For a while now I’ve been helping clients manage the insidious spread of social media across the enterprise. It’s worse than kudzu. It grows everywhere. For most companies, social media are brought in by the folks in the marketing department, probably because of the cute icons that make them look harmless enough. And then wham! Companies have to actually start budgeting for this stuff. Many were slow to allocate resources, but once digital companies were able to offer stronger measurement, they had to. And now social media have spread everywhere.

Marketing was an obvious fit for social media. But it’s the breakthrough in communications offered by social media that’s causing the rapid adoption by different departments and verticals, including customer service, corporate communications, learning and development, manufacturing, sales, product development, and human resources and recruitment.

A good example is enterprise resource planning, where the use of activity streams (think Twitter, only not public) can reduce information delay. In the same way that Salesforce.com’s Chatter activity stream allows team members to quickly communicate information about leads and opportunities, manufacturing UIs are implementing the same technology to reduce inefficiencies across shop floors and supply chains. Derek Singleton, ERP Analyst with Software Advice, lays it out very clearly in a piece about the use of activity streams and manufacturing.

WeejeeLearning, our sister company, a custom learning company that specializes in e-learning and social learning, has seen a dramatic increase in inquiries and engagements for social learning solutions, another example of the spread of social media within the enterprise. Corporations understand how well suited social media are for capturing learner insights that inform other learners, and so they’re supplementing formal learning solutions with community-based learning initiatives.

Why does social media spread so? Community wants to happen. If I could be in multiple work-related places at once, I would be. Social tools like activity streams are bringing those places to us, and the efficiency gains are improving work life balance and giving us more free time. For things like, well, social media.

What activity streams are you using in your work? Twitter? Chatter? Something cool and proprietary? Please comment below!

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Update: Klout seems to be listening. On December 2, CEO Joe Fernandez posted “What Does Klout Measure?” on Klout’s blog. You can find the link below.

At the end of October, Klout changed its standard for measuring influence. The Klout score is a 100-point scoring system that gives marketers, employers and users of social media the opportunity to surmise from a single number someone’s ability to drive action on the social Web. Recently, Klout changed the way it arrives at this score, resulting in dramatic changes for many of its users. Some scores went up while others went down.

Originally established as a scoring system for influence on Twitter, Klout now measures influence on a dozen social networks, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Google+. More networks are being added, and the company’s CEO Joe Fernandez predicts the total will reach 20 by the end of 2011.

A person’s Klout score is based on three subscores: True Reach, Amplification and Network. How these scores are calculated – Klout’s PeopleRank algorithm – is Klout’s secret sauce, and on October 26 the ingredients changed. With the additional number of networks and the increase in data – over 2.7 billion pieces each day – the company realized it had to change its algorithm so that scores would more accurately and transparently reflect a person’s entire social influence.

Earlier in the year Klout had stated that the addition of networks to a person’s profile would create an “additive affect” and would not detract from one’s total score. But overnight, Klout scores changed dramatically. Many influencers saw large drops, leaving them wondering how Klout could have gotten it so wrong before. Mine dropped 30%, from 70 to 49. My true reach went from 10K to 2K, my Amplification went from 53 to 5, and my Network went from 71 to 18.

Since its earliest, Twitter-only days, I’ve been intrigued by the Klout system of scoring and have extolled its utility to my clients, and so the abrupt change in Klout’s “standard” came as quite a surprise. There was an outcry throughout the Klout ecosystem. I joined in as journalists, social media pundits and practitioners reached out to Klout for an explanation. We were referred to the Klout blog, which offered only a palliative post, at the end of which I expected to see a smiley face. Why would a company striving for more transparency not be more transparent with its users?

I began researching influence online, and very quickly one thing became resoundingly clear: influence is what’s wrong with social media.

The Larger Context of Influence

“Our friendships and professional connections have moved online, making influence measurable for the first time in history,” reads the first line of Klout’s About page. Klout would have us believe that our online connections represent the sum total of the measureable population of people who influence us, and that for the first time in history what constitutes influence in our lives is, in deed, measurable. If only hubris were measurable.

Quite simply, only a fraction of influence in social media is currently measured. Influence can only be approximated based on the very individualized uses – by millions of people – of hundreds of social media channels. Klout measures about a dozen channels and then distills that measurement into a single score.

But the real issue isn’t how or whether we’re able to measure influence. What concerns me is that social media influence is following the pattern of other forms of influence that have had pivotal effects recently on our society.

I don’t occupy anything these days, except perhaps my office. But I share the growing concern that America has done little to curtail the influence of our financial industry over Washington. I bring it up to illustrate a point about influence. It was influence, for instance, that facilitated the 1999 enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a law that repealed the restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act on commercial bank participation in investment banking activities. Influence again kept the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. The result was the creation of the financial industry’s securitization conveyor belt that led to the mortgage lending crisis, which has pushed about 50 million Americans to the poverty level while creating a top 1% that in 2007 took in over 23% of the nation’s income, conditions we haven’t seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression.

Could an online class system form from social media influence? When we look at the evolution of social media influence, we begin to see distinct divisions.

During Social Media 1.0, some of our existing offline relationships moved onto the Web. (It would be more accurate to say bits and pieces of these relationships were copied over to the Web.) We connected with some of these friends on networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And then during Social Media 1.5, we expanded our social graphs by adding people we hadn’t seen or heard from in years – old friends from high school, grade school, our childhood neighbors – people we hadn’t thought about much over the years. We even began adding people to our social networks based on relationships we had in our existing graphs. Friends of friends became first connections.

During Social Media 2.0 we began seeking even more friends, fans and followers, taking advantage of weak connections to build out our social graphs and engage larger and more influential numbers of people. While social media theorists and practitioners maintain that quality of engagement is more important than quantity of connections, none will dispute that there is a positive correlation between influence and number of friends, fans and followers. Size matters.

