Facebook Is Changing Business, Advertising, Language…
Click Me To Follow MKCREATIVE On Facebook
We wind up our week-long survey of Facebook with a look at how it can be used as a business tool, and how people are using it as such. Even if you do not yet have a Facebook site, the impact of the technology on our language is unmistakable: ‘Friend’ has become a verb. The ‘Like’ button has found its way throughout the internet. Posting or tagging someone’s wall no longer has any relevance to spray paint or graffiti… Certainly Facebook has changed the ways companies and nonprofits reach out to their customers and constituents. If your organization has set up an account, or if your organization was convinced to do so by yesterday’s posting, then you will want to see how to disseminate your site and to see how it is being received. Moreover, you want to be ready to take on the changes that social media have ushered in over the last few years, and – more importantly – the changes that are still to come.
Popularity: 3% | Category Community, Marketing, Media Review, Technology, Technology for Education, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
#HowTo: Setting Up Various Facebook Pages – Know The Types!
By the summer of 2009, Facebook came with a few new profiles: personal pages, community pages, and public profiles. The three are distinct, and even within the public profiles, one has a number of choices about the kind of public profile one wishes to establish. There were some issues (surprise!) when the features were first added, but by now many of the kinks have been smoothed out. A little research before you start clicking can go a long way though, because if you start your page in a ‘wrong’ category, all you can do is delete that page and start over, an unpleasant prospect. But please read on and hopefully we can clarify some of the jargon.
Popularity: 87% | Category Community, Marketing, Media Review, Nonprofit, Technology, Technology for Education, Web and Print | | 1 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner
The Keyword is “Social” – The Medium is Just the Means
From the study by Boyd and Ellison
We continue our week-long series on Facebook with a brief look at what ‘social media’ means. We make no claims of thoroughness in but one blog post. Indeed, some have taken entire academic semesters to explore the field. What we hope to present here are some common sense approaches to envisioning and contextualizing the social-media phenomenon of the last 4-5 years. In fact, a quick timeline will help put some perspective on the topic: The first widely accepted social-networking site was ‘SixDegrees.com,’ which was founded in 1998 and closed its site in 2000 during the Dot Com Bust. Though similar sites allowing the posting of personal profiles and the searching and liking of others via one’s profile percolated up in the intervening 2-3 years, it was only in 2003 that services like Last.FM, LinkedIn.com, and MySpace.com took off and the so-called ‘Social Media Revolution’ took off. Twitter was still three years away at that time! In other words, we are all new to this medium, and what sites will survive with which services is still an open question. (Time line taken from the scholarly study “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” by Danah M. Boyd, School of Information,University of California-Berkeley; and Nicole B. Ellison, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. Humans wrote on clay and stone for thousands of years before parchment replaced it for many centuries before paper replaced that some 700 years ago. Social media are still in the zygote stage, by comparison, which makes predicting their mature characteristics almost impossible.
Popularity: 1% | Category Community, Marketing, Media Review, News and Current Affairs, Technology, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
#Social Networks: Facebook Has 500 Million Users, Not 500 Million Fans
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday we saw some of the early history of Facebook and how that history might be pumped up by the movie “The Social Network,” due out this fall. The CEO and one of the inventors of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, seems comfortably nonplussed about the movie’s sexy spin on his and his friends’ efforts. But other concerns about the future surely do weigh on the young man who recently watched his website and company surpass 500 million subscribers. In fact, one of the awkward facts about Facebook is that it is by far the most used social-networking site, yet it is also the most griped about. Most recently: changes in privacy settings left users requiring to comb back through settings to opt out of new modes of sharing and even opt back out of what they had previously established as hidden information. Numerous consumer advocacy groups have cried ‘foul!’ and are challenging the practice. The movie might only sour further an already jaded relationship between users and the company.
Popularity: 4% | Category Marketing, Media Review, News and Current Affairs, Technology, Web and Print | | 2 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner
For The Week: Social Media Focus On Facebook
Are you one of the 500 million?
A purely alpha-betic writing established itself in the eastern Mediterranean about 3300 years ago, which marked a seminal shift away from ‘pre-history’ and towards documentation, institutional memory, and social media. We will not be tracing the evolution of writing from proto-Sinaic carvings or Phoenician tablets to Adobe’s Creative Suite 5, but we would like to look at the evolution (or what many might call a ‘revolution’) of the social-media behemoth that is Facebook. Though not the first social medium (Don’t forget Napster, especially in its pre/extra-legal days!), it has become the king of the hill with its profiles and searches and synergies with so many other networks (like Twitter). Facebook recently broke 500 million subscribers, and it brags that over 50% of those subscribers are on Facebook at any given time. Impressive numbers and a market teeming with customers, clients, donors, and ad-hoc NGOs.
