chance for a connection. Facebook doesn’t allow for that.
8) Facebook has a better capability to be a hub for your company. In a Twitter profile you are able to provide one hyperlink that will actually go somewhere. With a little trickery in FB you can have virtually unlimited links on the sidebar of your wall.
Again, if you have 100 followers on Twitter and 100 friends on Facebook, the experience between the two might be very similar. This post comes from the angle of wanting to promote a business or in my case a non-profit.
So, which one is better for promoting your business, cause or non-profit? If you had asked me 6 months ago I would have said Twitter – hands down. But now I spend a lot of time managing both platforms. I think I am finally starting to worry less about which platform to use and worry more about effective ways to engage people in general. We don’t want to overload or spam people. We do want to get our message across, but must realize they have a message too that is equally as important.
I would love to hear your suggestions on how we can engage people better, and/or tell us how you do it.
