Banning Social Media for Teens? NOT a Good Idea.

In the stupidest idea of the week category we have the New Jersey principal who wants parents to join together and ban their kids from using social networking sites. He asserts that there is "absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None."

Please.

How about we ban them from using computers all together? Because computers are bad and there is absolutely, positively no reason for any kid to use them. I guess that's why my 6 year-old niece is already learning PowerPoint and most of the classrooms in my kids' school is equipped with Promethean boards.

Come on, people. Social networking is the way the world works now. It can help your kid get elected as student rep to the school board. They can use social media to get scholarship money. Social media offers many ways to help students get organized, get noticed by colleges--even make money for good grades.

Yes, being able to monitor your kids' use of social media means that you'll have to use Facebook and stay current on each and every crazy change they make. Yes, it means you need to be using it too so you can be a responsible guide for your kids and help them make good choices online and stay out of trouble. But isn't that what we all do as parents anyway? Of course it would be way easier to just ban your kids from using it--that way you could ignore the whole mess and keep your head buried in the sand until this social media "fad" passes....because it WILL pass, right?

Yeah, right.

You'd think a school principal would know better than anyone that "banning" teens from doing something just makes them want to do it all the more...and they WILL find ways to sneak around a ban. Isn't that pretty much the theme of adolescence?

Instead of banning it, here are just a few of many good resources for parents to help their kids use social networking sites safely and responsibly:

• Facebook's new Safety Center
• Net Cetera: Chatting With Kids About Being Online is a booklet written by the FTC
• ConnectSafely.org

What do you think--am I totally off base and banning is actually a good idea?

Yet Another Level of Facebook Sucking: Community Pages

As if there weren't already enough things to dislike about Facebook: the way Pages can't be unlinked from creators, the way it is making billions off your personal information...I'm not even going to continue because it could take all day. You get the point.

At any rate, back to "as if there weren't already enough things to dislike about Facebook"--enter yet another one: Community Pages. Today when you sign in to Facebook you'll get a Facebook-speak message about how your likes, dislikes, etc, are now PAGES. Even the ones that are words that make no sense as Pages--e.g. if you had answered "Depends" in the music category meaning, like, it depends on my mood...now there's a Community Page called Depends. Which, by the way, is then auto-populated with every instance of someone using the word "depends" in a status update. Nice. And super useful.

Naturally, the default is that your profile is now publicly tied to each and every Community Page that has been auto-generated with this ridiculous "enhancement." Don't want to link to any of these super-useful Pages? Well, hope you don't mind that your profile page will be blank if you choose to opt-out of this stellar new feature.

Oh, and your employer will thank you, too, if you fill in the "employer" section of your profile because by doing so you create a Community Page for your company! How did I find this out? Well, because I list my employer on my profile:

and just now realized that because of that, this new Community Page has been generated:

I did "help them get started" by sending them the url for our "official site"....which, as you can see, is displayed nowhere on the page.

Am I the only one who feels like they're on a free-fall down a rabbit hole with regard to these new Facebook changes? When will it end?

Your Life...As Depicted By Foursquare

I saw this tweet today by @eric_andersen: "Great point! "Foursquare can paint a very vivid picture of your life"--and had to laugh because I can't help but think this exact thing every time I use Foursquare. As in, my life, as depicted through my Foursquare activity, is exceedingly lame. Seriously--I mean, by the looks of my Foursquare activity you'd think I was an obese housewife who lives in the burbs (I'm the mayor of Dunkin' Donuts, McDonalds, 7-11, Rita's, Taco Bell/KFC, Sam's Club, T.J. Maxx, Homegoods, Rite Aid, CVS and Giant Food). With a drinking problem (I'm the mayor of Olney Beer & Fine Wine).

Well, actually, now that I type that out I realize that aside from the obese part and the drinking problem part (really!), I am a mom who lives in the burbs (albeit not a housewife) so it's a pretty accurate depiction of my life. Sigh.