Klout currently scores over 100 million people, most of whom have not signed up for a Klout account. The company uses information from individuals’ public channels like Twitter and private channels like Facebook to build its data. More than 3,500 companies use this data to reach influencers with targeted marketing. In May, 2011, Fernandez told Forbes reporter Kym McNicholas that certain hotels in Las Vegas look up your Klout score when you check in to see how influential you are so that they may determine whether you should receive preferential treatment. The better they treat you, the hotels reason (if you have influence), the more likely you are to rave about your experience to your online community.

In social media, anyone with a small number of friends – at any level of engagement – does not have absolute influence. They can’t check in to a hotel in Las Vegas and be treated with privilege. Their numbers don’t cut it in Vegas.

And so at the end of Social Media 2.0, we face a new greed, one with the same unpleasant characteristics and ill effects of financial greed.

Social Greed

Not that influence is a bad thing, particularly when it’s formed and used in the aggregate. Even instances of individual ability to drive positive change are favorable when that change sincerely reflects the desires of many. But influence in social media is being co-opted by the second-comers to social media – marketers – whose interests aren’t necessarily those of the community.

An individual becomes an influencer in social media because her interests are well aligned with those of her online community. An accretion of friends, fans and followers occurs around this influencer, in some cases exponentially, as word spreads of the value offered by this individual. Marketers identify such influencers and engage them on various social media in order to reach their communities with a message engineered to slip seamlessly into the conversation. No harm, no foul, particularly if the marketer’s interests are genuinely aligned with those of the community.

But as gamification and award-based practices (like those of the hotels in Vegas) become rife in social media, the behavior of the influencers changes through incentive. Badges, mayorships, leaderboards and free orders of fries can cause someone with influence to act less in the interests of their friends, fans and followers and more in the interests of the marketers offering these rewards.

As badges build and connections accumulate and Klout scores climb, and as more and more people buy into the idea of engaging influencers to build their own influence, the ecosystem skews toward the interests of the few. And so the interests we find at the top of the influence pyramid once again are out of alignment with the interests of the many. Influence at one time may have been organic on the social Web, but no longer. As with a lot of things these days, social media influence is for sale.

Social Good

Where’s the social value in engaging only with influencers? Where’s the responsibility? A representative from Klout offered insight into Klout’s point of view when she answered my email questioning the drop in my score:

The reason you may have seen a drop is that we’ve improved our ability to take into account how *much* you influence someone. For instance, if I rarely like or comment on anyone’s posts, but choose to do so to yours, that is more meaningful than if I like 60 posts a day. For users whose engagement primarily comes from others with high activity, you may see a drop in your Score. [sic]

What part of the secret sauce is it that tastes really bad here? If I’m in the middle of an Arab revolution, and I retweet updates at a rate of 60 a day or I like 60 related posts a day, will that reduce influence? Do I care? I just want regime change.

Hotel rooms and French fries are one thing, or shopping for shoes online, or asking where to rent a bicycle for the day. But what if I want to learn about an emerging presidential candidate in a party other than my own? If I begin asking around in various social media, I’m led to destinations online that have been Liked, commented on, retweeted or otherwise shared by people in my social graph. My results are skewed because of our aligned interests – we’re members of the same political party, for instance. The results are further skewed if the activity of my social graph includes Likes, retweets, comments or shared objects that have been strategically inserted into their online conversations by influencers wishing to spread political messages that unfavorably portray this opposing candidate.

I wonder if Klout will ever see the need for a new badge: Trusted Objective Observer. Or if they’ll ever come up with a score that indicates how un-influenced a user is. Perhaps that score already exists, and that at some point soon instead of striving for a higher Klout score, we should strive for a score of 1.

Update: Klout’s reaction to these and similar concerns: “What Does Klout Measure?”

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

I arrive at my desk early with a cup of my favorite coffee, open a browser and log in. My cloud-based CRM has collected for me a list of new sales opportunities and has sorted them based on criteria I’ve created, mostly keywords, some of them geo-tagged.

I see in the list of new opportunities a company that happens to be a regular customer, a company we’re in touch with almost daily. But the contact name is different. Curious how this new contact popped up on the list, I see that the opportunity is from a different department, and it’s an opportunity for a new service that our company just added within the last week or so, one we’ve been promoting like crazy through our usual channels – AdWords, Vocus, email, and on our website and blog. We even built an engaging Facebook app, and we’re tweeting about it.

My CRM seems to have identified something relevant in the social Web belonging to this new contact, something in a blog post she wrote, or a press release, or a tweet, or an update on LinkedIn or Facebook, or most likely a combination of these, something that indicated a strong match for our new service.

However it happened, my social CRM has identified a potential sales opportunity for my company, and now I simply need to call or email or tweet this new contact. I’ll drink Obsidian Dark Roast to that.

What? No Social CRM?

Wishful thinking. My cloud-based CRM doesn’t do that yet. In fact, no CRM does. CRM systems have not yet done for businesses what social platforms have done for individuals, which is to say they have not yet facilitated the personalization of connections, interests, recommendations and discovery.

With Facebook, I’m able to find relevant information based on my likes and interests on thousands of websites simply by signing in using my Facebook login username and password. My friends’ activity on these sites informs me and, in many cases, steers me directly to the content I’ve come to that site to find, content that makes up those shared interests I have with my friends who also visit that site.

As businesses, we monitor relevant activity in social media, we go where the conversation is, engage, manage our brand, and we analyze our company’s performance. But the fluidity of our connections and our ability to nurture them continues to be interrupted by the walled-off environment of our CRMs.

Houston Neal, director of marketing for Software Advice, recognizes companies’ rapidly growing need for “a scalable way to engage customers in the social sphere,” but he points out that software vendors and analysts alike appear confused over the very definition of social CRM.

