Asio Studio » Social Media

6 things you (probably do but) might not know you can do on Facebook.

Bonny — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:00:55 +0000

I was talking to my Dad on Fathers day and inevitably the conversation turned to Facebook and before long I was spouting off tip after tip of Facebook knowledge when it dawned on me that others could benefit from this information as well. So here you are…

6 things you may not know you can do on Facebook!!!

These particular 6 things will be presented one thing at a time every day until the 27th of June. That’s nearly a full week’s worth of things you may or may not have known! WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Enjoy the things.

Hey, Check out the bottom half of my face!

Cropping your Profile Picture:

Maybe it’s just the photographer in me but I can’t stand it when someone’s profile picture shows half of their face, half of their buddies face and then most of a tree they are standing next to. It’s super easy to adjust the way your profile picture shows up in the little box, here’s how:

First go to your profile page and click on your profile picture in the top left corner of the page and you’ll notice that it says “Change Profile Picture”

After you click this Facebook will give you a menu of options. If you scroll down and click “Edit Thumbnail”. A new window will open and you will then be able to drag the thumbnail around to get the cropped photo you desire. Drag your profile picture to desired crop and click save…. noting more too it!

I don’t really care how your farm is doing… go away!

Hiding Stuff from your news feed:

By now most of you have found the handy little “hide” box in the top right corner of a status update but incase you’ve missed it; Facebook allows you to turn off those applications (or friends for that matter) you find just a little to annoying.

If you’re like me you don’t really care about Farmville, or horoscopes, or “What type of shoe defines you” or the super awesome high score someone got in Farkle. Facebook allows you to block information you don’t want to see by clicking the Hide button. You can find the hidden ‘Hide’ button by rolling over the application update you wish to remove. When you do this a button will appear in the top right corner that says… oddly enough “Hide”.

When you click the button a box will pop up

This box allows you to block the application or to block the person posting the application (more on this later).

Once you’ve blocked the application its gone forever… poof! No more Farmville.

BUT WAIT!

This new page I’ve turned in I’m my life has made me a more tolerant person with a much more addictive personality. I totally WANT to play Farmville now!

Not to worry, you can get it back by following these steps:

Navigate to the News Feed page and make sure that you are looking at the Top News option (this option can be changed at the top of your home page). Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Edit Options” link. Select the “Applications” tab and click on the “Add to News Feed” button beside any third party application that you would like to add back to your home page.

Yeah, but… its not the applications so much as it’s my really annoying neighbor who wont stop talking about his dog Fluffy!

“Well, just delete him.”

“I can’t”, you say… “He’ll cut down my tomatoe plants.”

Well, there is one more option. You can turn off status updates for people too.

Same as before. Roll over, click Hide but this time click “Hide (Person’s name)” instead of the application.

Done and done….

Oh, but 6 months later when you play poker with the guy and you get to talking about Fluffy, ‘Woof”, he comes over and falls asleep in your lap and now you to want to know every cute thing he does from now to eternity. Not to worry, you can turn your neighbor back on too:

Scroll down to the bottom of your News Feed and click “Edit Options.” If you are looking for a friend, scan the list to find that person. If you are looking for a public profile, select the Public Profiles tab. Click “Add to News Feed” to see their posts again. Click “Close” to save your changes.

Now, if you were paying attention you might say at this point… “But Bonny, when we did the thing before where we turned the applications back on I totally saw a box next to the Applications button that said Friends! Cant we just add our friends back there?”

The answer is “Yes” and you get a big fat gold star for being such a good student, and heck even a pat on the back while we’re at it.

…Moving on.

I know how awesome Frank Bob and June Summertimington are, if only the rest of Facebook could too…

Link to other profiles in your status updates

Lets say that you spent an afternoon at the lake with your good friends Frank Bob and June Summertimington. Now, you had a great time with them and you want to tell the whole Facebook world about it, but by golly, it isn’t enough to just tell them you want to show them who these fantastic people are you spent your whole weekend with. No problem, you can do this by linking their names to their profile pages in Facebook.

Start by typing up your status update as usual: “We had the best time at the lake this weekend with Frank Bob and June Summertimington” (great update!) but when you get to their names type the @ sign first. You’ll notice that when you type the first letter of their name it will pull up a list of everyone you know what that letter in their name. A few more letters will narrow the list down and you should be able to select Frank Bob’s name. Once you do this you’ll notice the name will change to blue. This means you did it right.

…Now of course a much more effective way to use this would be to help promote a friend or an event. Example:

Stupid Facebook, that’s not what my link was… it should say _______

Change the description text in your link

I see this one all over Facebook. Its actually something I discovered on accident, and I love it!

