You probably know more about Facebook than you realize. Perhaps you even know more than you care to know. Seems these days information about Facebook can be found everywhere. The iconic “F” Follow us on Facebook may even feel like they’re following you. And, now with the thumbs-up “like” symbol vying for your attention every place you look—what’s a person to do?

For starters, you can brush up on the Facebook facts you might not have known before this fun infographic.  And here’s another new hot-off-the-internet story about how Time Magazine’s May 31 issue will hit newsstands with a cover and feature story about Facebook and how it’s redefining privacy.

What Facebook facts or trivia can you add to the conversation?

[Source: Online PhD Programs]

50 settings with more than 170 options, Facebook’s Privacy Policy is longer than the United States Constitution!  See the full size.

[Source: Online MBA for MashableMashable.com]

Recently, I had a conversation with a few colleagues about how they search and whether they ever click on a sponsored link. Even though I’ve never once clicked on one of the links on the right hand side of the google search results page, their answers surprised me. It was a unanimous, No! It got me thinking about the whole phenomenon of pay-per-click advertising, who uses it and for what.

I decided to pose the following question to a group of marketers on LinkedIn–to see if I’ve been missing something.

“When you do a Google Search, do you click on the sponsored links on the right-hand side of the page? -Sometimes, never, always Why? Do you click differently personally vs. professionally?”

Here’s some of their comments below:

1. “Have to admit I never even look at the sponsored ads on the right hand side. They don’t catch my attention and I never think to even read them. if what I’m looking for isn’t in the first few search results I’ll tend to try a different search string, but I’ll never glance over to the ads. maybe that’s ad blindness caused by excessive web use!”

2. “Sometimes, if the description seems directly applicable to what I’m looking for.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Social media can have an impact on health care organizations, whether the organization has proactive programs or passively chooses to ignore it. By doing nothing, hospitals are at more legal risk because no clear guidelines articulate how staff should participate in social communities, how doctors share medical advice on blogs and where patients get medical information.

Andrew Cohen of Forum One, recently wrote about the session he attended at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, which identified legal issues as the top concerns of hospital administrators. Second to this is “lack of comfort with social media by administrators as well as staff…”

With patients helping themselves to information on websites that may or may not be good information, hospitals and other healthcare organizations like lifecare facilities have an opportunity to help guide patients and their families to good information and support.

In fact, every department needs to consider how social media effects them including human resources, legal, marketing, IT, patient services, and each and every medical specialty.   In 2009, we met with many of the SVPs  at a major teaching hospital north of Boston, Lahey Clinic, to give them a sense of what they need to think about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seven things to stop doing on Facebook via Consumer Reports, June 2010 issue:

1. Using a weak password
2. Leaving your full birth date in your profile
3. Overlooking useful privacy controls
4. Posting your child’s name in a caption
5. Mentioning you’ll be away from home
6. Letting search engines find you
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised

What else do you do to protect your privacy?

Also of interest:
Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
How To: Disable Facebook’s Instant Personalization” [Privacy]

Check-out our Podcast Interview with Author, Phil Simon

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear someone talk about the challenge of keeping up with technology. Most of the time it’s an individual talking about things like new mobile phones, iphone apps, google docs, search engines–you get the picture. But think about how difficult it must be for CIO’s and people working in corporate Information Technology departments; people who are responsible for choosing systems and applications and having to make decisions on where and how to spend their IT dollars.

This is why people like Phil Simon are so important. Simon is the author of a new book, The Next Wave of Technologies: Opportunities in Chaos, who collaborated with a network of experts to write about a wide spectrum of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.The book demystifies topics you may have thought were hands-off to you: SaaS (software as a service), enterprise search and retrieval (ESR), service-oriented architecture (SOA). The book also covers topics which may feel more mainstream at this point such as cloud computing, mobile technologies, and social networking.

The Next Wave of Technologies is a must-read for IT professionals who are scrambling to keep up with the implications of new technologies and a book for their colleagues who need to interface with them. Students and consulting firms will also benefit from reading the book. Simon writes, “…it does not provide all of the answers to any one technology, but summarizes the questions that readers should be asking themselves.”

Simon concludes, “In the end, no one has a crystal ball predicting how any technology will ultimately be used and by whom. Even the experts in this very book cannot foresee with any degree of certainty where we are going, much less how we are going to get there. In five years, any one of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies in this book may have already fizzled. We may look back at any one of them and say, “What were we thinking?…It will be a bumpy but exciting ride with magnificent rewards at the end for those able to find opportunity in chaos.”

One thing is clear, we can’t bury our head in the sand until the next wave of technologies settle. All of us who want to stay current and competitive need to have a good picture of the choices out there today and the effects they will have on the ways we communicate professionally and personally.

* DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION Special thanks to John Wiley & Sons for providing a review copy of The Next Wave of  Technologies for this blog post. Wiley books are available at your local bookstore or by calling 1-800-225-5945.

An important new report from Web Analytics Demystified and Altimeter Group with four objectives that serve as a foundation for effectively measuring social marketing: foster dialog, promote advocacy, facilitate support and spur innovation. Read the full report.

On top of everything else, Facebook thinks about the linguistical ramifications of the words it chooses. Yesterday you may have been a “fan” of a page, but today you “like” it. According to Facebook, to like something is lightweight in comparison to coming right out and saying you’re a fan.

I can’t say that I took particular issue with fanning a company, product or brand. To me it’s more about winning me over, doing something which stands out—deserves recognition and acknowledgement.

We have lots of choices today about where we can take our business: fly a particular airline, shop at which local supermarket, buy a certain brand automobile. The list goes on and on. Everyday we’re faced with choices. This brand over that brand. That company over this company. Bottom-line, the companies who win our business need to do something to earn it and keep it.

Will you think differently about which Facebook pages you like?

Have been experimenting with Hootsuite. Set-up tabs for monitoring & managing twitter accounts, facebook pages and linkedin. One of the greatest features is the ability to set-up twitter keyword searches and stream them as shown below in embedded column from hootsuite.

Are you using Hootsuite? What’s been useful for you?