“In reality, social CRM is a misnomer,” he writes. “This catch-all nomenclature implies a category far more straightforward than the diverse set of specialized systems currently targeting the social media opportunity.” (You can read Neal’s post on social CRM here.)

Given the need for social CRM and the ability of current technology to provide a solution for inbound relationship management, it’s beginning to feel as if we have to squint to see the customer in Customer Relationship Management.

Community Within

Salesforce’s introduction of Chatter, a system that enables team collaboration and community around individual leads and accounts, is so much like Facebook it’s, well, comforting. In fact, there’s not much about Chatter that’s not like Facebook.

Steve Bobrowski, senior developer evangelist at Salesforce, points out a healthy side effect of the tool.

“The key insight for me about Chatter is how it flattens the traditional organization from the typical hierarchical reporting structure,” he says. “If your company uses Chatter and you’re a go-getter, no matter where you are in the organization, you’ll get noticed.”

As Bobrowski described it to me, Chatter revises our notion of the ladder to success within an organization. But while Chatter is a collaboration platform that boosts the business process layer within Salesforce, it’s not connected to other places on the Web where business opportunities lie.

FaceForce?

Social CRM is inevitable, and we may be close to a definition, if not a solution, with Salesforce taking the lead.

Recently, ReadWriteWeb reported that Salesforce has launched its Facebook Toolkit to facilitate integration between the two platforms. At the same time, Facebook announced it is looking for a developer to create and integrate Force.com applications for Facebook’s internal and external use.

A few system architecture differences notwithstanding, Salesforce users could be on their way to seeing the level of community in their business graphs that they enjoy in their social graphs. Hopefully, other CRMs will follow. Social objects within the business world could give a new meaning to the word “opportunity.”

Do you use a CRM? Would it help if it were more social?

Please share your comments.

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Leading instructional designer Tracy Bissette and Weejee Media, LLC have created WeejeeLearning to combine areas of expertise in e-learning and social media.

Tracy Bissette, a leading instructional designer based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, and Weejee Media, LLC, a provider of comprehensive social media programs for corporations and non-profits, have announced the formation of WeejeeLearning, LLC, an e-learning design and development company that offers social learning solutions as well as formal and instructor-led training solutions. Recognizing the growing demand for integrating social tools into traditional e-learning workflows, WeejeeLearning was formed to provide organizations with innovative course designs for more effective learning.

“Knowledge is constructed one layer at a time,” says Bissette, award-winning instructional designer and North Carolina native whose clients include Cisco Systems, Quintiles, GlaxoSmithKline, and Shell Oil. “We’re seeing that when structured learning is paired with social learning, layers are put in place that can create quicker and longer-lasting transfers of knowledge.”

Social learning is based on the principals of social learning theory, which suggests learning occurs through the observation of social factors within a person’s environment. The application of social learning theory can be greatly facilitated by the recent proliferation of online social networks and tools.

“When we participate in social media, rarely are we not learning,” says Ian Huckabee, president of Weejee Media, LLC. “The advances we’re seeing in communications and new media are evolutionary. Social media, whether main stream or behind a company’s firewall, offer moments of engagement that are proving to be some of the strongest opportunities to impart knowledge.”

The impact of social learning is not lost on many corporations and institutions of higher learning. The recent purchase by Blackboard, a leading provider of learning management systems to colleges and universities, of Wimba and Elluminate, companies that provide social and collaboration tools for learning, demonstrates the movement toward social learning that the next wave of students entering the workforce will best respond to in post-ed training environments.

“We’re having a lot of fun right now,” says Huckabee. “The tools to implement social learning theory have finally caught up with the theory, and so we’re enjoying integrating them into simulations, 3D virtual environments, games and other established learning environments, as well as creating new environments.”

“E-learning doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective,” says Bissette. “Our goal is to continue to design e-learning programs that learners actually want to take and to do so in cost-effective ways. By its nature, social learning makes that goal easier to achieve.”

Some say the effects of Facebook are evolutionary. I’ll leave that to the anthropologists. But as Facebook itself evolves, I felt it would help to offer up a simple guide on how to Facebook.

Chances are you’re already on Facebook, so you might want to click down to see some of the changes to Editing your profile or to learn more about Facebook’s updated Privacy settings. Also, check out Pages and Groups for a better understanding of when to use which.

Read on, and check back. We’ll do our best on this page and other postings to keep up with Facebook’s changes.

Here’s what I cover in this post:

• Signing up
• Logging in
• Editing your profile
  • Featured People
• Privacy settings
  • Apps and Websites
  • Instant Personalization
• Notifications
• Photos
• Pages and Groups
  • Creating a Page
  • Creating a Group

SIGNING UP

Signing up literally takes minutes. In no time, Facebook steps you through the process of entering profile info, uploading a profile photo and even finding many of your friends who may already be on Facebook.

On the signup screen, you’ll be required to include your gender and birthday. This encourages authenticity. But don’t worry, you can hide your date of birth in the privacy settings. (More on those later.) If you were born before 1905, you might have to lie a little. Facebook offers a dropdown list of birth years that only goes back to 1905.

Find Friends

On the first screen you’re taken to, Step 1: Find Friends, Facebook offers to search your email contacts to identify your friends who are already using the site. This is a quick way to connect with friends, but if you have contacts in your email address book you don’t want to be friends with on Facebook, you’re better off finding the ones you want manually once the signup process is over. Finding friends on Facebook is part of the fun. Also, Facebook has been known to send requests to those of your contacts who are not already on Facebook asking them to join. I recommend clicking Skip This Step in the lower right.

Profile Info

The next step is to enter some basic profile info. When you enter a school you attended, Facebook offers a list as you type, in many cases displaying the school emblem. If your school isn’t listed, simply enter it. Same with your employer.

