fbooklookin at Facebook Spam

It seems that more and more spam is streaming through Facebook these days. The latest spam appearing on Facebook is a post saying that your profile picture is featured on fbooklookin. Tempting to check out the site? Yes. A pretty obvious spam site? Definitely.

I'm constantly getting nervous that Facebook might one day up like MySpace, a site littered with spam. Here is to hoping that Facebook will step up its game with regard to spammers and viruses.

This Tweet is Personal

Large businesses are not personal by nature. The larger the corporation, the harder it is to be personal. On the other hand, Mom & Pop shops are highly personal. You know the owners, who are often very kind and friendly people.

The average customer desires a personal connection with companies they shop at. This largely explains the revolt against WalMart. They are seen as a massive corporation that is only in the business of making a profit. If customers didn't care about the personal shopping experience, small towns would welcome stores like WalMart who sell products at much cheaper prices than smaller Mom & Pop stores.

Twitter is the personal connection tool that large corporations have been waiting for. They can show that they actually care. They can reach out directly to the customer. Comcast is a great example of putting personality behind a corporation.



What is stopping most companies from embracing customers and starting up a dialogue with them?

Fear.

Companies fear a backlash. They fear one poorly worded tweet being retweeted and causing an uproar. The latest example with Motrin is not reason to avoid social media, but more so a reason why you need to know your audience. Just because one company in your industry fails, doesn't mean your company will. The same applies to social media. Just because one company screws up, doesn't mean yours will.

The day that a company loses control of its brand online, is the day the company will begin to build value in the eye of the consumer.

I welcome any company that joins Twitter, as long as they use it to start conversations and not shout advertisements.

Ambiguity Answered: Top 5 Social Media Measurement Tools

Percolating oneself on every social network seems to be the common strategy for practitioners wanting to stay ahead of new media competitors. Though, if you spend your time fragmenting, you’re going to miss out on the thing that matters most to landing online business: social media measurement tools.

An ambiguous area to say the least, social media measurement is something not even the experts have been able to completely understand, but companies are trying. Here are the top 5 social media measurement tools to add to your proposal:

• Trackur Similar to Google Alerts in terms of pop-up value, the site also allows you the ability to filter out keywords that don’t belong in your search. You can add as many filters as you like. Comparable to Google Reader with its results userface, Trackur features share and RSS feed subscription. Trackur’s biggest advantage: highly specific, though search results can take 2-3 minutes.
  

• Compete.com A must-have for monitoring the popularity of one Web site over another, Compete generates web traffic and indicates visitor frequency daily and annually. For example, searching perezhilton vs. techcrunch reveals, while Websites are entirely dissimilar, they maintain similar web traffic.
  

• Vitrue SMI Vitrue asks the question, “How social is your advertising?” A quick comparison search will reveal not only the popularity of the subject or phrase, but where it’s most likely discussed, such as forums, microblogs, blogs, and video-sharing. This tool was highly impressive when it came to projection monitoring of the 2008 Presidential Election.

• Forrester Research- Social Technographics Tool This free and fast tool will provide you insight into where your client should focus their audience. After filtering gender, age, and country—the result is an analysis on whether or not you should advise set up on blogs, discussion boards, or microsites.
  

• Search.twitter.com Don’t underestimate the power of search on a microblog. Extremely fast turnaround, search.twitter.com allows you to directly reach out to your consumers after they tweet about bad or exemplary services and products.
  

FOR-EV-ER

We've been talking a lot lately about your online fingerprints. The things you do, say, participate in, post, and bookmark will all go on your permanent record and cannot be undone. There is little opportunity to take back what you have done or say you were "just kidding."

Case in point - NME posted some interesting news this morning about Coldplay, quoting a Chris Martin discussion in which he mentioned a possible band breakup in the next couple of years. Although they have already taken the news down (and replaced with a blank page), the information is already all over the internet.

Even if you try very hard to reverse an online action, it can be hard to undo. Before you push "send, "publish," "post," or "save," make sure that you would want your grandkids (or future employers) to see it.