I'm old enough to be ok with that, but if I were one to be concerned with my personal brand, the post @eric_andersen was tweeting about makes some good points. As in, if I cared more about my personal brand maybe I'd skip checking in at...well, basically all the places I check in.

She also makes some good points about HR stuff like don't call in sick then later check in at a movie theater, and you also might want to watch those week-night check-ins at bars. And be mindful of your privacy settings and how much you share on Twitter and Facebook.

The bottom line is no matter how tightly you lock-down your Foursquare profile--limit your friends to only people you know, don't publish to Twitter or Facebook--you're still putting a lot of information about yourself out there, both from a personal privacy standpoint and a personal brand standpoint. Be careful, um-kay?

The View from 20,000 Fans (I Refuse to Say Likers)

For those of you who don't already know it, I'm the online community & social media manager for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). I don't usually write about stuff specific to ASHA but reaching 20,000 fans (like I said in the title, I cannot bring myself to say "likers") on Facebook feels blog-worthy, so I thought I'd share some stuff I've learned on the way.

We started the Page in October of 2009 with no expectations and no real plan. We advertised the page to members in a minimal way--it was more an experiment than anything. We didn't--and still don't--feature our Facebook Page on our website in any prominent way. We occasionally mention it in a print publication, but, again, not with a lot of fanfare--or even a direct url, for that matter. These low-brow promotion techniques are intentional. Our approach with Facebook has been not to shove it down members' throats; on the contrary, we set up an outpost on Facebook to meet those members and non-members who are on Facebook where they are and engage with them there. Let's face it--to many people, Facebook is still considered a stupid waste of time and some gentle nudges towards the community there have been met with less-than-enthusuastic responses from members.

Ok, here are some numbers for you ROI-curious people:

• Facebook has become a HUGE source of traffic to our website. Of well over 7,000 sources of traffic, Facebook is consistently between 10 and 15. Of those, about 30% tend to be new visitors.
• 40% of fans are female ages 25-34; the two other largest age groups are 18-24 (about 20%) and 35-44 (about 20%). Our members are predominantly female, btw.
• The growth of the page has been 100% organic--we have not done paid Facebook ads to promote the page or any other kind of "become a fan" promotion. Occasionally we tweet about the page or mention it in a newsletter or some other member communication, but for the most part, I assume people find the page by seeing it in friends' news feeds.
• Because we have over 10,000 fans the "impressions" feature is enabled. Facebook describes impressions as "raw number of times this story has been seen on your Wall and in the News Feed of your fans." The number of impressions is usually almost double the number of fans--typically between 35,000-40,000+ impressions per post.
• The types of posts that elicit the most "likes" and comments from fans are videos about stuff related to the professions of speech pathology and audiology or human interest stories from our publications. Resources for students get a lot of interest, too--announcements about awards, volunteer opportunities, etc. But by far, human interest stuff like stories or videos about people get the most positive attention.
• The success of the page is totally dependent on daily tending. During the month-long period when I left to take another job and the page was pretty dormant, traffic to the page and to ASHA website from the page plummeted. Especially if your'e not relying on Facebook ads to direct people to your page, the only way people are going to be aware of it is if they see updates from your company in their News Feed. The only way to make that happen is frequent posts to the page.

I could go on and on but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say that it's been extremely gratifying to watch the community grow and see people come to the page to solicit feedback or advice from peers.

How to Add Facebook's New "Like" Button to Blogger

I'll preface this by saying that this is the bootleg way to add the button; I'm sure there's a better way to do it so people can like individual posts rather than the whole blog. But until Blogger or someone else posts those instructions you might want to try the new "like" button feature on your Blogger blog, so here's an easy way to do it.

