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Last week, I attended a webinar from WOMMA where WOMMA General Counsel Tony DiResta discussed the importance of disclosure across social media. This conversation normally focuses on brand-blogger relationships but the same best practices and government guidelines may also affect your Facebook Page.

Here are five things to keep in mind about your brand and disclosure on Facebook.

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This Facebook Friday is dedicated to the Little Guy: the one-man communications team, the small business owner, or the intern for a non-profit who just got assigned Facebook (I’ve been there). So here’s to you, Little Guy, and because you make Facebook awesome, here are six easy and (almost) free tips for your “little” Facebook page. And you Big Guys can learn a thing or two as well.
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The title of this post might make you shudder since commenting policies and risk mitigation seem like heavy subjects for something as fun as Facebook; but setting simple, straight-forward guidelines should be an essential part of your Facebook strategy. These guidelines (which you can post or link to on your Info tab) are part of facilitating an open sharing environment and have the added benefit of coaxing you to figure out exactly how you want to use your Facebook brand page.
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Apologies that Facebook Friday is coming at you a day late this week but here in Washington DC we got TWO blizzards so I hope you’ll forgive us. The 2010 Winter Olympics started yesterday and of course every major athlete, organization, and sponsor has a Facebook campaign going on. Here are some recommendations for getting the most out of the games using Facebook.

The Officials - Inside Facebook has a good run-down of the main Facebook pages from the IOC, Visa, Vancouver, and NBC. None of these stand outs but some are a great way to keep track of scores and upcoming events if you’re a hard core fan. The majority of them simply repurpose content or sweepstakes from their website or YouTube and the applications are action oriented, inviting fans to learn about the sports or get into the action with virtual skiing, speed skating, or hockey.

The Athletes- There are lots of Athletes who manage their own fan pages and if you have a sport or an athlete you love these are really fun and the best way to feel like you’re there. Brand pages make it easy for athletes to share their stories and experiences with fans through status updates, blogs, and multimedia; today USA’s Lindsey Vonn posted a status update that she was in her condo baking banana bread and is her injury is healing nicely. Vonn and other athletes and also using Twitter but in Vonn’s case you can tell it’s linked off of her Facebook so the posts don’t make much since when their cut off at 140 characters.

Your Friends- Last week, Facebook quietly rolled out their next jab at Twitter: a search feature that letsyou look at friends’ posts and everyone else’s. Search for “Olympics” and you can see status updates, photos, videos, or links your friends are sharing related to the games. The search functions aren’t nearly as flexible as Twitter search and the use of hastags hasn’t appeared yet but if privacy advocates don’tcomplain about this new feature I think we’ll see a new version of the now-dead Lexicon in 2010.

Overall, I’m underwhelmed with branded Facebook campaigns this year because they didn’t take advantage of human element of platform.

In 2008, our team worked with Lenovo to build the Voices of the Summer Games. We found 100 relatively-unknown Olympic athletes from around the world, armed them with Lenovo products, and asked them to blog about their experiences. The reason the program was a success was because it reminded people about who these athletes are: not everyone is going to win gold; most of these athletes have jobs andfriends and families outside of their competition and are living the dream of their moment to compete against the best in the world. Had this program been done today with the flexibility of brand pages, Facebook would be the perfect platform to bring these great stories to life and cheer on the unsung heroes of the games.

Briefly noted- USA Today had an article about broader social media use at the Olympics: here.

This week, Facebook Friday will look at six of Facebook’s top news stories and how they affect brands. As a bonus- a link to a bit of Facebook psychology.

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2009, defined by the deep recession, forced consumer brands to do more with much less.  However, this stressful environment drove  marketers to try non-traditional and less expensive channels, fostering the development of some unique engagement programs in social media.  In this series of posts, I’ll revisit a few of the more interesting campaigns from the past year and explain how these programs can guide our 2010 engagement strategies.

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If I’m reading the signs correctly Facebook is preparing an major applications push, trying to make them more attractive to developers with monetization and promotion: will it work?

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Over the next few months, be on the lookout for Friday posts about Facebook news, trends, and tools. Today I get my feet wet with three hot tips on this week’s Facebook news. continue reading

Since the launch of Facebook brand pages, there has been confusion as to whether your brand or cause should set up a page or a group. As brand pages grew in popularity and were given more and more features, it seemed like discussion of groups dropped off. Finally, on Monday Facebook updated the look and function of Facebook groups and now that they dust has settled I think it’s worth revisiting the age old question, “Do I want a Facebook group or a brand page?”

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Mashable this week posted about the low numbers of teens on Twitter.  The post invited readers to weigh in on why they thought this was (e.g. they’re too private, they prefer texting, etc) – once the comment count spilled into the hundreds, Mashable wrote a follow up post further analyzing the issue.

At the risk of throwing my hat into an already crowded ring, here’s why I think Twitter sees low adoption among teens:  Teenagers, for the most part, do not yet posses weak social ties – the very connections that fuel nearly all of twitter’s growth. continue reading