So what do you think? Do you “Like” this new feature or do you think it adds even more confusion to Facebook?

Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?

The results:

Prohibited completely: 54%
Permitted for business purposes only: 19%
Permitted for limited personal use: 16%
Permitted for any type of personal use: 10%
Don’t know/no answer: 1%

Not Understood?

It’s no surprise to me that so many companies are still hesitant to venture into the world of social media. After all, these technologies aren’t fully understood by many of today’s executives. But these new communication mediums cannot be ignored! A fundamental shift has occurred in the way we communicate, share ideas and engage one another. In order to be competitive, companies must become educated and willing to explore the benefits of social media.

Lost Productivity?

Many employers are worried that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other sites divert employee attention away from the task at hand, and that employees spend time on personal communication. Of course they do to an extent. However, these sites can also become extremely effective customer engagement, retention, and sales tools. My opinion is that these sites don’t cause any more employee distraction than cell phones, email, instant messaging, surfing the web, water cooler chats, and the TV in the break room – all of which are allowed in most workplaces.

Losing Control?

Perhaps the issue is that executives are worried about employees sharing confidential information in the social space. If that is the case, blocking these sites at work doesn’t accomplish anything. Reality is, most employees are using these technologies anyway. Whether it is at home on their own time or at work on a cell phone, an ever increasing percentage of people are logging onto social networking sites and sharing all sorts of content (what they like, what they don’t like, what they are pissed off about, what they are happy about, who said what to who, who did what to who, what they are working on, what they are going to do, and on and on). If an employee’s interaction on social networking sites cannot be controlled when they are away from work, why bother trying to control them while they are at work? The best approach is to embrace social media, become educated, and help your employees understand what is and isn’t appropriate use.

Corporations have to understand that the use of social media isn’t something that might happen. It IS happening! Executives can no longer afford to ignore this fundamental shift in the way we communicate. To do so only hurts the company’s opportunity to engage customers and compete in the global economy.

Which side of the fence are you on? Should social media be banned in the workplace, or should companies embrace and promote the use of social media?

This article was originally posted on cityshift.org. Shift is a New Media Conference coming to Greenville, NC on May 27th & 28th, 2010.

Shift Conference is a free event designed to educate businesses and business owners in the use new media for cultural and economic influence. This event will benefit the growing creative economy in Eastern North Carolina. Shift will feature training and resources to take back with you, and will offer a great opportunity to network with other professionals from our region.

For more information, to register, to volunteer, or to become a sponsor, please visit the Shift Conference website at http://www.cityshift.org.

Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter. These social media sites and many others have gained increasing popularity over the past few years. Are you exploring these tools and learning how to effectively utilize them to connect with your customers in new ways? Perhaps you have been reluctant to jump into this space. Newsflash – Social media is not a fad! Just ask one of the more than 400 million users of Facebook, or one of the 75 million plus users on Twitter.

You must go where your customers are

Ten years ago, you would never think about not being listed in the yellow pages if you owned a business. Why? Because that is where people were going to look for you. These days, more and more people are turning to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others to find you and your company. Gone are the days of thumbing through your local index to find services and local businesses. When is the last time you even remember looking at a phone book? If you are like me, I can’t tell you where to find one in my house – we simply don’t need it. Every service and every product that I want can be found on the Internet, at my convenience, using my laptop or my mobile phone. Wait, will I find your business there? Will I find your competitor there?

When they find you, what will they see?

Don’t think that you aren’t in these social spaces already. Even if you haven’t made an effort to create a Facebook Fan Page, start tweeting, or post a video on YouTube about your products and services, your customers and critics may have. Are they talking about you? If so, what are they saying? If you can’t answer these two questions, I encourage you to stop reading this article right now, and spend the next hour or two combing those sites to find out. You may already have a thriving fan community that your company could tap into. Then again, you might have a PR nightmare on your hands. Not knowing should scare the crap out of you.

You cannot afford to do nothing

Regardless of whether you find yourself or your company in either position, thriving community or PR nightmare, what message are you sending by not participating in these conversations? The opportunity here cannot be ignored. Think about this. If you knew that 150 of your best customers (those that love you and spend money with you frequently) were all going to be in one place, ready to hear from you, would you turn down the chance to connect with them? On the other hand, if one of your best customers was suddenly upset with you and decided to share that frustration with the entire world, how can you afford to not engage and attempt to make them happy again?

