Adding a Facebook Box to your site is a great way to promote your Facebook presence on your business website. Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world and people are not only using the site to connect with family and friends but to show their support and interest in businesses too. The Facebook Box is interactive and users can click to connect with your company on Facebook right from your website. With Facebook’s easy customization you can style the Box how you would like and Facebook will generate the HTML code for you.

For you non video folks:

1. First things first: you need to be an administrator to the Facebook page you would like to promote
2. Go to Edit Page of your Facebook Business Page
3. Then on the right hand side, click on Promote with a Like Box
4. Customize your Like Box – choose the width and the information you want to include
5. Hit Get Code
6. Copy code
7. Plug the HTML code into your website files where you want your Facebook Like Box
8. Publish your web page update

Want more information?

Watch our prerecorded webinar: Creating and Optimizing a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business Facebook is becoming a force on the internet. Most of your clients and potential clients are using Facebook. Should you consider using a Facebook Company Page to reach your target audience? In this webinar we will discuss if your business should consider creating a Facebook Fan Page and show you how to optimize the profile to be found easily. We will also show some shortcuts to regularly adding content to your Facebook Fan Page, the difference between a Fan Page and a Facebook Group and show you some examples of what other businesses are doing and if they are getting any value from this popular social network.

I am not going to lie everyone, I have had a rough couple weeks in this old internet space. Things not going the way they planned, people who I thought would be good business partners ending up being 3 headed monsters, my Google Reader is so out of control I don’t know where to start but with the ‘mark all as read button’, and on and on.

What I needed to do and many of us probably need to do is take a step back and remind ourselves of our goals, our tactics and strategy to reach those goals. I needed to realign myself and find a better stride than the one I was carrying on with. So I did some revamping and I am optimistic about the rest of the year. Here are a few key points I took away on determining my social media stride.

Pace Yourself – When training for an athletic event there is a small window of effort you are supposed to try for. Train too lightly and you aren’t building the muscle or stamina you need. Train too hard and you may get injured or burn out. The same goes for your social media presence. Too little and you won’t even feel like you are seeing return out of your efforts. Too hard and just maintaining your social media presence could be a full time job and your actual responsibilities (like running a business) will suffer. You need to find that balance so you are pushing yourself strong enough to grow but without burning out.

Discard bad relationships – This is hard for many of us to do in business. We feel every relationship has a monetary value to it. Unfortunately, some of those relationships take more than they give. This goes for your online network as well. Sometimes an online relationship that you think will benefit both of you ends up being negative. No matter how many Twitter followers or LinkedIn contacts they have, if they are not in line with your business goals but instead are detracting from them, you may need to step away. If you have thousands of Twitter followers but still find no value in Twitter you may have focused on the wrong things when growing your online network.

Remember why you are here in the first place – I think I say this at every event I speak at but you need to set your goals before you start participating in social media and you need to constantly be checking back and seeing if you are achieving them. It is very easy to get distracted with what competitors are doing, or the biggest social media experts are doing but you joined social media to build relationships for your brand and not to be the next social media expert.

Goals aren’t static – Yes, I am a goals freak but even I know as your business and technology changes your goals need to change too. Sometimes things happen in your industry or your local space that aren’t threatening but are worth realigning your goals to make sure your business will thrive through the coming years.

No one can do this for you – I am not talking about the debate over ghost bloggers or ghost tweeters, I am saying no one can decide for you what you are going to do in this space but you. No one can determine how much time you spend with it and what kind of return you get. If something isn’t working you may need to change your stride. You need to find a rhythm that works with you and your organization that shows you some kind of return.

Of course there are lots of other factors, like the tools you choose, for determining your social media stride. I am looking past tools and to goals, relationships and time. Is there anything you would add on finding your social media stride?

I also have no problem talking to people about how I use these tools. I have talked to large and small groups about how they can use social media in their line of work. I have no problem educating people on how I use social media as a tool. Much like how we don’t charge for webinars at Hall because we feel it is better for us overall, if we educate people more on the recent advances in technology and internet marketing. I don’t keep my Twitter strategy or how I use LinkedIn close to the vest. I want you to know too. I think we all can learn from each other.