Profile Picture

Next, you’re asked to upload a profile picture. You can take on using your computer’s camera or upload one you already have on your computer. If you don’t want to upload a picture of yourself, find a picture that represents you: a picture of your cat, your, car, your tractor.  Profiles without pictures can look incomplete and even suspicious.

Activate your mobile phone

You’ll be given the opportunity to activate your mobile phone to receive notifications from Facebook. I recommend doing it. But not all notifications! I’ve set mine only to receive SMS notifications when someone tags me in a photo or posts on my wall. I’ll cover this later.

Control what information you share

On Facebook, there are over 50 privacy and 170 privacy options, which can be daunting. But what this should tell you is that you actually can control what you share and with whom. And these settings have become easier to navigate. Facebook is under the microscope, as are many social media platforms that collect personal information, and so it’s never been more in the industry’s best interest to self-regulate. With these comprehensive privacy settings, Facebook really does allow you to control who sees what. When you see the link “Control what information you share,” click it and learn more about Facebook’s privacy settings. I cover them below as well.

LOGGING IN

When you log in to Facebook, you have the option of checking the box “Keep me logged in.” Up to you. As often as I access the site, it’s easiest for me to stay logged in. Facebook has played around with this setting some in the past. At one point, the default setting was checked. Now it’s unchecked.

EDITING YOUR PROFILE

Life changes, and so will your Facebook profile. Here are the basics. Log in, and in the upper right corner, click the Profile tab, and then click the Edit Profile button.

Basic Information

Here you can change your basic information: say something about yourself, add languages you speak, even change your gender!

Profile Picture

In the column on the left, click Profile Picture to change your picture to one you may have already uploaded, or upload a new one. NOTE: Edit the thumbnail! If your profile picture isn’t perfectly square, the thumbnail version of your profile picture that appears next to your updates and comments may be cropped unflatteringly. Click Edit Thumbnail to adjust how your thumbnail will look.

Featured People

Featured People appear in the left column of your Profile page beneath the list of your friends. You can create different lists or add existing groups or lists. It’s great for showing family members or co-conspirators. And these lists give you quick access to the profiles of these friends.

Other Settings

Most of the other settings in the column on the left are legacy settings; some are new, like Sports. Most are self-explanatory. If you have questions about any, please comment at the end of this post and I’ll update this page.

As for Contact Information, most of what you put here can be controlled by your privacy settings.

PRIVACY SETTINGS

Most of us are aware of the privacy controversies Facebook has stirred on several occasions. Facebook has admitted they’ve made mistakes and feel they may make more – the cost, its founder says, of building something so useful. Whatever. I don’t say anything on Facebook I wouldn’t say sitting at a busy outdoor café. When I post something, my friends see it, but so do others “sitting” close by.

To control your privacy settings, click on the Account tab in the upper right, then click on Privacy Settings. You’ll see a table of your current settings.

Click “Customize settings” at the bottom of this table and you’re taken to one of the most important pages on Facebook.

Here is where you determine who sees what. Most settings give you a widening choice of people to share with: Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Friends and Networks, Everyone. You can also customize most settings to include or exclude specific friends.

In the grouping “Things others share,” there is a setting for “Friends can check me in to Places.” Facebook Places is a location-based service like Foursquare that allows users to check in to their current location – a coffee shop or a bar, for instance. Places gives users the ability to also check in their friends. Here you can disable this if you have particularly mischievous friends.

Apps and Websites

Very important. Back on the Privacy settings page, at the bottom is a link to the settings for apps and websites.

Click this to see the settings for the apps you’re using with Facebook. Some of the apps may be ones you have subscribed to from places outside of Facebook. Their settings are controlled here.

Also, click on the Edit Settings button for “Info accessible through your friends.” This opens a screen that allows you to choose what information will be shared automatically when your friends use apps that they have subscribed to.

Yes, your info is shared when your friends allow apps to access their info! This is the biggest info leak on Facebook, so be warned. Here’s what is shared whether you like it or not:

• Your name
• Profile picture
• Gender
• Networks
• User ID.

The screen above gives you the opportunity to automatically share more info if you choose.

Instant Personalization

Instant Personalization allows Facebook’s partner sites to use your personal information on their websites to personalize your experience there. I happen to like it. Some feel it’s invasive. This is the beginning of Facebook’s endeavor to create a social graph that creates a tailored experience across the web for each individual user. Click on the Edit Settings button to see Facebook’s current list of partner sites and to disable this feature if you don’t want to participate. This feature is enabled by default.

NOTIFICATIONS

Facebook and some of the applications you use on the site will send notifications when certain events happen that affect your profile. You can be notified by email and, in some instances, by SMS whenever some tags a photo with your name, comments on one of your updates, posts something on you wall and so on.

To control which notifications you receive, click on Account and then Account Settings, and then click the Notifications tab. There you’ll see dozens of reasons you may want Facebook to notify you.

PHOTOS

In 2010, Facebook surpassed Flickr in total number of photos uploaded. Photos are the number one shared item on Facebook. When you upload photos, you can group them in albums, add them to existing albums, tag photos with the names of your friends (even if they don’t appear in the photo!), and un-tag any unflattering photos you may have been tagged in.

When you’ve been tagged in a photo, whether by you or one of your friends, and whether the photo is one of yours or one of theirs, it appears in the horizontal string of photos at the top of your profile page, most recent from left to right.

If you don’t want a particular photo to appear there, scroll over it and click the “x” that appears.

Uploading Photos

Uploading photos to Facebook is simple. The time it takes will depend on the speed of your Internet connection and the size of each photo.

Click the Profile tab in the upper right corner, and then click Photos under your profile picture. Then click Upload Photos button in the upper right corner and follow the instructions from there.

Organizing Photos

Once your photos have finished uploading, you can name the album and then arrange the order of the photos by dragging them. Next, click Edit Album Info at the lower left. Here you can edit album details. Then click the Edit Photos tab at the top left and edit the details of each photo.

