Important Facebook security improvements

Symantec: Change your Facebook password now, via InfoWorld.com

Facebook Blocks Malicious Links Via Web Of Trust, via AllFacebook.com

Facebook Beefs Up Security To Fight Hijackers, via AllFacebook.com

News on Pages, Promotions: Contests and Sweepstakes, and Indiscretions

You can now tag Pages in photos, via Mashable.com
But admins should be vigilant in case inappropriate photos tag their Page (if so, admins can remedy this by using Facebook as their Page and removing the tag from the photo).

Admins, Get A Load Of The New Pages Dashboard, via AllFacebook.com
Facebook now provides admins of more than one Page a place to view stats in one place for all of their Pages

Facebook updated their promotions guidelines yesterday, re-emphasizing that you cannot use “likes,” “comments,” and other means to determine winners. The only approved way to run contests and sweepstakes on Facebook is to use an application. Be sure you’re familiar with these revised guidelines!

And, of course, we can’t ignore The Daily Beast’s outing of Facebook’s ugly indiscretion this week.
Can we trust Facebook after this ugly behavior? But, wait. Did we ever truly trust Facebook? Or are we so in love we’re willing to overlook this bad behavior?

Fans now have to know to select “Most Recent” (which is found under “Top Posts”) to view Page posts in chronological order. This is better than it was before when posts could not be viewed chronologically at all by fans, but it’s still not enough because most fans won’t know to click “Top Posts” to get the drop down option of “Most Recent.”

I’m still hoping Facebook will give Page admins the option of setting “Most Recent” as the default view for posts. Maybe we need to start another Page on Facebook: Let Admins Choose the Default View for Pages!

Hy.ly - Simple Social Apps

With more and more businesses using Facebook as part of their marketing strategy, it’s no longer enough just to post on your wall. Businesses are not only competing to get fans. They’re also vying to keep the attention of the fans they’ve got. Fans expect benefits or they won’t stick around to make an impact on your bottom line. But how, as a business, can you affordably add bells and whistles to your Page?

Check out Hy.ly. CEO Munish Gandhi and his team of developers are on a mission to make it easy and cost-effective for small businesses to find new customers using their attractive and highly functional Facebook applications.

The best part about Hy.ly? Right now their Facebook apps are free!

After using Hy.ly’s Welcome tab, Coupon, and Sweepstakes apps for clients–with great results–I contacted Munish via Facebook to learn more about his up-and-coming company that’s helping small businesses engage with their Facebook fans in a big way.

*****

COLLEEN: How did Hy.ly start?

MUNISH: I am a serial entrepreneur. Hy.ly was founded to simplify Social Media for business. Before Hy.ly, I co-founded Clickable with David Kidder. Clickable simplifies online advertising for business and is backed by some of the Internet’s most successful venture-capital firms and private investors: FirstMark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Founders Fund.

COLLEEN: Hy.ly’s focus today is on Facebook customization but I recently read an article mentioning Hy.ly’s Twitter/ CRM-like tool to help businesses harness the Twitter platform for customer service. Is Hy.ly still working on that service?

Hy.ly CEO Munish Gandhi

MUNISH: Yes, Hy.ly actually has a (secret) sophisticated Customer Care for Twitter offering that is still under active use. We have disabled new signups until we redesign it to fit our new Facebook-centric architecture.

Our passion has always been to develop simple, elegant and affordable solutions for a small business. As we improved the sophistication of the Customer Care solution, we realized we were moving further away from our passion. We decided to stop accepting new signups, go back to our passion, and develop simple tools for small businesses to get more leads.

COLLEEN: How long have you been offering Facebook customization through Hy.ly?

MUNISH: The Welcome Tab app was our first app and it was released in November of 2010.

COLLEEN: Do you see Hy.ly competing directly with Wildfire and other 3rd party Facebook application developers? What does Hy.ly do better than those other 3rd party applications?

MUNISH: At Hy.ly, we are strong advocates of small business. We believe that simplicity, elegance and affordability are key to winning the hearts and minds of the small business owner. Our apps embody these values: They are simple to use, they personify elegance, and they are affordable for businesses of all sizes.