The time is now

Have you been reluctant to jump into social media? Perhaps you are worried about losing control. Maybe you don’t know enough about social media, or you are even intimidated by it. If you aren’t willing to take on the challenge of educating yourself and experimenting with these rapidly evolving tools, you are effectively planning to lose. The best advice I can give you about social media is to explore. You will never understand something that you aren’t willing to play with, and you can be assured that your competition is already or will soon be doing this. By the way, it’s free! The only thing you have to invest is your time. So go ahead, do some research and start exploring social media today. Either catch up, or you and your business will be left behind.

Sure, the relish squeeze bottle was invented for convenience. After all, no one wants to spend their day chasing little chopped up pieces of pickle around a jar with a knife. I’m sure the pickle companies of the world were hoping to capitalize on the success of the Heinz “EZ squirt” ketchup bottle that debuted a few years earlier. But, they forgot one important thing. Just because it works for one product or company doesn’t mean it will work for your product or company.

Social media can be the same way. Everyone is so eager to jump on the bandwagon and create a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. What they don’t realize is that without proper planning you are doomed to failure. What works for one company may not work for yours. You need to think about what you are trying to accomplish with your venture into social media. What are your goals? What sort of content will you share? How do you plan on engaging your customers? What will you do to attract fans to your page? How will you handle negative comments? It is very important to think about these things before you go public with your social media campaign.

Get your stakeholders involved and be prepared to spend some time planning before you send that first tweet or invite all those folks to your fan page. The old saying, “Poor planning leads to poor performance”, is definitely true when it comes to social media. Your plan should provide a steady, concerted effort to your campaign so you don’t have to try to overcompensate later. You don’t want your social media campaign to turn into a relish explosion!

The problem

How am I supposed to help my friends and peers with a change in design that I can’t even experience for myself? Facebook left me out in the cold on this one. I was prepared to do screenshots and blog about the new changes, share some helpful tips for use of the new design, etc. I wonder how many of you wanted to do the same thing?

So here is my idea…

From now on, I think Facebook should give people an opportunity to opt-in to a new design a week or two before it comes out so that people like me can be prepared to help through the transition. This would make more sense to me than rolling it to 80 million people at random.

What are your thoughts?

Steve Jobs said that the iPad will be ready to ship within 60 days, and prices will range between $499 and $829. I’m not declaring that no one will buy this thing. I’m sure many people will, especially the hardcore MacHeads. It looks cool, but will buyers be disappointed? In my opinion, there are several drawbacks.

1. No camera

I can’t believe Apple didn’t include a camera on the iPad. So, let me get this straight. To get pictures onto my tablet, I will have to take them with a digital camera, download them to my desktop and then upload them to my iPad? What if I want to change my Facebook profile picture or Skype with a friend. Oh, and how about the apps that require a camera for use? Maybe Apple should block us from being able to download them to the iPad or some people will be sadly disappointed. I can imagine the error now, “I’m sorry, this application does not support devices without a camera.” Even my old Motorola phone had a camera.

2. The AT&T Blues

There will be models of the iPad that support 3G, but AT&T has been selected as the carrier. I guess Apple hasn’t learned anything from all the problems they’ve had with supporting iPhones. Even more disheartening is that AT&T doesn’t offer 3G support anywhere in my area, so it’s pointless for me to get the 3G model. That means I’m still stuck with Wifi only access, which my laptop already provides.

3. No Flash?

How is the iPad going to deliver “the best web experience you’ve ever had” without flash support? Sure, the screen is bigger so that I can see the whole page as it was meant to be displayed, but what about rich media?

4. No Multitasking?

And you expect the tablet to be a replacement for a netbook? Seriously, this is 2010. People expect to be able to run multiple applications at a time. I think this is a major oversight on Apple’s part.

5. Awkward Touch Keyboard

Well, well, the touch keyboard appears to be a larger version of the one on the iPhone. To be honest with you, I think this thing is going to be difficult to type on.

6. Where is HDMI output?

iPad is supposed to be the coolest gadget we’ve ever seen geared towards entertainment, but don’t plan on plugging it into your TV. Yeh, you can stream HD videos on your iPad, but you will be watching them on a 10 inch screen!

7. Screen ratio of 4:3

I saw a video demo on this thing and realized right away that something wasn’t right. Don’t expect your widescreen movies to be up to par on the iPad.