• Go to Facebook's developer documentation site's social plugin section
• Put your blog's url into the "URL to like" generator and click "get code"
• Copy the iframe code
• In Blogger, go to Customize and click "Add a Gadget" on the sidebar
• Select "HTML/JavaScript" and paste the iframe code into the content block.(leave the title block blank, or add a title if you want.)
• Voila! Now people can "like" your blog, which means that your blog's url will show up in their activity stream on Facebook

Three Things About Social Media That Just Don't Make Sense...And Piss Me Off

Without any fanfare, here are three things about social media that are perplexing me today:

1. Posterous comes to Ning's rescue. Except, um, last time I checked Posterous was a lazy-person's blog platform and Ning was a fully-functioning social network. It's like saying that Disney World is closing but have no fear--a movie theater chain is willing to step up and take their old traffic. In other words: does nothing for forlorn Disney customers but would be a goldmine for movie theaters. Nice going with this one, Posterous--way to take one for the team...and ride the coat-tails of all the coverage Ning is getting.
2. Facebook replacing "fan" with "like." It made sense: you wanted to show to show support for a company, brand or public figure on Facebook, you became a fan. But Facebook, in its eternal quest to totally and completely exploit the information provided by its more than 400 millions users by monetizing every last bit of it, decided that people were more likely to merely "like" something rather than make the full commitment required of declaring themselves "fans", so they replaced "become a fan" with "like" because, in their words, ""We hope this action will feel much more lightweight." WTF? Oh, and not only will it ease the burden that fanning entails, it conveniently makes a bunch of our formerly-private information public.
3. Facebook Community Pages. I defy you to read that and explain to me, in plain English, what the f*ck they are talking about. Seriously--I could not explain this feature to someone if my life depended on it.

Bye Ads

Does this blog look a little different to you? It's because I have stopped running BlogHer ads. I started running them 10 months ago purely out of curiosity to see how much money you really make running ads. The answer, for me at least, turned out to be a total of I think $30 over that entire 10 month period. Meanwhile, I had to devote the top 1/4 of my right sidebar to ads for huge brands with huge ad budgets.

In the end, I just couldn't justify basically giving away free ads to huge companies and giving someone else control over my blog's template basically as an act of charity since I made a total of $3 a month. I may not have thousands of page views but I'm sorry, I happen to think my writing is worth more than $3 a month.

QR Code Fun

Have a QR code reader app on your phone? If so, scan these to view my Linkedin profile, Twitter page and (redundant but oh well) this blog.

Have no idea what I'm talking about? Wikipedia is always a good place to start, and here are a few other resources:

• What is a QR Code and Why Do You Need One?
• 5 Unique Uses for QR Codes
• How to Avoid FDA Regulations Using Mobile Marketing (interesting take on uses for QR codes)

Want to make your own QR codes? I used QR Code Generator from the ZXing Project.

Maybe You Can Collect Those Old Tweets After All

Today the Library of Congress announced "Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress.

I've blogged before about my frustrations with Twitter search and the fact Twitter's archives only go back about 1.5 weeks.

Does this mean that companies will be able to get their past tweets from the Library of Congress? I don't care about my own tweets or even the ones from my company's account, but to be able to get hashtagged tweets from past events or promotions? Heck yes I want them!

What's a Fan Worth to an Association?

Today Adweek reported that value of a Facebook Fan has been calculated: $3.60. The findings are evidently based on impressions generated in Facebook's news feed, and a fan base of one million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year.

Naturally, since I manage my association's Facebook page of almost 20,000 fans, my immediate thought was "does this mean our Facebook page is worth almost $72,000?"

What do you think? How do you define "worth" of a nonprofit's fan--in dollars? In membership dollars? Product sales? Awareness of the professions an association represents?

What if Associations Followed British Spy Agency's Lead?

Fired for not embracing social media? Yep. It's happening in the UK. Britain's spy agency says it's firing some "James Bond-generation agents" (read: older) because they've "failed to master social networking and other Internet technology."

Is this just a convenient way around age discrimination lawsuits--or good practice for businesses?

What if associations started doing this? In a culture where, in large part, senior staff members refuse to even acknowledge--let alone master--social networking and new technologies in general, what if adoption became a non-option if you wanted to keep your job?