Sometimes when you put a link to a new story on Facebook, depending on the settings of the site you’re linking to or a gambit of other circumstances, the title of the page and the link descriptions can vary from exactly what you want to say to some sort of internet gobbldygook no one can understand. Facebook gives you control over both of these things so you can change them to say what ever you want.

What in the Sam Hill are you talking about Bonny? … well, let me show you…

HOLY COW! I just read the most amazing story on this super awesome website and I want everyone I know on Facebook to see it. I go through the common steps: Go to web page. Copy web page URL (Web address) and Paste into my Status box. YAY! Now everyone will know about this thing I found and the world will be a better place!

Oh no! when I pasted it in the box it put up some weird title that doesn’t explain what the story very well, and the text below the title is a description of the website, not of the story… no one will click on my link now and I will be sad.

Alas, check this out:
If you hover over the title of the story when it appears below the status box you will notice that it turns yellow. This glorious transition of color means you can click on that text and change it to WHAT EVER YOU WANT, so instead of the link text saying “bla bla bla, I’m not text that’s relevant to anything” it can now say “Hello, I’m something super important, relevant and descriptive, you surely want to click on me now!”

While we’re here lets just touch briefly on the thumbnail selector at the bottom of this box. you can change the photo that appears with your link by cycling through all the images on the page. This is particularly useful if for some reason Facebook thinks the Budweiser logo is more important than you’re best friends daughter knocking the ball out of the park for the game winning triple. Additionally, you have the option of displaying no thumbnail if, after you’ve cycled through the selection of photos available, none seem appropriate.

My buddy from high school keeps sending me event invitations, but I don’t want to look like a jerk and click “Not Attending”.

Remove yourself from events with out grief

You can remove yourself from events completely. This means you don’t have to lie and say you might be coming to an event you have no intention of attending or worse yet, you wont show up on the Not Attending list and hurt anyone’s feelings.

Facebook recently changed the way they handle events so this actually took a little digging to rediscover but it would appear that it is pretty easy. All you have to do is go to the event page and look under the event photo in the top right corner.

Man, Facebook Chat is so annoying. Frank Jim keeps talking to me but I really dont want to go off line in case Dreamy McHearthrob wants to talk to me….

Turn off and sort chat

Most people know that you can turn off the chat function if you are feeling particularly antisocial but what you may not know is that by using Facebook’s list function you can actually sort groups of people into friends, family, people you saw once in the hallway in high school and most importantly, people you really don’t care to chat with.
What this does is makes you appear off-line to one group of people while appearing online to another group. For example:

I like to be online when ever grandma pops up because I love grandma and want to talk to her every chance I get but I don’t really like talking to the pimple faced squirrelly boy who sat next to me in math class in the 8th grade and he seems to want to talk to me all the time…. gawd he’s dumb!

Here’s how we fix this:

Start by creating friend groups. You do this by clicking “account” in the top right corner of Facebook and then clicking “Edit Friends”. A box will then pull up containing all of your Facebook friends. Name the group by clicking the box at the top then you can sort through your friends by scrolling down or by typing their names in the search box in the top left corner.

You can create as many groups as you’d like. This function is also nice for sending messages and filtering status updates from friend groups as well as some other handy dandy stuff, but I suppose that’s another article.

Now that you have all your friends sorted nicely into nice folders lets move over to your chat box in the bottom right corner of the page. This will open a list of everyone who is online at the moment. You’ll notice though that now they are sorted nicely into the groups you’ve created.

To the left of the list groups is a green toggle switch. If you click the switch for each group it will change your online status. This way you can control who you appear to be online to at any given time.

6 things you (probably do but) might not know you can do on Facebook – Intro

Bonny — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:51:51 +0000

6 things you may not know you can do on Facebook!!!

These particular 6 things will be presented one thing at a time every day until the 27th of June. That’s nearly a full week’s worth of things you may or may not have known! WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Enjoy the things.

Video Marketing – when seeing is doing

Claire Scholz — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:53:24 +0000

Where do you turn if you want to learn a new skill or purchase some new fancy gadget? The internet? That’s what I thought.

Recently, I decided I wanted to learn how to photograph a water drop so I headed over to our trusty friend, Google and typed ‘photograph water drops’ in the search box. Here are the results:

Digital-photography-school.com (#1 Google site) sent me off to this page. It is a nice, easy explanation of the setup and procedure.

But I wanted more information. So I bopped over to www.youtube and found a wonderful video from PhotoGavin titled How to photograph a splash of water.