Social media is like a mullet

Photo credit: heyjohngreen

News flash – Social media is fun. There is nothing wrong with participating in something fun but for some reason we all feel guilty doing it. We have to constantly verify to our peers, bosses and friends that we are working when we use social media. We assume we can’t use something for work and have fun, or can we?

I connect with business partners, share our content and have made some perfect business connections thanks to social media. I have a larger business network, we have more inbound links to our site and we have made sales from people we connected with on social media sites, showing me that this is effective for our business.

More than the business part, social media is fun. Users connect with friends, share pictures, tell stories and tell everyone about fun and exciting things they are doing.

I usually keep these two aspects of how I use social media (work and personal) clearly defined. For example my LinkedIn account is for business – I list business books I am reading, post links to our blog and share company news. My Facebook account is much more personal – I share news about my friends, events I am attending, races I am registered for, photos etc.

So social media is a little business up top, but it is also a pretty big party in the back.

Social Media Agencies, Experts and Gurus – What did you do before?

In my travels over the last few years, I have met and stood shoulder to shoulder with lots of social media experts and business professionals. One thing I am noticing is as companies get into using social media, they are slowly morphing into social media companies. I have seen software consultants blogging about Twitter, retail outlets posting about their favorite Facebook tips and more.

There are lots of pieces to running a business; marketing and networking are big pieces. My concern is that too many people are turning into social media experts and less experts on what it is they joined social media to do in the first place.

You created a Facebook fan page to direct people to your website that sells widgets. Now you are posting about social media tips, people are going to your website and businesses are shocked that no one converted and bought a widget! They didn’t want a widget – they wanted that social media tidbit you teased on Facebook.

What did you do before you added social media marketing to the mix? That should be your goal still. This could be website traffic, building your business network, selling more products, getting more people to your events etc.

By focusing on being a social media expert you are hurting your business

Photo credit: ilovememphis

Constantly remind yourself what goals you had in mind when you joined social media sites. Staying on message should equal more conversions because you have a network of people interested in your products and industry, not social media.

Building a business around social media or morphing your current business into a social media boutique or consultancy has the same benefits as calling yourself a high end salon that specializes in mullets. You are hurting your business by putting too much energy into a tool like social media that changes hourly, how it is used is case-by-case by organization and that doesn’t put money directly into your bottom line.

Mullets happen every day. Someone, somewhere walks into their barber shop and requests their hair to be short up top and longer in the back. Is that what you are going to do? Build a business (reminder – businesses are supposed to make money) around a tool people use for marketing that is mostly personal and has some business usefulness? Or should you stick to what you came to do and be the best widget seller who uses social media for their own marketing efforts?

Use an RSS Reader to stay on top of LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers are great! You can drill down into the topic your industry is in and find questions people are asking daily. Taking the time to answer some of these questions in and around your industry is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. As you answer questions it also shows up on your LinkedIn profile and in your network’s activity stream. Letting people know you are the go-to in an industry leads to referrals and business.

Many of us are not on LinkedIn all day though. So by the time you remember to check LinkedIn Answers, there are too many to sort through and if you did answer one, you might be the 50th person to give your opinion and it gets lost in the noise.

By subscribing to LinkedIn in your RSS reader you can scan through Questions as they come in. Using a more central location like your RSS reader makes it more timely, easier to scan and alleviates the need to log into LinkedIn multiple times.

Below is a video showing you how you can quickly subscribe to a LinkedIn topic that interests you:

Not a video person? Here is how you subscribe to LinkedIn Answers

• Go to LinkedIn Answers you can either follow this link or pull down the More menu on the LinkedIn Navigation to get there.
• On the right hand side, browse and select a category that interests you.
• If possible, go back to the browse category and drill down to a more specific topic.
• At the bottom of the browse section, click on the Subscribe to new questions in: link.
• Choose your preferred RSS reader

I know a woman who refers to Twitter as a giant cocktail party and loves that you can eavesdrop and jump in on any conversation, at any time. True, but what if your followers stink? They tweet about boring things, share the same links over and over, talk at you not TO you and no one responds to your thoughtful content.

