Social Media Tips and How-To's for Beginners

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I stumbled on this excellent video today on YouTube that compares the Punk Rock movement of the 1970s with the current social media revolution going on around us.

What do you think? Is social media like punk rock (or something else)?

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Read my full commentary on DaniWeb.

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You can’t talk about social media this week without mentioning the on-going Facebook privacy brouhaha as I wrote yesterday in Reactions to Facebook Privacy Changes Vary.

But without a doubt, my favorite social media story this week came from the GOP, which tried its hand at social media and got a bit more than they bargained for when they opened up a social site to decide on their Fall Congressional campaign agenda.

Not far behind was Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, who posted a poll on her blog asking who was dumber: her or a critical viewer who wrote her to tell her how dumb *she* was. Turns out most people thought Greta was dumber by a large margin.

Sometimes that Internet can be a harsh mistress. And with that, this week’s five links in social media:

• Republican’s new web site not exactly what they hoped it would be by Dana Milibank on Washington Post.
• Fox News Anchor Asks the Internet: Am I dumb? on Gawker.com
• Revenge of the Facebook Users by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on ITWorld.
• How is being new to Twitter different in 2010 by Shannon Paul on her Very Official Blog.
• Why BP Should Embrace the Fake BP Twitter Account by Lisa Barone on Outspoken Media Blog.

Photo by eliztesch on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.

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Facebook announced the long-awaited privacy setting changes yesterday and will be rolling them out to users over the coming weeks. The biggest news is that they have been simplified (supposedly) and put on one page. That should help. It was a bother moving from page to page to set individual settings, but are these changes really meaningful?

It depends who you ask.

• Privacy International took Facebook to task in a post accusing the company of basically papering over a large problem.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy rights group was a bit kinder, saying Facebook made a good start, but there’s still more work to be done.
• Gawker thinks Facebook CEO is being more than disingenuous about the company’s privacy concerns  in the post Facebook CEO is Sorry You’re So Dumb.
• For a good overview of the changes, see 10 Things You should know about Facebook’s Privacy Changes on All Facebook and Facebook Announces New Privacy Features on Mashable.

Finally, Facebook is hoping this whole privacy conversation will go away now that they’ve made these changes, but they seem to completely underestimate the undercurrent of anger and frustration in their user base. The fact is that people should control their own data. Yes, it’s all about sharing as Zuckerberg pointed out recently, but it should be up to individuals to decide what they want to share and with whom they want to share it.

Facebook officials seem to think that just because their numbers are still growing, they have nothing to worry about, but I think they’re dead wrong. I believe that they are vulnerable to new, more open social options that respect a user’s privacy and that their business model could be more fragile than their own arrogance and myopia let them believe.

Let’s close with this video from Mashable where Facebook officials speak for themselves. I think their attitude speaks volumes. And by the way, I don’t think this is the end of the privacy conversation. In fact, I think it’s just beginning and Facebook ain’t seen nothing yet.

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This video explains why the founders of Diaspora are fed up with Facebook. They have reasons much like the rest of us. They are fed up with the idea that Facebook controls your data when they believe (and I agree), your data should belong to you and you should have complete control over it.

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Welcome back to another Friday 5. We’ve seen FourSquare mature a bit this week and Facebook continue to take hits. A group of NYU students took direct aim at the social media giant by trying to establish an open source social media platform that actually respects your privacy and security. Imagine that. As though, they needed more fuel for their trek, Mashable reported this morning that Facebook and others were caught selling user data (actual user data) to advertising platforms.

With all that as a social media backdrop, let’s take a look this week’s five links in social media:

• Three Training Tips to Become a Better Blogger by James Chartrand on Copyblogger
• Twitter for iPhone Now Live in the App Store by Christina Warren on Mashable
• Why we need to kill “social media” by Rob Key on iMediaConnection.com
• Facebook Apologists Miss the Point: Facebook Isn’t the Future by Stowe Boyd on StoweBoyd.com.
• And finally, something new this week, a link to a social tool. This week, I recommend Micropoll.com, which lets you create a poll and embed it in your blog or web site. It’s simple to use and it’s free.

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Foursquare and Starbucks announced a joint venture this week that could change the way we think about these geolocation services. We’ve all seen announcements on Twitter and Facebook from Foursquare and Gowalla (among others) about where our friends are right now. To be honest, I’ve found most of these announcements to be boring wastes of bandwidth as I wrote in Foursquare: I Really Don’t Care Where You Are.

But my snarkiness aside, I do see the commercial value of trusted friends’ recommendations. If my friend eats at a certain establishment, perhaps I will too. Starbucks this week raised the geolocation stakes when it announced a deal with Foursquare to reward people who report frequently from Starbucks. For those who aren’t familiar with Foursquare, it’s set up like a game, so the people who report most often from a given location are given “Mayor” status.

The Foursquare-Starbucks deal gives Mayors a special reward they can unlock. It’s actually a great way for businesses to reward those customers who frequent their businesses most often. I could see smaller rewards for non-Mayors who report their location as well.

While the current implementation can be annoying, this kind of deal between Starbucks and Foursquare could represent the future of the business model, and it could be something we all care more about if it involves saving money at places we frequent anyway.

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I came across a tool from an organization called reclaimprivacy.org that checks your Facebook privacy settings and indicates when you have some settings that may require adjusting.

Follow these steps to retrieve and run this tool on Facebook:

1. Go to the reclaimprivacy.org web site and drag the Scan for Privacy tool to your Bookmarks bar in your browser.
2. Open Facebook and click the Scan for Privacy button you retrieved in Step 1.
3. Review the results and check the settings as indicated.

It’s a nice little tool as far as it goes. It doesn’t state which setting specifically is wrong or what you should do to fix it, but it does point you at the general settings you should be adjusting. It’s also worth noting, it gave me an error because I have my Adding Friends setting set to Everyone, meaning anyone can add me as a friend then I can accept or reject it, which seems reasonable to me.

No tool is perfect, and this one isn’t either, but it does give you a general starting point for checking the privacy settings in Facebook and I encourage everyone to run it and learn what you can from it.

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