Bingo, everything came clear. Before I went off to experiment though, I subscribed to the author’s Youtube channel so I could come back and watch the rest of his movies.

The point here isn’t to teach you how to photograph water drops, it is to show you how effective video is when it is mixed into your marketing efforts.

Concepts become clearer when we can watch them in action.
Fact – most people would rather watch a movie than read.
A video of your company’s doings, facilities or employees makes you more “real” in the eyes of the viewers.
Videos add value to your brand, they can make you the go-to expert.
They can show the heart of your company. Do you do good deeds? Video, upload and share them.
Video testimonials are powerful and much more believable than a list of text tributes.

I was impressed by the video so I went to PhotoGavin’s website and bookmarked it (I use delicious.com). I noticed that he has some DVDs for sale and they look interesting. And heck, I’m telling you about him too. So I’d say his video did a great job of establishing him as an expert, wouldn’t you?

Marketing – Outback Steakhouse’s Bloomin’ Onion/Facebook campaign

Claire Scholz — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:10:56 +0000

Outback Steakhouse recently offered a free ‘Bloomin’ Onion‘ to the first 5,000 folks who signed up on their Facebook Fan page. The results? They added 24,000 new fans in the first week. And the numbers just keep on growing.

The 5 spoked wheel of social marketing

Claire Scholz — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:14:44 +0000

Social marketing, at its core, is like a wagon wheel. It has a hub and 5 spokes which can conveniently be arranged into a fine circular object that will handily take you down the social track.

The hub is your blog
Spoke #1 – a social networking account on Facebook.
Spoke #2 – a microblogging account on Twitter.
Spoke #3- a video sharing account on Youtube.
Spoke #4 – a photo sharing account on Flickr.
Spoke #5 – a network of like-minded blogs to follow and comment uponst.
The invisible spoke – patience, keen listening skills and time.

In this wonderful new world of business models there are lots of folks who have reached ‘wizard’ status…and there are lots and lots and lots more who are just trying to figure out where to start. As a way to help the later group we are putting together a series of videos created by members of the ‘wizard’ ilk. We will start with a Youtube video called Blogs in Plain English by Lee LeFever.

The story of creation (via Twitter)

Claire Scholz — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:08:57 +0000

This wonderfully witty post is from Tom McNichol at the Huffington Post

Day One
Let there B-lite. OMG! Or shld I say Oh Me! It’s so much easier 2-C now. WTF was I thinking B4? Spent the rest of the day dividing lite from drkness. It is good.

Day Two
Made a firmament (sort of a dome thing) to divide the waters under firmament from the waters above. Assigned firmament the file name . +<:-)

Day Three
Gathered waters and let dry land appear. Dry land tagged , waters tagged . Uploaded grass and herb-yielding seed into folder. GR8!

Day Four
More lighting wk. Installed 1 great lite to rule day [] & lesser lite to rule night []. Beta tested them & everything seems to work. It is gd.

Day Five
Bushed from tweaking fish & fowl files. They wouldn’t be fruitful and multiply until I found it’s a simple command. >:-? Thank Me It’s Friday.

Day Six
Created 2 humans, file names and . At last – I now have 2 Twitter followers! Tweeting just to myself is sooo Day One. LOL!

Day Seven
[no tweets]

7 habits of the highly effective

Claire Scholz — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:17:47 +0000

Highly effective websites are like highly effective people. They don’t just happen. Their success is honed and developed. To explore this thought I found a summary of Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

That works The first 3 habits are pretty clear. The proactive part simply means taking a good look inside, in our website scenario this step would include an analysis of what your business site already has going for it, then adding a careful mix of research and dreaming to see what it ultimately should be.

Beginning with the end in mind? In other circles that would mean setting clear goals. Give yourself and your people a destination. Think of the early American pioneers in their covered wagons. They knew their ultimate destination was San Francisco or LA or Portland. Because they know this fact they could route their course and measure their day to day accomplishments. So it goes with website planning. If you know where you want your website to take your business it makes for much easier pathway planning. It also give you the ability to set up milestones along the way.

Put first things first – As simple as this seems, it is really quite the opposite. As C.S. Lewis once said, “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.” It has to do with prioritizing and giving tasks ordered values.

My favorite habits are 5, 6 and 7 because not only do they apply swimmingly to website planning and implementation they also are practically the poster children of good social media practices.

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood – We don’t call them customers anymore. We call them the community members. Customers were the old school advertisement recipients, the broadcastees. They received the messages from our ads and then for the most part, they kept their mouths shut. Community members talk often, they talk loudly and they are wired to large numbers of other community members. By getting to know them, chatting, sharing and learning from them – products improve, brands gain loyal followers and complaints are dealt with quickly.