If you focus too much on your Twitter followers being a numbers game and not a relationship starter, you will be blessed with crappy attendees to your virtual cocktail party. Thousands of boring tweeters will clog your Twitter stream with sales promos, what they had for breakfast and whiny tweets about how horrible their lives are.

Relationships beat numbers

What are you using Twitter for? As a broadcast tool? To tell you boss that you have 10,000 followers? Then sure, numbers are good but more often then not, your tweets fall on deaf ears (or um, eyes). If you are using Twitter to build and reaffirm relationships with your customers, establish yourself as an expert in your industry or to get feedback on your products and services, then relationships matter more.

Jason Falls wrote a quick and to the point blog this week about what is more important, ‘influence’ or trust? Many people spend too much time trying to get the attention of the people with the biggest Twitter followers or most blog subscribers. If one of those picked up your content, would you really get the eyeballs you want on your content? You are probably better off finding someone in your niche who has followers that would really benefit from your content, products and services.

3 easy ways to find good people to follow on Twitter

1. Try adding your LinkedIn contacts to your Twitter followers. The Next Web thought that with this new easy integration, this could be the ‘a-ha’ moment for many Twitterers struggling to find meaningfulness in their Twitter streams.
2. Look for hashtags that are in and around the target group you are trying to reach.
3. Can’t find a good hashtag? Start your own or start a Twitter chat. Twitter chats are a great way to find new people you can connect with. I have met some really good people through #blogchat.

Lastly, if you feel like your followers are lacking the qualities you need, don’t feel bad about trimming the fat and getting your numbers down to people who care about you and your content.

You may have seen them leaving off-color remarks on blogs, or always being negative on Twitter but Internet Trolls can be serious business. If you haven’t run into them first hand, you should probably be prepared to and have an idea of how your business will deal with them.

What is an Internet Troll?

Internet Trolls are internet users who find enjoyment in attacking and criticizing other people’s content. Their mission is usually to get a reaction from the person they are attacking or from their network.

An internet troll can be found in the comment sections of blogs, on social networks, in message boards and more. Their protocol is usually to comment on someone else’s content or profile in a negative and sometimes controversial manner to try to get a reaction.

Where the damage can occur to your business is in how you react to an internet troll. Your comments are as much of your marketing as your original post or profile.

Wikipedia Defines Troll (Internet)
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

As you become an authority in your industry, you are more susceptible to trolls. Remember when your mother told you that kids were mean to you because they were jealous? Well the same applies here but with grownups and new tools for malicious behavior. As you establish yourself as an authority and broadcast to your network what your point of view is on a topic, you have put yourself out there and need to be prepared for trolls to try to get a rise out of you.

Sonia Simone from Copyblogger had a great post called The Dark Side of Authority where she explains that we all know being an authority in our industry is what we want, but trolls are one of the downsides of being an ‘expert’. She goes on to say that it is human nature to admire authority, but it is also human nature to for some to resent authority.

How to Deal With an Internet Troll

First things first, an internet troll is looking for a reaction so carefully consider your response or your decision not to respond.

Here are a few tips for dealing with internet trolls:

• Have a plan first – As with all things we talk about with internet marketing, it is important to have a plan first. This could be a conversation with anyone who is participating in your business blog and social networks or an official policy on how to respond to off-color comments. Going into the situation blindly without considering the possibilities means you could be more prone to having a gut reaction, and giving the troll exactly what they are looking for, attention.
• Approach each comment as constructive – As many of us have learned the hard way, there is no tone in written text. You cannot tell when someone is being sarcastic, or trying to be funny, maybe had a typo, or shouldn’t have read your blog after that martini and they misunderstood your content. Treat each comment like it had good intentions. Some will be very easy to tell that they are malicious but if it is borderline, treat it like it had the best of intentions.
• Delete content that hurts your network – I think leaving negative comments on your blog or profile is usually ok, if not good. It shows debate or lets you realize how other people view your opinions and you can have some really great conversations that help you grow. You should delete content that attacks another member of your network, has profane language or that you find offensive. You don’t want to be the arena that one of your readers gets into an argument with a troll.
• Say ‘Thank You’ – If there is a comment or a tweet that I think is malicious but I don’t have anything constructive to add, I will just say a simple ‘thank you for your comment’ or ‘thank you for your perspective’. That way, they know they were heard but they did not get a big reaction out of me.
• Follow up – On at least a dozen occasions someone has said something hurtful about me, my work or my company I have followed up and made a relationship out of it. A few have even become partners I refer work to. A whiny tweet could just be someone else who provides similar services but thinks their way is better, a cry for attention to view their work or a faceless crime and when you meet them face to face they are guilt ridden for their comment.

