Social Media Examiner

Greetings,

I've recently come across Social Media Examiner - not only is a super knowledge base, it's cute to look at :)

I think that a recent article on How to Turbo Boost your facebook page is super relevent and easy to understand.

What I want you to take away from here is that Facebook business pages can be exciting and interactive spaces, and it's high time you learned how it works.

Check out the video, the 8 minutes goes by quick, and there is a bit at the end about facebook contests - super important to us in the Tourism industry.






Also - check out this gent talking about content.

Joe Pulizzi Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

Full interview and links HERE

In Summary:

1. Social Media examiner is a great resource that's fun to use

2. Sign up NOW for facebook and learn how to use it

3. Create your content - you all have interesting stories and tidbits and insider info to share

4. Launch your social media campaign

And as always I'm here to help

beth@@tianb.com

Update on the new computer

So it's been a solid 10 days with the new computer and both my parents and myself have learned a few things

I copied off several gigs of pictures onto CD from the old computer. I didn't bother to put them on the new computer, however as Mom points out, "How am I supposed to send them to people now?"

Which is a valid point. While I assumed that all the pictures on the old computer had already been sent or facebooked or emailed, there will always be someone who is "new" and hasn't seen the latest pictures of my nephew. Perhaps she/he just got online (we are talking about my parents friends here) or perhaps she/he rarely goes online. Perhaps they had a computer failure and lost all their pictures (heaven forbid) and are wanting to recreate some of that.

Needless to say, there is always someone new online somewhere looking for something that you thought everyone already had.


Next, it was like pulling teeth getting my Mom to Google everything. In fact she point blank said she was "tired of Googling". Like it was some kind of torture I was making her complete.

I next resorted to "did you check their literature" when she asked for the 100th time "Where was the TD banking site?"

I was teaching her see, teaching her to read all that marketing crap that is on every TD ad, every TD statement, and every TD calendar in the house!

She didn't appreciate my teaching method.

And frankly I don't know what the heck she was doing that she couldn't google TD bank...

So I left it at that and added it to her favorites when she wasn't looking.


We also had a few days of fun because I forgot to install flash, shockwave, and java for their favorite game sites, and I also created the desktop icon for IE 64bit instead of IE 32 bit, apparently the world is not ready for IE 64 bit. My bad.

And they haven't mentioned the Aero effect or smooth scrolling, start bar quirks or any of the other fantastic changes that come with Windows 7 - frankly I don't think they ever have more then one window open at a time.


I think we're pretty much over the hump now, but if things change I'll keep you posted.


PS We also use Royal Bank but she didn't seem to have near the trouble with that one...

I won't mention it

I'm not going to mention how remiss I've been in my blogging, and I don't expect you to either.

Nuff said.




I just wanted to bring to your attention that in November 2009, facebook did some changes to its contesting policy - check the lastest version out at:


http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php


I'm not sure that you're allowed to run contests on facebook anymore ... and I wouldn't want them to freeze your page because that's a night mare you'll never get out of - Facebook doesn't seem to care about the individual business or person for that matter - ironically enough



I believe that you can have a retweet contest on twitter but not a member contest on facebook. So I'm not sure how to get out of that public relations mess if you happen to be mid contest, other then to maybe drop references to it and hope no one notices


Or you'll have to turn it around and have them send you an email as well.


Also make sure that you have more then one admin on your facebook fan page, if for some reason your account gets frozen no one will have admin access to your fan page.


Facebook is putting in new security every day and I've heard about people trying to log on from another country and / or from their mobile and their account gets locked because Facebook may deem it as hacking. Once your account is locked, again it's a night mare you might not get out of


Facebook doesn't seem to have any sense of customer service or a procedure for things like that.

So best practice is to have at least two admins, even if one is an account you create for your fictional grandmother and only log into once a month !


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On another note, I bought my parents (age 65+) a new computer for back to school ... well it was on sale because it's back to school.

It's an upgrade from their Win XP to Windows 7 - essentially skipping over Vista for them, not on purpose, Vista was/is a great operating system, it just worked out that way.

And I just left them to it. It's my own social/blogging experiment. No instructions, no introductory session while they hovered over my shoulder.

So we'll see how they make out.

Already they asked where one of their favorite websites was and while I did copy their favorites to a CD and could potentially put them back on the new computer, I responded with Google it.

Thus getting them in the mindset of googling things, and hopefully reshowing them how to create new favorites.

We'll see how it goes.


Later
Beth