The question is: for a site that is acquiring 3/4 of a million new users A DAY, is this the kind of ads they want associated with the brand?

How long before we all migrate elsewhere? Maybe not, but maybe. Do you think McDonalds wants to see Mafia ads alongside their pages? I’m guessing not.

Call this a rant, OR call this something to think about: in the future, will we want to join open communities where this is what we get?

I should also state that I don’t use very many tools. I know that Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop allow for FB updates, and I’ve sent one or two from there, but that’s not where I think the meat of Facebook is, and so I don’t use those tools in that way.

How I Manage Facebook

First, I should apologize. I probably can’t friend you in Facebook. I’m right up at the 5000 people limit (I removed about 600 and so I’m hovering around 4751). It’s not you, it’s Facebook. I’m sure you’re wonderful and I like you just as much, even though we can’t be friends. Now, on to the info.

I have three main areas I sit on, and I keep them open in 3 browser tabs. The first is my list called “Short List.”

This is approximately 185 people and it’s only for people I know personally and that I want to stay closely updated on. I read that voraciously. If I run out of updates, I drop into the general population and see what’s going on there. It’s changed how I see the world and what I know about people who matter to me. (It’s probably closer to how you use your Facebook).

From a “push” perspective, I update Facebook separately than Twitter. I talk much more personally on Facebook, and I’m not out to win any friends. I just say what’s on my mind there. My blog also imports there, as do my photos, as do my Google Reader Shared Items, as do my FriendFeed actions, and a few other things. I use Facebook to collect a lot of info from a lot of places, so you get a fuller view of me.

The second place I camp is on my own Profile, to chat with people in the comment stream:

I have enjoyed chatting with folks in the comments section, though again, it’s not in any kind of business perspective. It’s just me being people. What I feel is that Facebook is like the afterparty from the big performance, and I’m just chilling backstage.

The third place I camp is on the Trust Agents community, which is a Facebook fan page.

As of this writing, we have 2190 people, of which about 30 or 40 are actively talking about Trust Agents and ideas around the book. That’s been the most rewarding. You might recall that I deleted my fan page a while back. I still stand by that. But the passion of talking about ideas instead of “having fans,” is a really good thing.

I also love the birthdays feature. My secret is that I don’t wish people happy birthday in Facebook. I send a personal email and/or a tweet. It makes it more lovely, in my eyes.

What It All Means to Me

I don’t use Facebook for business. I tried buying a Facebook ad to test out how well it would convert new people to the Trust Agents community. I spent $500 and got hundreds of thousands of impressions and only a handful of new members. I tweeted once and got another hundred. In fact, I wouldn’t think of Facebook much for business, except that Louise Rasho of Microsoft Office Live showed me some great examples of fan pages that do seem effective and useful. Beyond that, I haven’t seen tons of great success on Facebook as a direct business conversion tool.

Where it shines, however, is as a relationship tool for business people in two areas: sales and customer service. In sales, it’s a relationship tool, not a marketing funnel driver. You use it to get to know more about your prospects, and to keep your customers warm. As service, it’s another outpost to talk with your customer base, and a place to share some extra information, should that be useful.

On sum, I use it mostly for personal, and it’s worked out well as a great augmentation to my LinkedIn presence. You might see it differently. I’d love to know.

And You?

How are YOU using Facebook? What do you like about it? What’s not so useful? What would you change, if you had the ear of the team?

Three Changes I Wish Facebook Would Make

1. If I’m reading people’s status updates via a list (for instance, I have close personal friends grouped together), and someone comments on MY status, I can’t see this without clicking over to my profile. Suggested fix: just let me subscribe to myself in lists.
2. I was talking with someone from Riverblind (a cool band), who said they’d missed an opportunity because any updates on a fan page aren’t rigged to notify the page owner, so when someone left a comment requesting an important interview, it went missing because the band wasn’t hanging around on their page 24/7. I feel this way about our Trust Agents community. It requires manual visitation to know that changes have been made.
3. I want to be able to share ANY element of a page. I often find comments to things I’ve written that deserve promotion. Why can’t I share pretty much anything? Heck, I saw that Keith Ferrazzi had some ads for his book, and I wanted to SHARE the ad in my stream, but that wasn’t an option. I get that a share isn’t a click-through, but if I share something, I’ve just given it almost 5000 more chances to be clicked, right?

The Framing

In all three cases, I can see the counter-motivations NOT to do what I’ve asked.

1.) Goes against their need for more page loads to show more ads.
2.) Ditto.
3.) Clicks.

Um, now that I’m looking at it, basically, if I’m right in my assumption, these usability changes are all null and void because of how they’d impact ads. Am I wrong?

What do you think? Do you run into those types of things on Facebook?

How are you navigating it all?

Here’s the thing, Facebook. You KNOW what I like. You KNOW who I connect with. You KNOW how old I am, whether I’m married, what I’ve liked or favorited, or joined. You know TONS about me, that I’ve freely volunteered. But you don’t listen.

Sadly, it reminds me of this video:

You COULD do so much for me, Facebook. Just try?

Twitter

1. Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share.
2. Reply to at least five things with full responses (not just “thanks”).
3. Point out a few people that you admire. It shows your mindset, too.
4. Follow back at least 10 folks. (I use an automated tool, but this is a personal preference. If you want such, I use SocialToo.)
5. 10 minutes of just polite two-way chit chat goes far.

Facebook

6. Check in on birthdays on the home page. (Want a secret? Send the birthday wish via Twitter or email. Feels even more deliberate.)
7. Respond to any comments on your wall.
8. Post a status message daily, something engaging or interesting.
9. Comment on at least seven people’s status messages or updates.
10. Share at least 3 interesting updates that you find.
11. If you belong to groups or fan pages, leave a new comment or two.

