Ellie's Blog

My HubSpot TV Debut: Talking Facebook Features and Email Fun

Last week I had the fun opportunity to fill in for the oh-so-provocative Karen Rubin by co-hosting HubSpot TV. It was a pretty perfect week in marketing for me, with lots of news on Facebook and email marketing! Check out the full episode below or on the HubSpot blog.

Facebook for Business Tips [My Radio Debut]

Recently I made my radio debut on Career Life Balance Radio as part of their "Marketing Minutes" segment. My segments are focusing on "How to Use Facebook for Business". Listen below for my surprisingly high-pitched Facebook for Business Tips.

Part 1:How to Use Facebook to Market Your Business

Part 2: How to Get More Facebook Fans

Part 3: How to Get the Most Out of Facebook Ads

 

Photo credit: foraggio

The Story of Exodus, As Told Through Facebook

This brings together two fabulous things: Jewish stories and social media geekiness - in a hilarious way!

Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah

The story of Exodus, as told through Facebook.

Some highlights:

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Read the whole story of Exodus, as told through Facebook.

I Made An Internet Marketing Geek Discovery!

It's no secret that I'm an Internet marketing geek. In particular, I spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of Facebook to share how businesses can use the social network for marketing.

Well, in doing just that, I made a discovery! Yesterday I discovered a loophole that allowed me to create links from Facebook to my website that pass SEO (search engine optimization) credit.

This is a pretty big deal because (1) a link from Facebook.com is incredibly valuable, and (2) almost all links from Facebook are either "no follow" (don't pass SEO juice) or "redirects" (first bring you to a page that warns that you're leaving Facebook). But through the custom-coded FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application, I could code whatever link I wanted - the target URL, the link text, everything!

For at least an hour, I was jumping in my office seat. Of course, after sharing my news with the marketing team, I was volunteered to write a blog article about it.

Read my post: Facebook Gives SEO Credit to Links in FBML Applications

Photo credit: futurowoman

A Picture - Or Case Study - Is Worth 1000 Words

There's nothing like a great conference to really get lots of thoughts and ideas jumping around in your head, just waiting for a blog post to flush them out. Yesterday I drove down to Randolph, MA for Geek Girl Camp Boston to talk to women about how to use inbound marketing and, specifically, Facebook, for business and afterwards I was so energized with blog post ideas about marketing and Facebook and social media newbies.

But that's not really what this blog post is about. I'm actually pretty new to the conference speaker role, and I was excited to get some experience at this event. Feedback was great (thank you all!), but of course I want to improve. I'll be the first to admit that I have a tendency to be a bit wordy and confusing when I try to explain things that I know too much about. I definitely fall victim to the Curse of Knowledge and need to work on better explaining things I know a lot about, like Facebook.

So when I got home last night, I pulled out (one of the four books I'm currently reading) Made to Stick to pick up where I left off (months ago... I really need to focus on one book at a time). Made to Stick has been one of the best business books I have ever read, really helping me with this Curse of Knowledge that I so easily fall victim to. Something that occurred to me - both in observing the authors' writing style and also the section specifically on Concrete ideas being "sticky" - was that concrete examples or case studies can be a huge help in delivering your idea in an effective way while also overcoming the Curse! By using real life examples of what you're explaining, a reader or listener can more easily remember your story. Also, by using case studies, you paint a picture that is worth a thousand words - your audience can fully experience what you're talking about, draw their own conclusions, and all at the same time, you make a lot more sense by not being so abstract.

Uh oh, I'm falling victim to it again. I'm being too abstract and not using concrete examples! So let's try this again.

In my presentation at GGC, I spent a lot of time talking about the news feed, about business Pages, about Facebook applications. Sure, I was giving step-by-step instructions for setting up a Page, but I still got a lot of questions like, "What if I don't want my clients to see my friends' kids' photos?" or "Should I use my real name?" -- questions more easily answered by just jumping in and seeing how Facebook works from a user's perspective.

Here's what I could have done: logged in to Facebook. Shown the news feed. Look! My friend Dan posted a link to his latest blog post. Mike uploaded a video of his son. Ashley became a fan of Flight of the Conchords. From there, we could go look at the Flight of the Conchords Page on Facebook. We could look at Ashley's profile, that shows she's a fan of that Page. And we remember that her action of becoming a fan actually showed up when I logged in. That's pretty cool.

That's one idea. By making it a lot more concrete, people can see exactly what Facebook is and how it works and will (hopefully) be better able to jump in using it.

What I especially like about the case study approach is that I can still allow myself to be wordy... But in this case, my words are used to describe a story. They add color and texture, and at the end, the listener can get a fuller experience of the picture, instead of me throwing a thousand words at them to describe the picture. I'm hoping from now on I'll try to paint more pictures... and not write any more dissertations.