Synergize – This is Habit 5 with a kick. Its teamwork, group-created new solutions and big ideas. It happens when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And it is great fun.

Sharpen the Saw – In the summary this habit is explained, “Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.” On an enterprise level Google defined it as ‘Innovation Time Off’, their practice of encouraging all engineers to spend at least 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing. This has benefited Google greatly resulting in such products as Gmail, Google News, AdSense and Orkut.

I would also put ‘learning adapting and constant implementation’ into habit 7’s saw sharpening requirements. In order for a website to be highly effective it must change and grow with the trends of technology and communications. A site that was effective three years ago has already lost quite a bit of its luster. The way messages are delivered and received on the web changes – sometimes quicker than others. The changes we are witnessing now are flying lightening fast. As Catherine the Great said (and I’m sure would say again if she were surveying the social scene) “A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.”

Remembering 9/11

Claire Scholz — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:44:15 +0000

Most of us will take some time today to reflect on the September 11^th tragedies of eight years ago. Its sobering to remember the disbelief, apprehension and grief we all held as the day unfolded. As the days and months passed we learned of the 2,752 who had died, we witnessed the ceaseless acts of bravery from those who were assigned to ‘make it right’ again and we watched the ushering in of a new era. One of muffled hope and cultivated fear.

In many ways 2001 seems far, far in the past. We learn, communicate, heal, analyze, travel, even play differently now. We can thank (or curse) technology for many of the sweeping changes.

In order to get a finger on America’s heartbeat concerning 9/11 I did a Twitter search. I followed some links in the unending stream of thousands and thousands of tweets to read posts written by journalist, actors, conspiracy believers and politicians. I wondered what would have happened if Twitter or Facebook or the endless list of other social sites existed on that fateful day.

Is Twitter worth the time?

Claire Scholz — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:39:02 +0000

On June 22nd Amazon acquired online shoe/clothing merchant Zappos.com with a stock deal valued somewhere between $850 – $920 million.

I’m sure there a more reasons for this acquisition than meets the eye but the most stated reason is Zappos’ CEO’s philosophy of “karmic capitalism”. What goes around comes around couldn’t be truer in this case.

Tony Hsieh is Zappos’ CEO. He is a Harvard graduate with a degree in computer science. He made a bunch of money back in 1998 when he co-founded and sold LinkExchange to Microsoft. He joined the Zappos team in 2000 and has taken the company’s gross sales from $1.6 million to $1 billion in his tenure there.

What is remarkable about this young man is what how he accomplished this feet. He and his team created a Zappos ‘culture’ that is completely customer-centric. You can read Zappos 10 Core Values here. http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values They included their employees and customers in this ‘culture’ and they tweeted – a lot. Not just a little bit of alot, they tweeted a lot of alot.

Search Engine Watch’s Sage Lewis wrote Zappos + Twitter = Innovative Success http://searchenginewatch.com/3631269 back in October of 2008. It is worth the read.

One thing that caught my eye was Sage Lewis’ point that dedicated Twitter activity garners links from other sites. At the time the article was written, Zappos had 2467 pages linking to their site. I did a link check when I read the article. Now they have 7116. Wow!

For those not obsessed with search engine optimization, incoming links from other sites is a significant factor (some say less so now) in who’s site show up where in a searched listing. They also bring very valuable, targeted direct traffic. In other words, incoming links add value to your company’s bottom line.

So does being a Twitter rockstar. And in the case of rock star, Zappos, it brings about 1 billion tidbits of value.

Oh Wow!

Claire Scholz — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:34:10 +0000

I had a big ‘Oh wow’ moment on Saturday when I went to get the mail out of my mailbox. Mixed in with the usual blend of credit card offers (yes, I’m still getting them), catalogs and bills was the latest issue of Time magazine. Pictured on the cover was the large, signature photograph of FDR – and the headline, “What Barack Obama Can Learn from FDR.’

That cover was glaring proof that traditional news coverage is gasping for air.

What I knew and what the world’s citizens had been incredulously mourning, discussing and rehashing was the fact that Michael Jackson was dead. He died last Thursday. His passing was so passionately felt by so many that the millions upon millions upon millions of mentions of his name almost crashed the internet.

Social sites like Twitter and Facebook slowed to a crawl. Google interpreted the huge spike in Michael Jackson queries as an attack on its services. AOL’s instant messenger service went down for 40 minutes due to the heavy load. Yet, here in my hands I held –hot off the press- one of our nation’s foremost news magazines without a mention of the King of Pop’s passing.