Colin's Blog » social media

Social Media: Six Dos and Six Don’ts

Colin Carmichael — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:11:41 +0000

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.

Introducing Subscribe: Facebook changes the game again…

Colin Carmichael — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:13:15 +0000

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.
…
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.

How Facebook Pages really work…

Colin Carmichael — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:15:30 +0000

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.

Who Can See What? Facebook makes some significant (and overdue) changes

Colin Carmichael — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:28:29 +0000

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.

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

Inline Profile Controls
Profile Tag Review
Content Tag Review
View Profile As…
Inline controls
Word Change: “Everyone” to “Public”
Change Your Mind After You Post?
Tag Who You’re With, or What You Want to Talk About
Tag Locations in Posts
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.

First Church of Facebook at PodCampToronto?

Colin Carmichael — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:54:51 +0000

Update: This session is now scheduled for 1:15 on Saturday February 20th in room 201

I’ve added myself to the growing list of suggested sessions at PodCampToronto 2009, to be held February 21 & 22, 2009 at Ryerson University.

I’m offering to hold a session called “First Church of Facebook: an exploration of Faith and Social Media.” We will talk about how churches and para-church organizations are (or could be) using social media to engage their existing communities of faith – and to bring their message to a wider audience. We’ll also talk about the social media adoption hurdles for churches and how they’re different from the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

These are things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit over the last few months as I’ve settled into my new responsibilities heading up the Communications Office at The Presbyterian Church in Canada. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to share my thoughts, and find out what others think.

If you’re planning to attend PodCampToronto and you have any experience with churches and social media, I’d be happy to co-present – get in touch!

LinkedIn Applications

Colin Carmichael — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:01:39 +0000

I just logged into my LinkedIn account saw a new addition to the top-left menu: Applications. A click reveals a fairly robust looking suite of applications to add some social media goodness to your LinkedIn profile. I’m sure TechCrunch et al will have all the details…

LinkedIn Adds More Social Features

Colin Carmichael — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:02:50 +0000

I manage about half a dozen groups on LinkedIn, including the alumni groups for my college and university alma maters. Tonight I got an email from the LinkedIn Groups Team outlining a few new features that will be rolled out on Friday. The email is included below:

Dear Colin,

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.
This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We’re confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.
Sincerely,
The LinkedIn Groups Team

Let’s Re-Think a Few Things

Colin Carmichael — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:17:40 +0000

[originally published at SocialMediaGroup.ca]

Remember Web2.0? I’m often asked what the difference between it and social media is. My usual reply is that Web2.0 is an evolution of the philosophy of how we build the web. The social media phenomenon, however, is an evolution of the philosophy of how we use the web. Neither can exist without the other and both require their respective practictioners to re-think, well, everything, actually.

Last month’s Mesh Conference in Toronto was all about re-thinking everything. The pre-conference MeshU was an opportunity to re-think the nuts and bolts of Web2.0 for those who actually build the tools and platforms that we social media types use everyday. As a recovering web developer, I was tempted to attend the MeshU sessions to get an html/css/php/mysql/apache geek fix. I managed to resist.

The main Mesh conference was two full days of talking about re-thinking things:

Ethan Kaplan talked candidly about how we (as consumers) and he (as the recording industry) have started to re-think how and why we purchase music, if at all.

Michael Geist led the conference attendees through examples of advocacy and activism online that force us (and policy-makers) to re-think our preconceptions about who has a voice in society.

StumbleUpon‘s amazing story of rapid growth and lucrative aquistion, told by founder Garrett Camp, was fascinating, but the application itself requires us to re-think the concepts of sharing and social identity.

Lane Merrifield, founder of Club Penguin, successfully captured the imaginations, and attention, of hundreds of thousands of kids. To do that, he had to re-think the business model – one with no marketing and lots of free stuff.

The morning keynotes I’ve mentioned above weren’t the only opportunities to re-think a few things. The afternoon sessions, too many to list here, encouraged us re-think everything from privacy, reputation management, and communities to the spread of video, the future of the venerable ‘home page’, and building brands online.

If the "re-think a few things" theme that I’ve intentionally beaten to death here sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen Dr. Michael Wesch‘s now year-old video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. (embedded below)

I happened to be reminded of the video just a few days after Mesh, and after watching it again for the first time in several months, I couldn’t help but feel that it did a nice job of representing what Mesh is – an opportunity for Canada’s best web-heads to get together and really re-think a few things.

Graduate-level Communications studies

Colin Carmichael — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:55:06 +0000

I was recently asked if I knew which (if any) of Ontario’s graduate-level communcations/media programs had embraced the concepts of social media. I don’t know the answer to that question, so I’ll crowd-source it.

What graduate-level communications/pr/media programs would you recommend to anyone particularly interested in social media?

The original question pertained to Ontario’s programs, but it would be great to hear about programs from farther afield a well!

Re-thinking things…

Colin Carmichael — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:03:52 +0000

I wrote a post over at SocialMediaGroup.ca linking the Mesh Conference with Professor Michael Wesch‘s “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video around the theme of “re-thinking everything.”

I’ve included Prof. Wesch’s video below – but I encourage you to go read the post. ;)