I Am Indeed A Girl Geek

Next week, I'll be heading out to Randolph, MA for Geek Girl Camp Boston to speak on How to Use Facebook for Business.

Geek Girl Camp is an unconference specifically for women who want to learn how to use different forms of technology for business.

I'll be speaking on something I know way too much about - Facebook. Specifically, how to use Facebook to market your business. That includes: an introduction to Facebook, how to create a business presence, how to market your business on Facebook, and what and how to measure your Facebook marketing efforts. I'll also be speaking with Rebecca Corliss on the basics of inbound marketing. (Also my coworker Karen "Katie Couric in training" Rubin will be speaking at the event too. We're going to have quite the crew there.)

Got a specific question about using Facebook for your business? Leave a comment below. I'm happy to answer all sorts of questions, either in the presentation (which we'll hopefully record) or on my blog. And if you're going to be at Geek Girl Camp, be sure to find me and say hi! Will be nice to meet some blogging / social media friends.

P.S. Hear about all the changes coming to Facebook Business Pages? If you want to hear more, I blogged about them over on the HubSpot blog.

"THIS IS NOT SPAM" Um, Yes, It Is.

If your message says "THIS IS NOT SPAM" then yes, yes it is.

I just got my first purely spam Facebook message that literally began with "THIS IS NOT SPAM". I'm not a big eye-roller, but I can't help but roll my eyes at this.

As I've gotten more active in the social media world (blame Twitter), I've been getting more and more requests to connect (mostly on Facebook, a few on LinkedIn) from people that I don't actually know. I don't recognize their names or their photos or can't figure out how we're possibly connected. I've struggled a lot with figuring out how to respond - accept the friend request? Let it sit in pending forever? Ignore it and limit my profile only to my close friends?

I haven't quite figured out for myself what I'll do in these cases yet, except for the case of getting a purely spammy request. Yep, in that case I just blog about how spammy social media can get.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do... Leaving Facebook For Twitter

I'm not one of the people who was outraged by Facebook's redesign, but I can't help but love this video.

Holy Cow! Facebook Enables Comments on Mini Feed

Why do I feel like I am one of few who are really excited about Facebook enabling comments on mini feed items? The second I found out, (not only did I twitter about it, but also) I turned around and shared the exciting news with a couple coworkers. My exclamation was met with some mild accord.

Overall it seems like my excitement level is a bit above the average in the social mediasphere right now. Maybe my fellow social mediaphiles think this is just old news (latching on to the functionality of FriendFeed and Plurk) or maybe they think it won't have any significant impact.

 

Well, here's why I think this is actually really interesting (albeit obvious):

Obviously, this is a natural move. Social media is all about engaging with people and enabling a bi-directional conversation as this does, so it makes sense, of course. But here's the difference between FriendFeed/Plurk/the plethora of other new social media / conversation tools vs. Facebook - Facebook's user base. DUH, right? Well the thing about Facebook's user base is that (1) it's huge, and (2) it includes a lot of people who, I would say, probably don't consider themselves "social media types".

(1) Facebook's huge. So what? Well, that means theres 1000x the number of conversations going on and way more people to interact with. I myself have many more connections on Facebook than I do on any other social networking site. This in itself encourages me to participate. It's not so much the technology but my connections that play a key role here.

(2) Crazy girl, Facebook is a social networking site, what do you mean its users aren't "social media types"? I consider myself a social media newbie (despite my years blogging, on facebook, and all the other sites I tried out) and a lot of my friends - though we grew up in this age of new media - are even less engaged in the social media world (what? blogs?), but they are on Facebook. I think for a lot of these types, sites like FriendFeed and Plurk are (not only unknown to many but also) overwhelming. With Facebook, we've been there from the beginning (my school's network was added in 2004 when I was a college sophmore and I immediately signed up). We're already comfortable with the technology and to add on this new level of engagement is much more manageable and natural than, say, signing up for Plurk and trying to connect with new people.

So I think, in this way, Facebook will continue to engage its user base and also draw in people who otherwise don't engage in social media much. Well, I guess we'll see. Hey, this could very possibly flop too.

Oh - and one last note: Facebook needs to allow the commenting straight from the homepage / news feed page. That's what everyone sees when they first log in, and you shouldn't have to click into someone's profile to leave a comment on the feed item you see right there. Let's really facilitate some conversation here.

Facebook to the Rescue

A couple months ago I was out in Davis Square in Somerville celebrating my friend's 23rd birthday. We had a great time bar-hopping and having some tasty Mexican food. Then, the next day my friend gets this message from a Tufts student on Facebook:

"Hey, I found a driver's license and blood donation card with your name on it and I'm wondering if you lost them on the T."

My friend had indeed dropped them at the T. Of course she messages back with her address and a million thanks.  And she gets her license in the mail the next day. Now that's what I call the power of social networks ;)

*This is clearly awesome enough to get published in the Boston Globe - "Friendly Facebook"