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.

Related posts:

1. Social Media in Two Buckets
2. Social Media in Real-Time
3. My new life in Social Media

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.
…
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.

What does it mean? For most pages that represent brands and organizations and for most people who don’t have “public” audiences this will mean very little. It is huge, however for people that have a need or desire to send updates to people who are not (or should not) be their friends.

If, for example, you have a profile AND a page that both contain your own personal name, you might consider merging them. Authors, politicians, musicians, and artists would fall into this category BUT there may be very good reasons for any of these to keep their pages and profiles separate, so get some advice before you press that merge button.

I suspect this new feature will be much more beneficial for people who don’t have a Page – but have felt that they should be connecting with people who are not their friends. These people (myself included) are usually very conflicted about who should and should not be a Facebook friend.

I can think of two professions that almost always fall into this category: teachers and ministers. Here’s this new feature could allow these folks to finally make the most of Facebook:

• Limit your Facebook friends to your real friends and family with strict privacy controls.
• Invite your students/colleagues/congregants and anyone else that wants to connect on Facebook, but isn’t really a friend, to “Subscribe” instead.
• All of your usual Facebook activity will be seen only by your real friends.
• on occasions where you want to reach your broader audience (ie: don’t forget that field trip permission forms are due tomorrow OR don’t forget about the Sunday School Picnic this week) you simply specify ‘public’ and everyone sees in their newsfeeds.

That’s my understanding of it anyway… I’ll be experimenting with this myself, but feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

Update: to enable ‘Subscribe’ on your profile, you need to go to the Subscribe page and click on the green Allow button.

Related posts:

1. Granular Facebook Privacy Settings – FINALLY!
2. The Power of Friends – Facebook Ads Just Got Interesting
3. How Facebook Pages really work…

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.

Which brings me to the email from Groupon:

Hi Colin,

We are writing to inform you that Encore! has closed. While most of you have already redeemed your Encore! Groupon, we know that some have not, and we want to get your money back to you as soon as possible.

If you haven’t used your Groupon, you are eligible for a refund. To claim your refund, sign into your Groupon account at www.groupon.com/mygroupons. From here, click “Claim Refund” and select either a refund to the form of payment originally used for the purchase or to your Groupon account to be used for future purchases.

We know how disappointing it is when a great business closes, so we appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience or frustration this may cause.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to share them with us at support@groupon.com.

Thank you for your continued support.

Regards,

Alicia P.
Groupon Customer Support

It’s great that Groupon took the pro-active step of notifying me (with a solution) rather than waiting for me to discover that Encore! had closed and then having to login and figure out how I get my money back, etc. I probably shouldn’t be as impressed as I am as this kind of thing should be standard operating procedure for ALL retailers, online or off. I guess too many years of reactive customer service makes me easily impressed.

Disclosure note: Links to Groupon are referral links that earn me Groupon Bucks

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. Resume app for Facebook
2. LinkedIn Hack Lets You Add Strangers To Your Network
3. LinkedIn Adds More Social Features

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.

Related posts:

1. Introducing Subscribe: Facebook changes the game again…
2. Who Can See What? Facebook makes some significant (and overdue) changes
3. End Of The Facebook Gold Rush? I Don’t Think So Either.

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.

The changes are pretty extensive and listed here: (the blog post has details for each)

1. Inline Profile Controls
2. Profile Tag Review
3. Content Tag Review
4. View Profile As…
5. Inline controls
6. Word Change: “Everyone” to “Public”
7. Change Your Mind After You Post?
8. Tag Who You’re With, or What You Want to Talk About
9. Tag Locations in Posts
10. Remove Tags or Content from Facebook

While most of these are just improved ways of controlling who sees what on your profile and elsewhere, #8 warrants special mention. It allows you to tag people and pages in status updates, comments and photos EVEN IF you’re not friends (or in like) with them. That is a significant departure from Facebook’s friending paradigm.

Now before you start freaking out about anyone being able to tag you in things, #3 allows you to prevent tagging without your approval. So anyone can try to tag you, but you have control over when and where you are tagged.

On balance these are good changes but will undoubtedly spark a flurry of concern. As I alluded to in the title of this post, most of these changes are overdue and will make life on Facebook much better – once we get used to them.

Related posts:

1. Granular Facebook Privacy Settings – FINALLY!
2. Resume app for Facebook
3. Introducing Subscribe: Facebook changes the game again…

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

Related posts:

1. Campaign Information
2. Welcome Back!
3. Healthy Candidates: all parties support smaller schools

Related posts:

1. Rory Sutherland on Life lessons from an ad man (TED Tuesday)
2. Is Gordon Brown as brilliant as he seems?
3. Janine Benyus on biomimicry in action (TED Tuesday)

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.

Related posts:

1. The Power of Friends – Facebook Ads Just Got Interesting
2. Granular Facebook Privacy Settings – FINALLY!
3. Canadian Twitter Traffic vs. Facebook

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

Related posts:

1. Dan Pink on Motivation (TED Tuesday)
2. Janine Benyus on biomimicry in action (TED Tuesday)
3. Alain de Botton on a kinder, gentler philosophy of success (TED Tuesday)