Dealing with internet trolls or off-color remarks is definitely a case by case and company by company basis. You need to do what is best for your business, your employees, your network and you. If you are prepared beforehand, you will probably have better results versus a petty battle of words in the comments section of your blog.

As we talk about blogging, social media and creating content online, we have to stop and talk about sharing content, copyrighted material and when it is ok to use other people’s work and when it is not.

For years, in our recent history, we copyrighted everything that we created. We copyrighted photos we took, videos we made, music we created and everything else so that people knew it was ours and we would get credit for it.

Now with the internet, blogs and social media – users are creating content all the time. With that they are re-purposing, sharing and building off other people’s words, thoughts and art; standard copyrighting laws are too strong. Many people want their content to be shared, built on and used for collaboration.

Introducing Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that is working with content creators of every kind to make it possible for some of their work to be used in some ways. Creative Commons provides free licenses for creators to use when making their work available to the public. These licenses give the creators that ability in advance to know what their content is intended for.

In the past, copyrighted material meant all rights were reserved and that you had to ask permission to use or build upon that work, without ever knowing what the original creator’s intention was. Now when you create some type of work you can use Creative Commons to tell potential users exactly how and when they can and cannot use your content.

In the late 80′s copyright laws changed, and as soon as you finished a piece of work it was automatically copyrighted as yours. What if you wanted to share that work? Let people add onto it? Build upon it? Make something else with the content you created? You couldn’t really. The copyright laws were too restrictive. Creative Commons created their own terms and agreements so you can make the decision on how and when people can use your work the way you intended.

Here is a video that I think explains Creative Commons well:

What Should I Do With MY Content?

It is very much up to you and your company what you want to do with your content. Some people want all of their work completely open to give it as much legs as it can get. Some want to publish some content for free and then have some work copyrighted and be able to charge for specific in-depth content. As you work with your business on a content strategy you need to decide what it is people can and cannot do with your content.

Jason Falls recently wrote a post on his blog, Social Media Explorer, on why he recently changed his open, share and share alike copyright to a non-commercial, share and share alike copyright. His work was being confused for other people’s and credit for his work was going to other sites and it was important to him to get those pieces back.

How Do I Know What Content I Can Use?

Not everyone participates in Creative Commons. It is still, in the scheme of things, relatively new. The catalog of items increases every day. You can start by browsing some of the resources Creative Commons has on their site. Some blogs have a logo and link to their creative commons specifics.

Photo credit: hoangnam_nguyen

I have always used Flickr for my blog entries and they are great with Creative Commons photos. You can search just for items that are part of the Creative Commons and each photo clearly tells you what the image can be used for.

For example this adorable puppy picture (I picked it to make Jenika go ‘awwwwww’) has a link on the Flickr page that says ‘Some rights reserved’. I can click on that link and see what the specifics of using this image are. This image is made to share as long as you attribute the work, which I did below the image, and on the condition that if it is used again from this blog entry, it gets attributed there as well. Here is the link that explains how the image can be used.

The puppy example is just for photos. Now think about how you can use this for text, music and other creative content. Creative Commons has a good thing here, especially now in this time of so much content creation. I hope this post helped explain what Creative Commons is. Happy creating and sharing!

At most group discussions I am a part of there is at least one comment, usually at the very end, of someone saying “Well don’t you think this is just a generational thing?”

Short answer: Probably, yes but there is more to it than that.