COLLEEN: I love Hy.ly’s entry marketing strategy: get users to spread the word about your apps by allowing them to accumulate points every time they “like” one of your apps (or potential future apps) on Facebook or when they log in to their Hy.ly account or promote their Hy.ly-created Facebook tabs. How did you come up with this strategy? Will you eventually move Hy.ly to a paid-only model or will you continue to allow users to accumulate Hy.ly points to “pay” to use your services?

Hy.ly's Coupon app for Facebook

MUNISH: I have always been fascinated by gamification of the Web. I wanted to design a game where our message of Simple Social Apps for Small Business is spread virally rather than an expensive marketing effort. We will continue to offer the game model for free use of the apps. [However,] as time goes by, not all our apps will remain free.

COLLEEN: How can you offer features such as the ability to require sweepstakes entrants to “like” a Page to be able to enter the sweepstakes when other third-party application developers charge at least $5,000 to implement the same functionality?

MUNISH: Creating affordable apps for small business is in our DNA. Even though there are other companies out there charging $5,000, we wanted to remain true to our DNA and offer affordable solutions.

COLLEEN: I was fortunate to meet you on Twitter and connect with you on Facebook so when I had questions while using Hy.ly apps you responded quickly. But does Hy.ly offer a Help section and/or tech support via your website? What’s your tech support model as Hy.ly grows?

MUNISH: Hy.ly does not have a Help section. Our customers can reach us on Hy.ly’s Facebook Page, Hy.ly’s Twitter account or by email at help@hy.ly. As we grow we will build out our tech support area and, maybe, offer it as a paid service.

COLLEEN: Where does Hy.ly go from here? Will you offer Facebook customization only or do you plan to branch out into other social networks or other projects?

MUNISH: We will continue to build out our offerings and, for now, we will continue to focus on Facebook.

COLLEEN: You’ve been creating and launching Facebook apps like crazy these last few months. First came your Welcome Tab app and then the Coupon app. Next you launched the Sweepstakes, Tweetshow, and Scheduler apps. What apps are on the horizon?

MUNISH: We have a few new apps on the horizon:

• A Photo Contest app:  This app is ready to use. Please send us an email (help@hy.ly) if you would like to try out the app for free.
• A Welcome Tab “Portfolio” app for artists, models, creative designers, and photographers to display their work in a portfolio
• A dashboard of metrics for people to measure their Facebook efforts.

COLLEEN: Thanks for sharing more about Hy.ly with Social Media Mentoring readers, Munish. We’re excited to see what Hy.ly does next.

MUNISH: Thank you!

According to multiple announcements today (12/23/2010), Facebook is rolling out the ability for Page admins to unmerge their Pages and Places!

To merge or not to merge? That is the question.

In my recent video, I suggested to clients that they not merge their Facebook business Page with their Facebook Place–yet. My main reason to hold off the merging? Once you merge the two, it cannot be undone

Lately, when a Facebook business Page has a corresponding Facebook Place, the Page admins, upon log in to their Page, are prompted (and, perhaps, tempted?) by Facebook to merge the two with the following message (and if you’ve clicked through this prompt to see the process of merging the your business Page with your Place you’ve noticed that Facebook does not take the time to show you what changes will result from the merge, nor do they notify you that this change is permanent):

Some of the businesses that have already merged their Page with their Place are outraged, not only at the way their Page layout has changed (a map now occupies the prime real estate at the top of their Page instead of their Wall which used to highlight their interactivity with fans), but also because they cannot simply “unmerge” the page.

What is a Facebook Place and why does Facebook want businesses Pages to merge with Places?

Back in August, Facebook launched Places which is essentially a competitor to Foursquare, Gowalla and other location-based games where you “check in” when you arrive at a location and/or business. Just as Foursquare allows businesses to promote “Special Offers” to people who check in at their location(s), Facebook Deals launched in November with the aim to allow business to offer specials and discounts when Facebook users check in using Places.

As it stands now, business wanting to take advantage of promoting Facebook Deals to customers via Facebook must first claim their Place so Facebook can verify that their business is legitimate and then merge it with their Page. The fans of the Page remain intact as does the information previously housed under tabs (but that information on the merged Page is housed under links on the left hand side). A map of the location is added at the top of the merged Page and the number of check ins to that Place is included now as well.

