Colin's Blog

I had hoped to have a follow-up post about Facebook’s Subscribe feature, but unfortunately that’s just not going to happen today – look for it early next week.

Instead, I happened upon this great little Dos and Don’ts post from Blue Avocado. There are six pairs of Dos and Don’ts but the author summarizes them nicely right up front:

Ultimately, understanding yourself and your audience is more central to a successful social media presence than mastering the minutiae of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Nevertheless, there are a few guidelines that can help you maintain good social media “hygiene” and avoid shiny new distractions:

via Six Dos and Six Don’ts with Social Media | Blue Avocado.

It’s a big week for Facebook. With their annual developer conference coming up, they’ve rolled out a few new features including “Smart Friend Lists” which I hadn’t even had a chance to write about here before today’s HUGE news: you can now subscribe to a personal profile’s public updates without having to friend them.

Here’s how it works. As you browse around the site, you’ll notice that some users have a button at the top of their profile that says ‘Subscribe’. Click it, and you’ll start seeing that user’s status updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. But there’s a big difference: unlike normal Facebook friends, the people you subscribe to don’t have to approve your subscription request, and there’s no limit on how many people can subscribe to any given user.
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Of course, Facebook has offered a similar feature called Pages for years now, which was meant for nearly the same thing (you’ll find that many journalists and politicians have already created Facebook Pages… because that’s what Facebook told them to do). The difference here, Facebook says, is that users no longer have to maintain two separate entities; they can just use the site’s sharing settings to decide which content they want to share very broadly, and what will only be shared with friends.

via Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’, Lets You Share With Unlimited Users | TechCrunch.

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I got a pretty awesome email from Groupon the other day. Several months ago, I had purchased a Groupon deal for a snazzy restaurant in Waterloo with the intention of taking my lovely wife out for dinner sometime near our tenth anniversary. Well, July 28th came and went and we never got around to going out for dinner.

The Groupon deal expires October so I was mostly resigned to losing the $30 unless we could somehow squeeze a night out into an already busy September.
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I don’t have much use for a resume these days, but when I came across this post on MakeUseOf.com about using your existing LinkedIn profile to quickly create a professional-looking resume, I was intrigued. I was also skeptical that a machine could take the data in the LinkedIn profile and turn out a document as nuanced as a resume.

I decided to give one of the two services a spin (the one that doesn’t require its own account) just to see if it really was as easy as MakeUseOf claimed:

Resume Builder is by far the quickest way to turn your LinkedIn profile into a professionally looking, minimalist resume. It was created as part of LinkedIn Labs and the whole process takes no more than a few minutes:

via 2 Tools To Turn Your LinkedIn Profile Into A Neat-Looking Resume.

The verdict is yes, it really was that easy. I was able to construct this resume in less than five minutes:  http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/85brx1cvb

The really killer feature is that your saved resume is updated in real-time as you update your LinkedIn profile. If you are the type of person who is constantly tweaking their resume and LinkedIn profile, this awesome little service may help you kill two birds with one stone.

This blog post nails the major misconception about Facebook pages for brands and organizations:

Unless someone has actively interacted with your page, they won’t receive your updates. Many brands launch a Facebook contest to boost their fan count, assuming that their future updates are now reaching the thousands or millions of people who clicked “like”. But that’s not how Facebook works.

Unless a fan actively participates in a brand’s Facebook Page and their activity on the Page has been continuous, the brand’s status updates will cease appearing in the fan’s Facebook stream.

via Can Facebook Work For Brands? | Market Sentinel.

Facebook has just announced MAJOR changes to how you control what people see:

Today we’re announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that “who can see this?” could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward. The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect. Plus there are several other updates here that will make it easier to understand who can see your stuff (or your friends’) in any context. Here’s what’s coming up, organized around two areas: what shows up on your profile, and what happens when you share something new.

via Facebook Blog.

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I have two bits of exciting news to share with my readers.

1) On Monday, May 31st, I registered as a candidate for Public School Board Trustee for Cambridge and North Dumfries. I don’t intend to write much about the campaign here on this site, so if you want to follow my campaign, please visit the official campaign site at www.cambridgepublischools.ca.

2) My sister and I finally went public with a little side project we’ve been working on for several months. We are partners in a new venture called Carmichael Digital with a mandate to improve digital literacy in organizations and individuals. You can find out more about what we do at www.carmichaeldigital.com.

It will be another busy and exciting summer for me and I’m looking forward to it!c

This video is now a half decade old – but is still every bit as revolutionary now as it was then.

Eric Eldon over at InsideFacebook.com has a great post outlining the growth trends at Facbook for January 2010. There are lots of pretty charts to look at, but I think the most interesting one is this:

Facebook Growth by Age and Gender (InsideFacebook.com)

It’s getting harder and harder to dismiss Facebook as the domain of young people. Indeed, according to Eric’s post, a full 60% of Facebook users are over 25. Some have suggested that the influx of older folks will drive the kids away and we’ll see something new crop up for them – MySpace 2.0? For my money, this won’t happen – at least not in the foreseeable future. The ubiquity of Facebook just makes things easier for everyone – if a little uncomfortable at times when you get a friend request from dear Aunt Agnes. Young Facebookers have figured out (mostly) how to manage these little inconveniences.

Welcome to TED Tuesdays on the blog. Each Tuesday, I will post a video from TED with a little commentary from me on why I think it’s worth sharing. I don’t want to compete with TED itself, so I’ll be reaching back several months for these.

For this last TED Tuesday post in 2009, I thought it would be nice to lighten things up a bit. This hilarious presentation by ad-man Rory Sutherland is a nice counter to the sometimes overwhelming topics covered in TED Talks.

There’s also a GREAT Canadian advertising story about 2/3rds the way through…

http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man.html