Here you can decide which picture you want as the album cover, add captions to each photo, move a photo to a different album, and tag friends by clicking on each photo. IMPORTANT: When you’ve finished making your changes, scroll to the bottom and click Save Changes.

If you want to share a particular album with specific friends, from your Photos page, click on the album, and then in the lower left under the photos click the Share This Album link. Facebook also lets you post the album to your profile and provides you with a public link at the bottom of the page that you can send to anyone.

PAGES AND GROUPS

Facebook offers two ways for you to build and join communities other than your personal profile page. Each has its own set of characteristics, and over time, it’s become clearer when you should use which.

Pages

A Facebook Page allows you to build community around your business or organization. If you’re a popular personality or a band, you can use a Facebook Page to engage fans and to increase the awareness of your brand. You can also discover the pages of companies you may have done business with and participate with the communities they’ve built.

Pages allow you to create a custom username for branding purpose. With Pages, you can also create custom landing pages, add extra applications to create interactivity for page visitors and promote your page with Facebook Ads. Facebook pages are open to public view and are indexed by the search engines.

Groups

Groups allow you to stay close to a specific group of people in your life, like family, a team at work or school, or your lion tamers’ club. With groups, you can share documents and photos and communicate in real time in a private environment on Facebook.

Groups let you control your privacy settings to determine who sees what. A group can be “Secret,” where its name and its members’ names are hidden and all content is only visible to its members; “Closed,” where members names are visible to the public but all content is only visible to its members; or “Open,” where member names and all content are visible to the public. Only members can add friends to a group.

Creating a Page

You have the option of creating a Facebook page for your business or your organization on the site’s homepage without signing in. But don’t do it! Sign in to Facebook first. Why? You’ll want your Facebook page to be associated with your personal page for a number of reasons. The most important is the custom username. Once you get 30 or more “likes” on your page, if you’ve set up the page while signed in under your personal profile, you can customize your username. This gives you an easy-to-remember Facebook address, like this:

www.facebook.com/WeejeeMedia

If you set up a page that’s not associated with your profile page, you won’t be able to create this custom username.

Log in to Facebook, and then go to this web page: www.facebook.com/page.

Unless you want to set up a Community Page (see below), select one of the options under the heading “Official Page.” When you click one of the three radio buttons, a dropdown list will appear with categories to choose from. Name your page (you’ll be able to change this later), click the checkbox saying you’re the official representative, and then click the Create button.

Facebook will step you through the process of creating the page. Until you’ve made a few posts, you’ll continue to see a setup page every time you come back to this page. Don’t worry. Visitors don’t see this page. Only you do.

Adding the profile picture for your page is similar to adding one for your profile page. In fact, pages work a lot like profile pages. To edit your page, click Edit Page under the profile picture. On the left you’ll see a list of areas you can edit, including managing admins. You can add page administrators by clicking Manage Admins.

What’s a Community Page?

Community Pages are unofficial pages created by fans of a celebrity, business, politician or other organization or cause. If the page becomes hugely popular, its administrative control gets turned over to the Facebook community. This type of page was added by Facebook to give official page owners more control over their brand.

Creating a Group

To create a Group, go to your Facebook homepage by clicking the Home tab in the upper right. Then click on Create Group under your profile picture.

Name your group, and then begin typing the names of the people you want in the group (as you type, a list of names of your friends will appear). Choose whether you want the group to be Open, Closed (default) or Secret, and then click Create and start sharing!

With a Group, you can share documents, chat with all members at once, send and receive updates using the group email address. Groups are great for family, close circles of friends, and creating team environments and classroom environments.

SO THOSE ARE THE BASICS

Facebook has so many features that the best way to find out how to Facebook is to Facebook. The most important thing to understand is that when you share information anywhere online, you risk it being shared publicly now or sometime in the future. That said, you can control much of that risk by being careful about what you share.

For the sake of keeping this post simple and to the point, I haven’t discussed Open Graph, the Facebook technology responsible for, among other things, the Like button. It’s the most significant release from Facebook to date and will continue to enhance your life, online and offline, in increasingly better ways.

Please “Like”

The Like button is how we will find the best of what we’re looking for on the Internet. A like is essentially a recommendation, word of mouth (without the mouth).

If you liked this article, please click the Facebook Share button below. It will be helpful to us as well as to any of your social media friends who, in the future, might be looking for some of the information in this post. Thanks for sharing, and please feel free to leave a comment.

How do you use Facebook?

What cool features or apps do you use?

Do you use Facebook for work?

Please leave a comment below.

…

HootSuite has climbed to the the top of the heap of social media management tools for individuals and teams who use Facebook and Twitter for business or organization purposes. Last week, HootSuite won Mashable’s Best Social Media Management Tool award, an award based on community votes and a testament to user loyalty. Mashable is a leading social media and tech news source with 30 million views each month.

In a further sign of its commitment to its growing legion of loyal users, yesterday HootSuite announced its Affiliate Program, which lets premium plan holders earn commissions by referring friends, colleagues, and clients to HootSuite Pro and Enterprise plans as well as HootSuite University. (See the ad, ahem, in our sidebar on the right.)

So what makes HootSuite so great? It’s the owl! The company’s wise little mascot consistently coaxes me into the plethora of features added frequently to this robust management system.  A quick Google search for “HootSuite vs [Your Favorite Twitter Client Here]” reveals account after account of people switching from popular services to HootSuite.

But to call HootSuite a Twitter client is a misnomer. The number of social media management features and the ease with which the uninitiated can discover and implement them is unlike any other tool I’ve tried. And the features keep coming. To see Hootsuite’s whirlwind 2010, check this out from their blog: http://ht.ly/3CyIL.

And with its freemium business model, the company continues to offer a free service to 95% of its users while monetizing its service with its heavier users.

