It can be scary out there sometimes. So many millions of people hustling, shouting and pushing their way to the top of whatever community or industry habitat they live in. Social media can be a ruthless place, where your time and motivation can be stolen away by the sheer density and intensity of the environment.

And we all play a part in that food chain of winners and losers. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we are either a predator or prey in the social media world. We rise to the top, or we sink to the bottom, and the path is not always clear.

Social media prey are the people who let their presence get fat, slow and lazy, expecting their reach and influence to grow on its own. The prey live timidly on the edges of communities and conversations, not quite sure who/when/where or even why to get involved. They are always looking for the “huge break” that will never come, and eventually become hobbled by a web of frustration and intimidation.  Read the complete post.

As an industry that is known for avant-gardism, innovation and creativity, it may not be immediately apparent why luxury brands and social media have been locked in a love-hate relationship. Luxury brands have been afraid of the big bad wolf of social media and it does not seem as if luxury brands are the trendsetters in regards to this revolutionary phenomenon – rather luxury brands are driving behind in an old-fashioned rusty car.  The luxury industry shows little or low commitment towards integrating social media, and we propose that most of the hesitation is caused by extreme contradictions between luxury brands’ way of being managed strictly from the inside versus the way consumers define the brand from the outside on social media.  Read the entire post.

In the past year, Facebook has added the ability to categorize your friends in lists, enabling you to filter the status and news updates as well as see which groups of friends are online.  But many people aren't aware of this capability, and are oftentimes surprised when I show them in the sessions I present.  So here's a quick blurb on how to do it.

While you're logged onto your Facebook account, go to "Account" (upper right hand corner of FB), select "Edit Friends" and "Create New List." Name your list whatever you'd like.  I have several set up, for REALTORS, mortgage brokers and speakers/trainers.  I also have geographic lists created, though most people won't want to go to that extreme.

You can also create a list in the "Chat" area of Facebook, simply by selecting "Chat" (lower right hand corner) and selecting "Friend Lists."  You can also add friends to a list simply by dragging their name - they have to be in the chat box - to the list you'd like to add them to.

A tip for those just getting started on this: don't create too many lists, as it becomes a management headache later on.

After you've created your lists, you can select which lists your friends go into (they can be in multiple lists). Then you can select a list from your Home Page (on the left side of the page, under "Friends") and it will only show updates from those people within the list.

When accepting new friends after that, make sure to assign them to lists BEFORE you accept them. It's easier to manage that way.

I'm going to shoot a video tutorial on this process in the next few days, and I'll append it to this post.  In the meantime, I hope that helped!

Read or Listen to the Story from NPR

]]>Brad HanksFacebookTwitterLinkedInhttp://connectingpeoplewithsuccess.com/Home/104#0Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:08:58 GMThttp://connectingpeoplewithsuccess.com/Home/104http://connectingpeoplewithsuccess.com/Home/102http://bit.ly/9hkXzt

Thanks Mark!

Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world's third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days.

Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found Facebook in his dorm room as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs on one another, the company has joined the ranks of the Web's great superpowers. Microsoft made computers easy for everyone to use. Google helps us search out data. YouTube keeps us entertained. But Facebook has a huge advantage over those other sites: the emotional investment of its users. Facebook makes us smile, shudder, squeeze into photographs so we can see ourselves online later, fret when no one responds to our witty remarks, snicker over who got fat after high school, pause during weddings to update our relationship status to Married or codify a breakup by setting our status back to Single. (I'm glad we can still be friends, Elise.)

 And here's the PowerPoint presentation:

"Socialnomics."

Video

Facebook is about to try to dominate display ads the way Google dominates text ads

It is customary to divide online advertising into two categories: direct response and brand advertising. I prefer instead to divide it according to the mindset of users: whether or not they are actively looking to purchase something (i.e. they have purchasing intent).*

When users are actively looking to purchase something, they typically go to search engines or e-commerce sites. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Google and Amazon are the biggest financial beneficiaries of intent harvesting.

  http://su.pr/4u69Z2

Ah Twitter, we thought we knew you.

A comprehensive survey (1,753 respondents) released today by Edison Research (a division of Arbitron), paints a fascinating picture of Twitter and its role in America’s social media ecosystem.

Click here to read the full article.

It seems this latest chink in the security armor of Facebook allowed users to view the live chats of their friends with just a few mouse clicks.  Those folks that were aware of the security flaw could also see the pending friend requests of their friends.

…The irony is that the exploit is enabled by they way that Facebook lets you preview your own privacy settings. In other words, a privacy feature contains a flaw that lets others view private information if they are aware of the exploit.

TechCrunch reported the issue to Facebook, and the company pulled the live chat offline for "maintenence."

If I were employed by Facebook, I'm not sure I'd be sharing that with people this week.  It'd almost be like you told people that you worked for Enron.  Just sayin'.

But imagine my dismay when I go to present to an audience of a couple hundred people and log on to Facebook and find a different look and navigation than I had the night before.  Kinda hard to appear the "expert" when you're learning on the fly.  But that's a topic for another post...

The first, called the "Instant Personalization Pilot," has incensed so many people that politicians are now jumping into the fray and activist groups are mustering support against it.  There's even a movement afoot among Facebook users for a petition to stop Facebook from implementing this program.  Many people are threatening to leave Facebook altogether, deleting their profiles and abandoning their accounts due to their concerns over privacy issues brought on by this "Pilot."

The second change was Facebook's requirement to opt in on the connections to various keywords for “Likes and Interests” for your activities, interests, music, books, movies and TV as well as for any of the employer/work and educational information that you have in your profile. (Click the "Info" tab on your profile to see.) 

If you haven't logged on to Facebook in awhile, your next visit will greet you with a window that asks you to link your activities, work, etc. to your profile in a blanket opt in.  If you select "Skip" as I did, the information you had added to your profile about those activities, interests and work history will disappear.  You'll have to go back and reconstruct your Facebook profile, as I find myself doing now.

If you choose to accept you'll blanket opt-in to all those items in your profile.  Then you have to manually go in to each and every one of those keywords and groups separately and opt out.  For many this results in a huge pain in the arse, courtesy of Facebook.

Personally, I'm not quite ready to commit Facebook Hara-Kiri, as ZDNet blog author Jason Perlow is contemplating.  [You've got to read his post, by the way. It's excellent.  Click on the link above.]  But I'm seriously questioning how much longer I'll put up with Facebook's incessant change.

I'm open to change and can adapt with the best of em.  But sometimes enough is enough, wouldn't you say?

During the interview, we discussed:

• Why social networking is such an important component of a real estate professional's marketing strategy
• The most effective social networking to use in business
• The difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing, and why it's important to do both
• How to many your time and apply discipline to your social media marketing approach

Click here to listen to the interview in its entirety.