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By Neptune Moon, August 19, 2010 5:15 pm

Facebook unveiled its new Places feature today. What does this feature do? Why should you care? How can you adjust your account settings?

What does this feature do?

Facebook Places is a geolocation or location-based functionality where you can “check in” via Facebook and let your friends (or the world) know where you are at any given moment. The functionality currently works with iPhones and can also be accessed with other smartphones via the web. Android and BlackBerry support is said to be coming soon.

Why should you care?

Not everyone wants others to literally know where they are – with GPS precision. There are the obvious safety issues to consider and it is probably not a great idea to tell the world you’re on vacation and exactly where – nothing like pointing a neon sign to your empty house! The feature is automatically enabled in your account, but if you don’t actively check in, your location probably won’t appear on your profile or in anyone else’s feed.

If you don’t want your location shared, ever, you should update your account’s privacy settings so that others cannot check you in.

How can you adjust your account settings to completely opt out?

Go to Accounts and choose Privacy Settings. In the list of settings you control, you’ll see a new one called Places I Check In. Click on the Customize Setting option. When you get to the next screen, in the Things I Share area you will see a choice for Places I Check In – choose the level of privacy you want. If you don’t want your location to ever be shown, choose Only Me from the options.

To make sure no one else can check you in either, you’ll need to change another setting. In the Things Others Share section, scroll down to the Friends Can Check Me In to Places option and disable it.

How much information you want to share about your real time, actual location is an individual choice. Just make sure you know how your settings are configured so that information you do not want to be shared remains private.

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By Neptune Moon, July 9, 2010 5:18 pm

Google Social Media + Lead Generation and you’ll find a wide variety of opinions on this topic. I’d like to suggest that can social media generate leads, is not even the best question to ask. A better question is how can we use social media to best support our business/organization and our customers?

There is an interesting article on just this topic over at the American Express OPEN Technology Forum “Is Social Media Failing to Produce Business Leads?” – read it here. In it, the author suggests that perhaps social media’s “job” isn’t so much to produce leads, but to allow companies to better or more strongly engage with their customers.

I tend to agree with this premise. I think there is an almost involuntary urge to try to make every technology fit in to an old school box about how to use it and what it does. That kind of thinking is a mistake. While those of you who have read posts here before know that I do believe selling is still about putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time - with social media, we have a whole host of new tools to help accomplish this task.

Social media can do a lot of things, but expecting to setup a Twitter account, a Facebook business page and/or even a LinkedIn profile and then just have the leads flowing in, is a completely unrealistic view of how these tools work. In order to get benefit from them, you have to actively use them. And not just to post your sales information or press releases, but to actually talk to your customers and potential customers.

Social media has opened up brand new ways for people and businesses to communicate and engage with each other, it’s true. But it is important to understand what these tools can and cannot do and how to make them work for you.

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By Neptune Moon, June 1, 2010 6:45 pm

So unless you’ve been living under a rock or in outer Mongolia for the past couple of years, you’ve probably found yourself wondering what the heck you should be doing to take part in this brave new world of social media to advance your career or business…

The prospect can really be quite overwhelming – which media to choose? How to choose? What to post? How often to post? How to interact with others? When not to engage with others? The questions can seem endless!

The good news is, that social media, like anything else is something you can figure out one step at a time. When you break it down into reasonable steps, it suddenly seems like an achievable goal. And don’t we all want to set achievable goals?!?

A few questions to get you started:

1. Who is my target audience?
2. Where do they spend the most time – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, YouTube, etc.?
3. How much time do you have to commit to social media on a weekly basis?
4. Who in your organization will be responsible for keeping your presence up?
5. Who will develop your social media policies?

Developing and implementing a social media strategy takes time and effort, but beginning to think about these questions is a great place to start!

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By Neptune Moon, May 24, 2010 5:29 pm

Just a quick update on the Facebook privacy post from last week… Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post, directly addressing users’ legitimate privacy concerns.

According to Zuckerberg: new, simpler privacy controls are in the works, along with ways to easily turn off of any third party services.

Read it at the Washington Post now.

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By Neptune Moon, May 12, 2010 3:36 pm

Facebook added a new feature recently that continues their push to make your profile information publicly available. Most people have their basic privacy settings under control – only friends whom you have accepted can view your profile. Or so you think, right?

Working in technology, I am very careful about the information I post anywhere. Yes, I get the eye rolls when I tell people that the should never post their birthday, especially with the year, on their profiles and that’s ok. But Facebook’s new features, called Social Plugins and Instant Personalization move beyond what is housed on the actual Facebook web site.

As with most of their new “improvements” this feature is Opt Out – which means, unless you turn it off, you are sharing this information now.

So, what is this new feature? According to Facebook:

How does instant personalization work on websites participating in the pilot program?

“We have established a small pilot program with an exclusive set of partners—currently yelp.com, Microsoft Docs.com, and pandora.com—to offer a personalized experience as soon as you visit. These partners have been given access to public information on Facebook (e.g., names, friend lists and interests and likes) to personalize your experience.”

What data is shared with instant personalization pilot program websites?
“When you and your friends visit an instantly personalized partner site – currently including yelp.com, Microsoft Docs.com, and pandora.com the partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections. To access any non-public information, the website is required to ask for you or your friend’s explicit permission.”

See the full FAQ on these new features on Facebook’s site here.

So why should you care?

If you do not want your profile information to be available to anyone but the friends you have chosen, log in now and opt out of this new feature.

According to Facebook, here is a summary of what information is being shared and displayed on their partner sites if you don’t opt out:

Will people beyond my friends see what I like or recommend?

“Yes. Likes and recommendations you make are public information, similar to when you comment or write a review on any website today or connect with a public Facebook Page. The “Like” button, Activity Feed and Recommendations only display your friends’ names and profile pictures and to show the likes and recommendations from people who aren’t your friends in an aggregated format (”15 people like this”).

When a like makes a connection in your profile, you can control who can see that in your Facebook profile by editing your “Friends, Tags and Connections” settings on your Privacy Settings page. Remember that even if you limit the visibility of a connection, it remains as public information and may appear in other places on Facebook.com or be accessed by applications and websites. [emphasis mine].

Depending on the connection you made, you can remove a connection completely either by going to the “Info” tab of your profile and editing your “Likes and Interests,” or by returning to the web page where you liked something and unliking it.”

Reactions to these new features

Facebook has received a lot of backlash for these latest “improvements” as well as news of several, now resolved, security issues with partner sites – See this article on TechCrunch for more about an issue with Yelp. See this article on CNN.com for more about the backlash.

Bottom line, you give up a certain amount of privacy by publishing anything on Facebook at all, but you need to be vigilant to make sure they are not sharing more than you think with the world.