Don’t Merge Your Facebook Page & Places Page

December 18, 2010 by

“Don’t Merge Your Nonprofit Facebook Page with Places Page,” warns the heading of an interesting Dec. 17 guest post on Beth’s Blog.

The post, by Ivan Boothe, explains if your organization accepts Facebook’s invitation to claim your Facebook Places geolocation page, you’ll lose your ability to specify a default landing tab on your regular Facebook page. That means all the time and money you put into creating a beautiful custom landing tab will go to waste.

Since at the moment this only appears to affect Places pages, and any existing Pages merged with a Place, it’s unclear whether this is simply a roll-out bug or something more long-term. … But given that Facebook first removed the default landing tab a few months ago, reinstating it after an uproar but only temporarily my guess is that this is the direction of things on Facebook.

This is serious problem. Default landing tabs are a powerful way to convert Facebook page visitors into fans. Instead of new visitors simply being dumped on your Wall, you can create a custom landing tab, welcoming new visitors, introducing them to your organization, and encouraging them to “like” it.

Facebook offers no unmerge option, so if you are unhappy with the results, you have no choice but to suffer or abandon your merged Page and start from scratch. You can also join more han 800 organizations—and growing—on the “Unmerge Places & My Business Page” Facebook page.

Filed Under: Causes, Technology Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Wave to Live on as Apache Wave

December 8, 2010 by

Remember Google Wave?  Last year I was pretty excited to get an invite to join what was suppose to be Google’s hot new social networking platform. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves (kind of a cross between chatting and threaded discussions on a blog).

Like many people, I didn’t end up doing much with it (in my case due to a lack of collaborators), so I wasn’t too surprised when Google officially halted Google Wave development last August and open-sourced the code in September.

I did see a lot of potential in Google Wave, however, and was happy to learn Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that supports the open source server software Apache, is taking Google Wave into its “incubator program” renamed as “Apache Wave.” Google made the announcement in the Google Wave Developer Blog on Monday:

“The creation of Apache Wave will serve to accelerate the growth of the existing community with strong open-source processes. If you’d like to get involved, please join the Apache Wave mailing list (send an email to wave-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org). We’re looking forward to working with you,” Google said.

Google stressed that Apache Wave won’t have full Google Wave functionality, but it will give developers and users a way to run Wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.

Who knows? The broader open source community might ripple Google Wave into something bigger than a trickle—or even a wave—yet! Only time will tell. Stay tuned.

Do you see an Apache Wave tsunami or trickle coming? Please share your thoughts below.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , , ,

Cyberbully Seeking High Google Rankings Arrested

December 8, 2010 by

I was glad to read in the Huffington Post today that cyberbullying is no longer helping New York eyewear merchant Vitaly Borker get top Google rankings and more business. Instead, Borker is behind bars charged with, among other crimes, fraud, interstate threats, and cyber stalking. A Manhattan judge has denied him bail.

Accordingly to the New York Times, Borker intentionally created a customer experience so vile, his customers would rant about it on the Internet, making his search engine rankings go higher on Google and his sales go up. His tactics allegedly included selling fake or faulty merchandise, threats of assault and sexual assault, and threatening e-mails and phone calls.

“It’s all part of a sales strategy, (Borker) said. Online chatter about (his company), even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: ‘I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my first complaint. I am in heaven. I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

Unbelievably, his strong-arm tactics seemed to haved worked because of a loophole in Google’s search algorithms, which failed to differentiate between positive and negative feedback, and simply took any mention of a particular site into account when judging its popularity.

Three days after the New York Times article appeared, Google announced on its blog that it had changed its algorithms so merchants with bad reputations would lose rankings.

“We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”

That’s good news too. In a Web 2.0 world, abusing customers shouldn’t work as a sales strategy, even if only a sadistic few have the nerve to do it.

What do you think about this whole episode? Do you think any publicity can be good publicity in a Web 2.0 world?

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , ,

Video Clip of the Month: Christmas Flash Mob

December 1, 2010 by

My December 2010 video clip of the month is a flash mob surprising dinners in a mall food court with a breathtaking rendition of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” Regardless of your religious preference, you’ve got to love the great performance and the reaction of the people around them.

I picked the video because it’s a wonderful holiday example of how two relatively small organizations in Welland—a town of about 50,000 in Canada near Niagara Falls—hit a home run using social media to introduce themselves to a global audience.  The video, shot November 13 and posted on YouTube November 17, has gone viral and has received more than 5 million views in two weeks. Stories about the video have appeared on ABC News, CNN, Canada AM, Inside Edition, LA Weekly, My Fox Orlando, the Tyra Banks show, and even a newspaper in Chile.

The video works because it makes viewers feel good, hitting them on an emotional level. It also works because it showcases Chorus Niagara’s talent for singing and the creative talents of Alphabet Photography, the company that organized the flash mob performance. There isn’t a disconnect between the performance and the brands it is pushing.

Check out the video below and let me know what you think.

Should flash mobs be used as a marketing tool? Should there  be a connection between the performance and the brand?

Filed Under: Communications Tagged With: , , , , ,

From Wax & WordStar to Paper.li Daily ‘Newspapers’

November 28, 2010 by

Back when I was editor-in-chief of my university’s student newspaper in the 1980s, it seemed we were on the cutting edge. We’d recently obtained some PCs, WordStar word-processing software, and a laser printer, so we could print out articles reporters typed themselves in columns ready for layout. It was so much easier than retyping and coding all the copy with an old phototypesetting machine.  

Even with the new technology, however, laying out the newspaper still took several hours of hard work. In the days before desktop publishing, you had to put wax on the back of printed out newspaper text and photos, paste them where you wanted them on a page, and then use a special tape to add borders and boxes.

Flash forward to today and the technological change is truly revolutionary. You not only don’t have to lay out anything to produce your own “newspaper,” you don’t have to write anything either. Yes, it’s true. Thanks to Paper.li, you can create your own free online daily “newspaper” in seconds by simply entering your Twitter user name. A few clicks later, a webpage will be created featuring the latest posts, pictures, video, and embedded links from the tweets of those you are following. This custom webpage really does look like a newspaper—complete with advertisements.

More than 1,000 Paper.li “newspapers” are created each day, and many are getting several hundred tweets and views. They are picking up subscribers too and not charging a penny. 

Every couple of days an article I’ve tweeted about ends up being featured in somebody’s daily “newspaper.” An excerpt of the article appears on the page with my Twitter user name and photo as the source.  I have to admit it makes me uncomfortable to see myself credited for tweeting about an article from a real newspaper, one undoubtedly losing circulation and revenues in a world where everyone can be an editor.

Filed Under: Personal, Technology Tagged With: , , , ,