I don’t mind. It’s worth every penny. Arrayed before me currently are 17 accounts that I manage. Tabs for these accounts appear across the top of the window, and within each are streams of social media updates from Twitter, Facebook and Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress.com, and other social media platforms. I can easily monitor @mentions and Facebook wall updates in a single glance, and with the team workflow capability, I can communicate directly with my clients and make assignments for responding to a particular update or social object.

Features like the easy importing of RSS feeds, the browser applets and the smart phone application make this an indispensable tool for my work.

Congrats and kudos to Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team for their accomplishments, and many thanks for their continued innovation.

Do you use a Twitter client? What about a social media management system?

Which feature most appeals to you:

• Mobility?
• Scheduling your updates?
• Real-time stats?
• Managing multiple accounts and teams?

Please leave a comment below.

…

Weejee Media has been selected by the Catalyst Group to develop social media strategies and Web marketing programs to help law firms engage with broader audiences online.

CHAPEL HILL, NC: Weejee Media, LLC, a Web strategy company and a provider of comprehensive online marketing programs, and Catalyst Group, Inc., a leader in the development of high-performance law firms, have announced a strategic partnership to develop social media strategies and Web marketing programs that will help law firms engage with broader audiences online. Specifically designed to address the rapidly increasing online opportunities for attorneys, the partnership will combine management and marketing expertise for the strategic development of law firms.

“We see this partnership as a great gain for our clients,” says Cheryl Leone, CEO of Catalyst, a national law firm development company based in Raleigh, NC. “Attorneys have great opportunities to deepen their professional networks through social media, but they must do it strategically. Weejee Media was an easy choice for us because of their thorough grasp of social media and their comprehensive approach.”

Weejee Media currently works with law firms to help build brand awareness on the Web. “It’s important for a law firm to have an integrated social media strategy that extends its brand beyond its legal services and into broader industry and local community spheres,” says Ian Huckabee, president of Weejee Media. “Given the rise of new media, it’s become essential for a firm to maintain a strong presence online to remain competitive.”

Located in Chapel Hill, NC, Weejee Media was founded in 2002 with a focus on search engine marketing. Huckabee quickly recognized the relevance of a social Web and began implementing marketing strategies around social media and adapting these strategies to different industries.

“Many attorneys are cautious about social media, which I see as a good thing,” says Huckabee. “We help them manage the risks and rewards and put policies in place to ensure the greatest reach and the best overall law firm marketing plan.“ Huckabee feels strongly that social media is no longer optional. “People are talking online – good or bad – so it’s important to monitor what’s being said and join the conversation.”

The Weejee Media-Catalyst partnership offers several levels of engagement: Building the social media infrastructure, implementing social tools on company websites, and social media consulting and management packages.

Leone has 25 years’ experience in the administration of law firms and has served as the general manager for two major law firms. “Catalyst is focused on a firm’s long-term success,” she says. “Social media is part of the competitive landscape here and now, and so long-term success depends a lot on how well a firm competes today in social media, which is why we’re embracing it and advising our clients to do so as well.”

Additional information can be found at www.catalystgroupinc.com.

The following was written by author Kartika, a writer who contributes regularly to Wikipedia. Wikipedia needs your help. Every year at this time, co-founder Jimmy Wales asks us to donate to Wikipedia to help defer the expenses of operating this great resource. This year, many contributors have helped with his cause by also requesting that you help. To see more pieces written by Wikipedia contributors, please visit Wikipedia.com or WikimediaFoundation.org.

To donate to Wikipedia, please click here.

A message from Wikipedia author Lilaroja:

13.3 million and zero.

How many people turn to Wikipedia every day for access to knowledge? Over 13 million. And how much do they pay for access to the 5th most popular website in the world? Absolutely nothing.

That’s what Wikipedia is all about.

There has never been a more powerful way for people all over the world to freely share what they know with one another. Not just to broadcast facts and data, but to collaborate on articles and make them as clear and accurate as possible.

But what’s most remarkable about Wikipedia is that all of that knowledge has been shared and edited by volunteers, one entry at a time. And, because Wikipedia is free of advertising, those of us who create and use Wikipedia have to protect and sustain it one donation at a time.

That’s what the annual Wikipedia fundraising campaign is all about. It’s the chance for those of us who have come to rely on Wikipedia to come together and help sustain what we help create.

I’ve made my personal donation to this year’s campaign and I hope you’ll choose right now as the time to make yours. Please give $20, $35, $50 or whatever you can to keep Wikipedia free.

I started writing articles on Wikipedia because I realized there was a lot of knowledge people might be searching for that hadn’t yet been added in my language. I didn’t do it for attention or for praise. I did it because I care about my culture and I want to share what I can with as many people as possible.

People all over the globe do the same thing each and every day and that’s what makes Wikipedia so valuable.

Please make a donation today to keep Wikipedia strong.

Thank you,

Kartika,

Jakarta, Indonesia

Reprinted under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

A new Web service makes it easy for home sellers and real estate agents to share listing information on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and over 250 other social media websites.

Chapel Hill, NC (Vocus) November 30, 2010

Weejee Media, LLC has launched DwellWell.com, a real estate Web service that helps homeowners sell homes through social media. DwellWell.com simplifies social media marketing by making it easy to quickly share listing information, including pictures and video, with friends and colleagues on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and over 250 other social media websites.

Word-of-mouth marketing has driven referrals in the real estate industry for decades, and yard signs have perpetuated word of mouth for the home. Today, social media extends this form of marketing even farther, allowing a single message to reach thousands of people instantaneously.

“Our focus is on saving time and money for anyone selling a home by giving them a lot of reach for very few clicks,” says Ian Huckabee, president of Weejee Media, LLC, creator of DwellWell.com. “We’ve made it easy for sellers to introduce their listings to their friends and followers in social media, the people who generate true word of mouth.”