How each generation works is different than the generation before them

A large point for more experienced workers is that they don’t consider participating in social media as “work”. Those who use social media tools don’t consider it “work” either. We consider it a tool for communication, like the phone, fax machine or email. Millennials and Gen Y’s are under the microscope from Boomers because how they are choosing to work is vastly different than those before them. They are using new tools, have new ways of reaching out to customers, work different hours and blur the lines between what is work and what is not.

Redefining what we call work

The Millennials, who are coming right up in the work force, is the only generation that doesn’t cite work ethic as one of its “principal claims to distinctiveness”. The same percent that cited work ethic also cited clothes as a claim to distinctiveness. This will probably change as it did with the stereotypes Gen Xers had to deal with.

What IS true is that what is defined as work is changing. The traditional 9 – 5 is getting stretched to its capacity. First it was 8:30 – 5, then 8:30 – 6 and now many of us are checking our email, preparing content and speaking with clients at all hours of the day.

I spoke with a nice gentleman recently who told me he ‘didn’t know how I did it’, carrying around my phone all the time, making time to tweet and write, checking email at all hours of the evening, etc. I told him the same goes for me to him. The thought of coming into my office and checking the emails that have piled up over night causes me anxiety. If I get 30 emails overnight, my whole morning is ruined with just checking emails. Now I know what is coming in and can plan out my day better. I feel like I hit the morning ground running. That is what works for me and it doesn’t work for him. I am not wrong and he is not wrong.

The term ‘weisure‘, work+leisure, was developed to describe this blurring of the lines of work and leisure time. Are we more willing to work on our free time because work is more fun? Or maybe we just have more work to do then can be done in a traditional work week?

“Social networking as an activity is one of those ambiguous activities. It’s part fun and part instrumental in our knowledge economy.”

Dalton Conley via CNN article Welcome to the ‘weisure’ lifestyle

Blending Work and Pleasure means losing your privacy

As we work more in our leisure time and we participate in social media sites while we work – the lines are getting blurred between the two. Most people have a public version of themselves and then they have a private one seen only by their family and friends. As we use Facebook to connect with business partners or add tidbits about our weekend life on our Twitter stream everyone needs to consider what they and their company are comfortable sharing on social networks and in their personal lives. Younger generations seem more comfortable on social networking sites with countless pictures and videos of them and their friends. At some point that content will be reflected on when they join the workforce in a more professional sector. We work with businesses often about setting social media policies to outline exactly what the business and the employees are comfortable sharing publicly. Whether or not you make a policy, these are important discussions to have with your staff.

New Tools mean new workspaces or lack thereof

With smartphones, online meeting services, social networking sites, real time searches, video phones and web cams does this mean people who are comfortable using these tools still see value in sitting in an office from 9 – 5? Gen Xers and Millenials are more apt to look for businesses that offer a work from home option or more flexible hours.

Work Shifting is the popular term for people who web commute to their jobs often, if not daily, and work from coffee shops, restaurants and hotels. In a recent article from Work Shifting ‘How Millennials Are Shaping the Future of Work‘ the author tackles some of the major things Millennials have contributed to change the way we work. She points out how technology and human interaction go hand in hand, marketing is a two way conversation and change is just part of the way the world works now.

Technology and Social Media keep changing

Millennials seem more able to change than any of the other members of the workforce. This generation grew up with quick advances in technology, unlike the ones before it. Change seems to be a way of life and not an unwanted inconvenience. As we have discussed on this blog before, not all the changes (very few honestly) will have a major impact on your business. If you are going to incorporate technology and take control of your own marketing align yourself with an Internet Marketing Travel Agent or someone you trust who is inline with your company goals to keep you in-the-know about advances in technology that will affect your business. For example I do a weekly recap of internet news that I think may influence the small to medium-sized businesses and B2B businesses that we work with.

Those are just a few of my thoughts on the changes in how we work through generations. So yes, I do think ‘it’ is a generational thing but the ‘it’ isn’t social media, the ‘it’ is how we work. How we work is different and social media is just a new tool to communicate in our workday. How we incorporate it (or don’t) is up to each organization and each person.