But Facebook has had growing pains as well. Security and privacy concerns for its users, a plethora of competitors (admittedly, many bubble up and fall away at a speed surprising even in the age of the 24-hour news cycle), and even the possibility that the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zukerberg does not even own Facebook. All this week we shall be looking at the Facebook phenomenon, as well as offering some tips and caveats for those considering using the social network as part of their personal and/or professional lives. We begin our saga with the recent media frenzy concerning the Facebook biopic/movie, and the allegations of Facebook having been stolen and/or sold away by Zuckerberg.
Popularity: 1% | Category Community, Media Review, News and Current Affairs, Technology, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
#Opinion: Corporate Social Responsibility As A Cause For The Deepwater Horizon Disaster?
Are corporations practicing kindness that can kill? Is BP too devoted to appearing green and ‘beyond petroleum’ to get down to the tricky work of deepwater drilling for oil? What about Massey mining concern and the disaster from April? And perhaps Wall Street Banks were too focused on gender equality not to study the bubble they were pumping up? So suggests Chrystia Freeland in a column in The Washington Post this past week. Surely corporate leaders can walk and chew gum, no?
Popularity: 5% | Category Marketing, News and Current Affairs, Opinion | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
As National Recipe Changes, So Should Marketing of Housing
The metaphor of the American melting pot has been around since the foundation of the republic, though the great breadth of peoples coming to the US did not really expand until the end of the nineteenth century. But along with the melting pot have come vociferous and sometimes violent resistance to immigrants – especially toward specific groups at specific times (the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, the Italians in the early twentieth century, Mexicans today…). The fact of the matter is: the various groups who make up the population of the US have shifted and reshifted over the last couple of hundred years. They are mostly looking for a safe place to participate in the American experiment and raise their families. Therefore we ask if housing marketers and organizations are taking on board the population trends in their outreach.
Popularity: 1% | Category Affordable Housing, Marketing, National/International, Nonprofit | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
Social Media Offers Reception, Not Just Dissemination, of Ideas
Social Media Is For Reading, Too
How many of us, individuals, organizations, and small businesses, have shied away from getting involved with social media because we were not sure we had much to say? How many of us have quietly sublimated a sense of distrust of what we could contribute into an unwillingness to learn about social media? I have, for one. The open seas of social media can seem vast, rough, and uncharted (if not ‘unchartable’!), and from the seashore it can seem safer not wade in. Nevertheless, we have often posted on this blog ideas about how to dip a toe, then a leg, etc., into the ocean – get acclimated, then get writing with what you are comfortable sharing with a wide audience that can become wider still with some patience. But a recent blog posting from Neil Vidyarthi on SocialTimes.com cleverly points out that social media can, and should, be as much about reading/learning as it is about writing/teaching.
Popularity: 1% | Category Marketing, Media Review, Tweets, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
Perspectives: Don Akchin, Director of Don Akchin Strategic Communications
Don Akchin
Don Akchin, Charm City resident for twenty-five years (“I’m still a newcomer”), has turned his reporter’s training and love of writing into a successful enterprise of marketing mission-based and community-development groups like St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center, The Baltimore Collegetown Network, and the Bon Secours Spiritual Center. Beginning his professional career writing for The St.Petersburg Times newspaper, he still considers himself “a recovering journalist.” After leaving the paper in the mid-1970s to pursue a job with the 13-30 Corporation (which later became Whittle Communications), he worked with print magazines and made TV-news format videos for high-school and college kids. During his tenure at 13-30 Corporation, he realized that he was moving accidentally into marketing. Since 2006, he’s kept a lively and information blog, “The Accidental Marketer.”
“I started out as a writer and I am here to help [nonprofits] with communications. But along the way I realized that in fact I was talking about marketing. So to me it was ‘accidental.’ I think that many of the people in marketing positions in nonprofits are there ‘accidentally.’ They were promoted from being the assistant to the president or they were in HR but were called upon to do fourteen other things, and one of those was communications, or PR, or marketing.” He sees numerous intersections between writing, fund-raising, marketing, and communications. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to do this.” Marketing is about story-telling.”
Popularity: 1% | Category Interview, Marketing, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
#Fundraising: Don’t Forget The Nickels And Dimes of (Micro)Donations
These can add up to big support
We are all sensitive to the economic plight that faces our country and the world: the banking crash and bailout and the unemployment that has grown close to 10% and could linger for some time. The beating the economy has taken shows its bruises first-and-foremost on those bodies least equipped to handle it: the working poor, the ill, the disadvantaged, and the organizations trying to help them out. Donations, as we have often noted on the blog, have taken a real hit since late 2008 (even though the US remains the most generous nation on earth in this regard). Nonprofits and charities are often temped to seek out the biggest donors to help balance the books and keep the good work going. Though that strategy has many merits, we would encourage these groups to remember the microdonations that became part of the donor landscape about eighteen months ago and continues to make a positive impact for their recipients (and for the folks who can spare even a few dollars to their favorite causes).
Popularity: 2% | Category Grants and Funding, Marketing, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner
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