The upshot

The iPad looks cool and I certainly think that the style and sleekness of it are to be admired as all Apple products are. However, I think today’s iPad announcement was a big let down. After all the hype and excitement that has been building for weeks, it turns out that the iPad is nothing more than an oversized version of the iPhone. I do think that Amazon should be very concerned about the Kindle becoming obsolete, but we will have to wait and see how much of a market share the iPad takes.

As for me, I’m still undecided. I think the iPad would offer a very interesting way to present website designs and other creative deliverables to potential clients and would look cool on my coffee table, but I’m not sure what else I would use it for.

What are your thoughts?

1. It’s free! That’s right, no startup costs or monthly fees. How many other opportunities can you think of to connect and communicate with your customers that are free? (Note: While fan pages are free to create, you should consider that it will take someone’s time and attention in your organization to properly manage the fan page)
2. Fan pages are publicly visible. This is good because it allows people that aren’t even members of Facebook to view your page. Google can index the page and include it in search results.
3. Fan pages offer stats. You can track metrics such as how many fans you have, age and gender, what country your fans are from, and how many likes, comments and wall posts your fans are contributing. This will help you determine what works and what doesn’t work with the page.
4. Gain access to your fan’s stream. Status updates posted to your fan page will show up your fan’s stream. You may be concerned that you are spamming your fans. Don’t worry, they expect it! They want to see your updates – that’s why they signed up.
5. Give them the opportunity to interact. Having a fan page provides a place for your fans to engage you and each other, building community. This could backfire if you don’t have a plan for dealing with complaints and negative comments, so be sure to think about that ahead of time.
6. You can advertise your fan page. You can spend a little money to have your fan page appear in Facebook ads that are targeted to your selected demographic.

These are a few of the benefits of having a Facebook fan page for your business or organization. What are some other reasons you can think of for having a fan page?

1. Produce an image file that is no larger than 328 x 84 and upload to the “images” directory on your server. If you don’t have an “images” folder, just create one and put this file in it.

2. Make a backup of the functions.php file that resides in your current theme directory in case something gets screwed up. The simplest way to do this is to copy the file to your local hard drive.

3. Copy and paste this code into the functions.php file that resides in your current theme directory.

function my_custom_login_logo() {
    echo '<style type="text/css">
        h1 a { background-image:url(/images/customlogofilename.png) !important; }
    </style>';
}

add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

4. Change “customlogofilename.png” to reflect the file name and type of your image and save the functions.php file.

You should now see your new custom logo on your Wordpress admin login page. If not, make sure that you have the correct location and file name for your new custom logo.

Find New People to Follow

Once or twice a week, you should go on a “find people to follow” mission. You can go about this by searching for keywords and sorting through the thousands of responses to see if anyone looks interesting to you, or you can use one of several tools out there to help you find users who are sharing the type of content you want. Just Tweet It is a directory of twitter users sorted by genre. Once you drill down to a category, you can browse and view users and read their bios to see if you might be interested in following them. Twollow and Twollo are two popular services that will auto-follow users that tweet keywords that you specify. One of my favorite ways to find interesting people is to see who my friends are following. Since you are interested in their tweets, it is likely that they will be following other people that interest you. Don’t forget about Follow Friday! Follow Friday is a weekly event on Twitter. Users from all over the world participate by listing other twitter users they recommend and including the hashtag #FollowFriday or #ff in their tweet. There is good chance you will be interested in who your friends recommend.

Join In Conversations

You should take any opportunity to interact with other users by answering a question, retweeting things that interest you, and offering assistance if you have the knowledge to help someone with a problem. On several occasions, I have responded to people asking for help with websites. I know that I have built long lasting relationships with these folks because I connected with them when they were in need. Don’t be shy! If you have the answer, share it and you will be rewarded. It is important to remember that you have knowledge that other people need. Twitter is about interacting and building relationships, not marketing or promoting yourself at every opportunity.

Respond to Messages and Thank People

You should think of Twitter as you would any other popular means of communication. If someone sends you a message that elicits a response, take the time to get in touch. This is no different than someone sending you an email or leaving you a voice mail. Also, don’t forget to thank people for answering your questions and retweeting your posts. This goes a long way in building relationships and it leaves folks with a positive feeling about you.

Twitter is growing in popularity on a daily basis; and it is becoming harder to stand out above the crowd. The best policy is to check twitter with at least the same frequency that you would check your email. Remember to constantly seek out new people to follow, be a part of the conversation, and take the time to respond to messages and thank people when appropriate.

I hope that you find some of these tips helpful. What other habits do you recommend for twitter success?