Huckabee, a Web marketing strategist, is also a North Carolina real estate broker and general contractor. He came up with the idea for DwellWell.com at the onset of the housing crisis when he recognized the growing preference among users of social media for recommendations from friends over information from advertisers. He configured DwellWell.com to use the word-of-mouth power of social media to promote the sale of homes.

“The evolution of new media has created a cultural shift,” says Huckabee. “It’s given consumers control over how they’re marketed to. And it’s happened at time when our economy has created some real opportunities for affecting this change in control.”

For the home seller, this change opens up the opportunity to extend the reach of online real estate marketing while promoting friend-to-friend sharing of home listings. Huckabee says it best: “You can say it’s like hanging a sign on the Web.”

It’s the first browser to bring together a user’s social graph as well as the sites visited on a daily basis, which will only become more and more important. Obvious concerns are users’ understanding of the privacy issues and what’s being shared with whom. We’re through a lot of that already from Facebook’s attempts to build the graph through personal invasion and, of course, Google’s “don’t be evil” ubiquity.

As a social media enthusiast, my answer is: Yes! Check it out early and see how you can integrate it into your daily online workflow. For me, it will likely be a second browser that I keep open. I use Firefox for a lot of the work I do because of how easy it makes it to peek at website code and do other web-related tasks. Firefox has been promising a new version of their browser called Tab Candy for some time now that will do a lot of what Rockmelt promises, sans the social.

The other thing to watch out for with Rockmelt is how they will monetize their browser. It’s worth noting that they’re a small private company, albeit with some noteworthy investors. But they’re not Microsoft (Netscape) or Google (Chrome), companies who aren’t in a position to have to monetize their browsers. What this means for Rockmelt is that user experience may be compromised a bit as they invite paying sites into the mix. For instance, you may open your Rockmelt browser one day to discover the Amazon tab is permanent!

But my bet is on Rockmelt or other such browsers seeded form the same idea.

Twitter has several known issues that its team of engineers are working diligently to correct. Some of them have existed for an extended period of time and are beginning to affect users’ Twitter scores and metrics. Largest among these are the lost mentions, @replies and tweets.

Many users have come to rely on scoring systems created by companies such as Klout, PeopleBrowser, Radian6, and Twitalyzer for identifying influencers. Whether for personal purposes or commercial ones, decisions made by users based on scores from these services become increasingly important as more and more people start using Twitter to interact with other users who have common interests.

These services are created using using the Twitter API. So if Twitter doesn’t provide complete data, these scoring systems are compromised.

As I look into this, it appears thousands of users’ scores and metrics may be affected by Twitter’s known issues. I’m communicating with some of the scoring services mentioned above and will let you know what I learn.

I’ve also corresponded with Twitter several times about the issue of lost mentions and @ replies. Recently, I escalated my inquiry. In fairness to Twitter, they have responded quickly with personalized emails, but all of them have directed me to the Known Issues page that, among other things, asks me to provide a “direct link to the reply/mention(s) which are missing from your Mentions timeline.” How can I? They’re missing.

I’d like to hear from you.

Have you lost any of your mentions, @replies or tweets? Please leave a comment below. (No comment box? Click on the title of this post and scroll down.) Please tell us:

• What are you missing: Mentions? @replies? Tweets?
• When did you started missing them?
• How many times has this happened to you?
• Any comment you may have related to the effect this issue may have on you.

We will not put your email on any of our lists.

Thanks for taking the time.

In August, I wrote that the future is moving toward us faster than at any other time in history, that the changes we are seeing in communications are evolutionary. The world ahead can potential be one “less of individual strategy than of collective reasoning” as new forms of communications open new pathways for opinions and understanding and empathy and compassion and facts. In the post-cyber age we will have greater opportunities to globally address time-sensitive and relevant social issues.

The extent to which we seize these opportunities has a lot to do with how well we protect ourselves online, and this depends a great deal on how well we control what we share about ourselves and how we deal with what others have shared about us.

In this interview from episode 5 of Brian Solis’ (R)evolution series, Michael Fertik, founder of Reputation Defender speaks about the need for tools that allow users to protect their reputations and privacy and to control their digital profiles. From students applying to colleges to professionals for whom reputation impacts success, the Internet is often a dubious partner. In this interview, Fertik and Solis take a look at our current state of online privacy and discuss ways in which privacy can be engineered and taught moving forward.

Twitter’s founders say it best: “… we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.”

On Tuesday night, the company gave a small percentage of registered accounts a sneak preview of the new Twitter, a re-engineered version of the micro-community that will provide its 145 million registered users — and non-users — with an easier, faster and richer experience.

The new design features a cleaner timeline and a two-panel layout for instantly viewing additional content referenced in a Tweet, including embedded pics and video. When you click a Tweet, you’ll see information about the author, the content and, in the case of geotagged Tweets, a map of where the Tweet came from. Other features include infinite scrolling and mini-profiles similar to the ones found on social media dashboards like Hootsuite.

Real-time search has changed how we find what we’re looking for online. Last December, Google rolled out Google Real Time search, a feed of updates – including Tweets, content from Google news, blogs and recently added webpages – embedded on the first results page for hot topics, finally addressing its users’ needs for more recent results instead of results based only on historical usefulness.

The new Twitter will likely break the barrier of triviality. In spite of its close to 150 million registered users, the technology is just becoming mainstream. Advertisers display “Follow Us on Twitter” icons in most media, but there are no accurate numbers on how many of the registered users are indeed active. In June, the New York Times’ associate managing editor for standards, Philip Corbett, pointed out that the word “tweet” is a colloquialism, a neologism and jargon, the type of word the paper’s writers should avoid using unless they are talking about birds. Many people use Twitter, he said, but many don’t.

But this improved rich version of the technology promises to push Twitter further up in the ranks of search options. Google is number one, YouTube is number two. What will the immediacy of Twitter’s new interface do for the little engine that could?