An example of a merged Page and Place.

There are a few things to consider before merging your Page with your Place:

• Does your business plan to offer Facebook Deals to your customers/prospects? If no, there doesn’t seem to be an urgent reason to merge.
• Do you want the focus of your business Page to be a map of your physical location? If no, you’ll probably be much happier staying with your current Page’s design.
• Do you have more than one location but only one Facebook business Page? You won’t want to (or, possibly, be able to) merge your Page with your Place(s) as this can become confusing for fans and check ins.

It’s true that one day (even possibly soon) our Pages may all take on the look and feel of a merged Page/Place. But for now we have a choice not to merge them. And until you have a compelling reason to do so (you’re offering Deals to your customers/prospects) it doesn’t make sense.

Like the weather, Facebook never stops changing.

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook you know that it’s like the weather. Wait a few minutes, or a day, or a week, and it’s bound to change. Stay tuned for how this all blows out.

But perhaps one of the biggest changes is the ability we now have to highlight certain lists and/or groups of our friends on the lefthand side of our profile using “Featured Relationships.” While this may not be of interest to some (and it might actually be a concern for others as @MomonMars points out in her post to parents) some of us will find this feature to be useful. Now we can easily introduce our friends to specific groups of our other friends. We can also  highlight (public, not secret) groups of which we’re a member so it’s easy for our friends to see which groups we belong to in the event that they’d like to join too.

Reminder: The lists of friends we created prior to this new release of Facebook profiles are still private. To make them public, you have to select them as “Featured Relationships” in your profile editor.

How to feature lists of friends on your Facebook profile:

1. Click on the edit icon next to “Friends” on the lefthand side of your profile (under your profile photo).

2. Select an existing friend list or group.

OR

3. Create a new list and add friends to it.

4. See your new list under “Featured Relationships” and Save Changes.

5. View your “Featured Relationships”  on your profile.

Take a popular local restaurant (part of a larger, national chain operation) that was smart enough to put “Follow us on Twitter!” at the bottom of their guest checks. Pretty smart, right? Only problem was they failed to give their Twitter handle. So they want me to follow them on Twitter–heck, I even had my iPhone with me so I could’ve followed them on the spot–but they didn’t give me their Twitter name. If I wanted to follow them on Twitter I was going to have to spend my precious time trying to find them.

So, did I? Sure. But that’s because I live and breathe social media and I became insanely curious to see if I could find them and identify exactly why they were so elusive in providing me with that incredibly important information. Imagine investing valuable time and resources to create a successful social media campaign and then not telling anyone where you are or how to connect with you?

Would most people in my situation have tried to find the restaurant’s Twitter handle? No! The average person would leave the restaurant, get caught up in living their life again and never give the restaurant’s Twitter name a second thought. Opportunity? Lost. In a big way.

What can you do to make it easy for others to find you in the broad world of social media?

Be consistent
When creating social media strategies that include tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. use your company name or as close to a reasonable variation of it as you can get and use the same name whenever possible across all social networks.

Be simple
Don’t use a name or handle that, while seemingly related to who you are and what you do, still doesn’t spell out, quite simply, who you are. If you’re a hospital, use your hospital’s name or a close and easily-guessed facsimile. Don’t use generic names or terms like “HealthCares” unless it’s part of your company’s recognizable slogan or tagline that people would use to find you. (After some investigation I found that the restaurant in question above used the following Twitter handle: @restaurantnameSanAn, not at all something I would have easily guessed or found–I had to dig deeper with several Google searches to find them, something others won’t take the time to do).

Be everywhere
Adding “Follow us on Twitter!” to your guest checks is a great idea. But if you don’t include your Twitter handle, your Facebook fan page name, your blog’s URL, or your other social network names, don’t bother wasting your time. Customers and prospects certainly won’t waste theirs trying to find you. Including your social network handles in invoices, email signatures, newsletters, stationery, business cards, guest checks – absolutely everywhere you can – is an easy way to spread the word that you’re active on social networks and it’ll help you build your follower/fan base too.

Don’t let the hard work and effort you’ve put into your social media strategy be for nothing. Make it easy for people to find you online.