Posts Tagged ‘FaceBook’

Like many folks over the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the whole Facebook privacy kerfuffle. There’s been plenty of buzz on the social networking sites about what many perceive to be a creepy privacy policy. TechCrunch and Mashable have been all over the story and Mark Zuckerberg himself has gotten into the mix with a piece in the Washington Post today which should help to dispel some of the negativity that arose from this article that came out last week.

Much ink is being spilled on this as well in the traditional media. The Wall Street Journal ran two articles last week in the B section and the always thoughtful Peggy Noonan also opined in her Saturday column about privacy and exhibitionism and what it means to us as not just individuals, but rather as Human Beings (capitalization intentional). I also got into it on my Facebook page, partly because all of the talk really made me think and partly because I wanted to see what others thought. I did consider dropping my Facebook account, but opted instead to scale back on what I share. Now, I was not a huge sharer, some favorite bands and books, marital status, company name, city, some hobbies. The wave of negativity spooked me a bit, I must admit, but feel much better for having locked down my account some more. Facebook is a valuable tool as my colleague Greg Wood reminded me and it’s an easy place to connect and re-connect to people who are friends and also resources who are invaluable in my line of work.

Over the past week, the reactions of Facebookers, and others in the online-space have been very interesting and compelled Facebook to both adapt and clarify their policies. Facebook has had some mis-steps over the past year, but they are a relatively young company in a very fluid market. They seem to test and learn as they push the boundaries and expand the usability and functionality of the platform. Facebook, like any business today seems to be fairly responsive to user concerns (the negativity to the last functionality upgrade notwithstanding) and they adjust course to respond to the concerns of their users. There is too much at stake not to. The danger, as I see it, and one that Gordon Crovits mentions in his piece in Monday’s WSJ (5/24/10), is that this should not be taken as an opportunity by the political class to protect us from big, bad, Mark Zuckerberg.

These new tools come with responsibilities for users too. If you want to publish the most intimate details of your life in a public sphere, then have at it; but, be prepared for the negative consequences. Understand that you control your information, and that you can and should share it in a way that makes sense to yourself, jibes with your values, and helps you achieve your goals for using the social space (social media goals apply to both individuals and corporations). It seems far better to me to allow people and companies to figure this out together (as is happening now with Facebook) than let the government begin dictating terms and conditions to us. If we cede ground to the government in this discussion, and let them swoop in and “save” us, the web in general, and social sites in particular will become very different places. You can count on that.

Image via CrunchBase

Posterous is my new favorite social media tool. While it will never replace Twitter as my platform of choice for communicating and networking,  it has made it super simple to post content to various social media outposts. To do so, I send an email to a Posterous email address, and, to paraphrase the site, they “take care of the rest.” Typically, I tend not to post the same thing to the same places — my Twitter updates are different from my FaceBook updates and my blog posts are typically unrelated to either of those things. However, when I’m out and about I do like to snap mobile shots and send them to my blog, or to Flickr, or occasionally to TwitPic.

When we took our road trip through the American South in April, I posted frequently to Twitter and Flickr and my fun blog. It was a fairly laborious process as I would have to access three different apps from my hand held to place my content on these various outlets. Needless to say, I didn’t post as much as I could have to multiple sites, opting instead for one, usually Twitter. Had I had Posterous, I could have posted all of my shots, and observations from the road to three, or more places, all at once. When I talk to my clients about social media strategies and tactics I always mention Posterous when I notice them calculating the time it will take to update their various outposts.

To get started, set up a Posterous account at posterous.com. Associate your various social media accounts with this account. Start emailing Posterous and watch your content magically appear across your social media outposts. It is truly that easy. The hardest part about set-up is remembering your log-ins for your various social sites. If you don’t want to take the blanket approach, then you can email one specific community (facebook at posterous dot com, say) and your post will appear only there — because, let’s face it not everything you post needs to go on each site, and in some cases should not, depending on your audience.

Your Posterous site is fully RSS enabled, and you can subscribe to others sites and see who subscribes to yours. There are analytics included so you can see views, visits and favorites, and all posts are comment-able. The layout is clean. Multiple image attachments on an email appear neatly above the image and permit easy navigation through the photo string. The Posterous API is open so there is no telling where the user base will take it.

Posterous is clean and nimble, simple to use and a great tool in any organization’s social media toolkit. It’s a great way to extend a client’s footprint online and increase links to their site as well as their social media sites. Posterous’s use of email, the grand-daddy of Internet communication technologies, makes it an ideal tool for the social media skeptic, and it can help to maximize the time a client, or their staff spends on day-to-day social media efforts.

Please check out my Postersous site, if you have a moment, and open your own while you’re there.*

*I’m not paid by Posterous, just a big, big fan who really does recommend it to my clients.