LinkedIn

11. Accept any invitations that make sense for you to accept.
12. Enter any recent business cards to invite them to LinkedIn (if you’re growing your network).
13. Drop into Q&A and see if you can volunteer 2-3 answers.
14. Provide 1 recommendation every few days for people you can honestly and fully recommend.
15. Add any relevant slide decks to the Slideshare app there, or books to the Amazon bookshelf.

Blogs

16. Visit your blog’s comments section and comment back on at least 5 replies.
17. If you have a few extra minutes, click through to the blogs of the commenters, and read a post or two and comment back.
18. While on those sites, use a tool like StumbleUpon and promote their good work.
19. Write the occasional post promoting the good work of a blog in your community.

It’s Not Easy

Maintaining your online presence takes time. If you look at all I’ve listed above, that’s easily more than an hour of work. But it depends what the value of that presence is to you, if you’re doing this as an individual, or to your organization, if you’re doing this on behalf of a brand or product.

We’ve traded dollars for time, in lots of these equations, as we see the return on our advertising spend diminish. It’s your choice whether you want to maintain an active online presence, or if you want to get away with a bit less.

What do you think?

As you know, I recently deleted my Facebook fan page. It just didn’t feel right. I didn’t want a page dedicated to me. But the book I wrote with Julien Smith? That’s another matter.

You are invited to join the Trust Agents Fan Page, where we will have discussions about the book, post about upcoming events like book signings and secret tweetups and flash events, and share photos and videos with each other, not about the book, but about what the book’s themes mean to you.

This page is for the Facebook-friendly folks of the world. Don’t forget we also have an official Trust Agents web page that points out where to preorder the book and other stuff.

Experimenting with Book Marketing

As this is our first mainstream book, both Julien and I are approaching this like a grand experiment. Our publisher, Wiley, has their own plans about how to promote and market our book. Julien and I are taking a lot of different routes. Inspired by new media authors like J.C. Hutchins and Scott Sigler, and with friendly advice from David Meerman Scott and others, you’ll get to see some of our experiments here as we hatch them.

The benefit to you, of course, is that we’ll be able to report openly about what works and what doesn’t in our marketing efforts, and we’ll be able to learn together what to do better for next time. You get all this information for your own purposes just by hanging out. Fair?

So, swing by the Trust Agents Fan Page and feel free to give us your opinion of what else makes a fan page work or not work. It’s all part of the experience for us.

And thanks.

I changed my Facebook profile URL today as part of their new Vanity URL program. I changed it to www.facebook.com/dotchrisbrogan. There was a purpose behind what I did. I was interested in pointing out that the URL is not the gold.

Yes, search marketers and SEO professionals everywhere just wrote me off.

I get that there are some SEO benefits to having certain URLs. I get that people will naturally choose to search in the url bar by putting my name. I understand that people looking for me will find someone else if they put in facebook.com/chrisbrogan.

But the characters in a URL bar are not me. The map is not the territory. The ship isn’t what brings the treasure.

This might or might not bite me badly, but I’m testing a point. Everyone else who voiced concerns on Twitter this morning are banking that Facebook is that important to my online presence and success that by choosing a different name, my entire brand will come crashing down around me.

It’s never about the sites and services. Never forget that. YOU add value to them, not the other way around.

Facebook is a sometimes useful part of some people’s and some company’s social media presence efforts, and can be very effective in building business relationships and providing a useful outpost where people might connect. It functions reasonably well. There are many useful ways to use it to create meaningful relationships.

I’ve said it before. You don’t have to touch every conversation. You can choose where you build a presence.

I opt not to use a Facebook fan page. I think a page about me is silly and somewhat redundant and pompous.

I never wrote that Facebook fan pages were bad. I never wrote that you shouldn’t have one. I never wrote anything. Several of you supplied your own opinion justifying why YOU had one. Good on you.

This isn’t a joiner’s club, friends. This is business (or community, or whatever you want it to be). If you’re in the “you’re only cool if you’re using all the hottest toys” camp, bless you. Have a ball with that. I’m in the business camp. And a fan page doesn’t enhance my business, my relationships, or anything else I do with my time.

Your mileage may/will/should vary.

Photo credit takomabibelot

They own your content. No matter what you feel, if you’ve put it on their servers, it’s in their possession. The only way it’s ever otherwise is if the terms say so. Banks own your records. Your health insurance company owns your records. You own nothing. (The effects of this are sometimes talked about by the VRM folks.)

What Facebook is saying, and they have to, is that they have to own your stuff, because if Facebook Connect and other services are going to make your data ubiquitous and shared and spread all around like peanut butter, then they have to have the rights to republish and distribute it. (I might have this a bit wrong. I’m willing to be a bit wrong.)

In Facebook, you surrender your personal data (tons more than you think) every time you add an application to your page. You give up lots in the old terms of service (TOS).

The only thing that I saw had changed was that your content doesn’t die when you quit the service. That’s it. You’ve been giving this all up ahead of time.

My only wish was that Facebook gave you some kind of “get out now” grace to get your stuff offline before that change in the TOS was enforced.

But think about it: every service you use on the web owns your data to some degree. Read the TOS for Google Docs. Read the terms at most sites.

If you’re freaked out by Facebook, go back and take a serious look at ALL the places you’re using on the web and ask yourself what the impact of them owning your stuff really is. It’s not what you think. It’s either worse or a non-issue, depending on how you see things.

**Update: See also this post by OM about telcos selling your data for pennies.**