Brian Solis, a thought leader in new media (with over 65,000 Twitter followers), believes Twitter “is a stream of collective consciousness that fundamentally changes the way we learn, discover and share.”

He writes:

Twitter execs, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Dick Costolo, have long stated that Twitter is not a social network; it is instead intended to be experienced as “consumption environment.”

In Williams’ words: “We’re trying to get people to understand that they don’t have to Tweet if they want to get value out of Twitter.”

Twitter has always been full of promise. Once the new Twitter is completely rolled out, more people will understand why its most dedicated users have been so full of praise.

Ever actually read a website’s Terms and Conditions statement? If you have, or if you have some idea of what one contains, you might agree that, dammit, it’s time we set some terms of our own! A lot has changed since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was signed into law protecting Web services that control access to copyrighted content. Increasingly, that content – and its associated profits – is being created by us. So webmasters, here are our Terms and Conditions:

We maintain this connection to the Web (“Individual Connection”) and collectively to all websites contained thereon (“You the Web”) for the purposes of communication, information, education, and watching Hulu. Please feel free to study our use of the Web for the purpose of enhancing our experience online by creating content to better inform us and to better waste our time. When permitted, You the Web may place cookies on our browsers in order to improve our search experiences or to facilitate our interactions with friends, friends of friends, followers or contacts. You the Web agree to clean up the crumbs.

You the Web may use information you collect from this Individual Connection for your own use. You may not, however, distribute, modify, transmit, reuse, report, or share in any way with third parties information You the Web collect from the Individual Connection without a written request delivered with great fanfare and presented to us in very large font and in our native language, which is not legalese. We must agree to your request by clicking first an “I Agree” button and then an “Are your Sure?” button and then a final button that links to the page where we may download a free app.

Your access and monitoring of the Individual Connection is also subject to the following terms and conditions (“Terms and Conditions”) and all applicable laws, including any laws we have made up and shared with, and that have been generally accepted by, our 500 million or so friends of friends of friends on Facebook.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

1. ACCURACY Information presented by the Individual Connection is provided to You the Web on an “as-is” basis. We make no warranties or representations, express or implied, as to its accuracy, particularly with regard to Photoshopped profile images, white lies included among our Likes and Interests, or any vicissitudes in our behavior that are a particular result of how You the Web use our information. We may no longer be who you think we think we are.

2. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY You the Web should assume that everything you see or read that has been generated by this Individual Connection is copyrighted or subject to trademark protection, unless otherwise noted, even if we forgot the little symbol. Nothing produced by the Individual Connection should be construed as granting, by implication, estoppel, or otherwise, any license or right to use any intellectual property displayed by the Individual Connection, regardless of how unintellectual, idiotic, dumb, inane, preposterous or plebeian it may appear, without the written permission of the Individual Connection, which, even at 140 characters or less, would itself be intellectual property.

3. USER’S RISK Your access or monitoring of the Individual Connection is at your risk. Neither the Individual Connection nor any other party involved in creating, producing, or delivering information to You the Web from the Individual Connection is liable for any direct, incidental, consequential, indirect, or punitive damages arising out of your inability to create an application or website that we can’t game. The benefit to both parties from the information You the Web collect from the Individual Connection will have a direct relationship to your ability to collect that information, and You the Web risk reducing that mutual benefit, particularly now that your Captcha phrases are becoming too hard for even humans to read.

4. LICENSE In consideration of the age of sharing, by displaying to the Individual Connection content of any kind, including, but not limited to, text, photos, or other data or materials (“Materials”), You the Web hereby grant to the Individual Connection a fully transferable, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free understanding that the Individual Connection shall endeavor to copy, steal, pilfer, modify, display, distribute, and otherwise use and exploit all such Materials in any form of media, software or technology of any kind that exists today or that will exist in the future unless otherwise agreed to in a signed written document with the Individual Connection. Your Terms and Conditions don’t count because the font is too small and because, while we may have agreed to that fragmented portion of your Terms and Conditions that appeared in a 250 x 250 pixel popup window with a flashing “I Agree” button underneath, we didn’t physically sign it.

5. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES While monitoring or studying the Individual Connection, You the Web may not: 1) post or transmit junk mail, spam, or any other type of unsolicited mail unless the offers contained in such unsolicited mail are genuine and really will make us rich online in six day days or less; 2) transmit or otherwise distribute information constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense without the expressed guarantee that such information shall provide the thrill of a lifetime; 3) stream or transmit Materials that are pornographic or sexually explicit in any way while our significant other is in the room; 4) transmit or use any information or software which contains a virus, robot, cancelbot, spider, trojan horse, worm or other harmful or disruptive component or insect, especially if you are McAfee, Norton or AVG.

6. USER’S REMEDY If You the Web are dissatisfied with the Individual Connection or with any terms, conditions, rules, policies, guidelines, or practices of the Individual Connection, your sole and exclusive remedy is to go out of business.

7. REVISION OF TERMS The Individual Connection may at any time revise these Terms and Conditions by updating this posting. You the Web are bound by any such revisions and should therefore periodically visit this page to review the then current Terms and Conditions to which You the Web are bound.

UPDATED, 22 September 2011

Okay, your ex just friended you on Facebook. Or your boss. Or your friend whose political views stream forth as constantly as the water from that broken fire hydrant when you were a kid. Oh brother.

How can you be nice about it? Hide them!

Facebook knows you’ll have friends like these, so they’ve given you a way to tune them out.

HOW TO HIDE FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK

1. Go to your Facebook homepage.

2. In your news feed, find the post by the offending friend.

3. Place your cursor over your friend’s post, and drop down arrow appears in the upper right corner of the post.

4. Click that arrow!

A drop down menu appears:

Here you’re given more opportunities than before.

5. Click “Hide story.”

Once you’ve done this, the story will be hidden from your news feed and you’ll be given the opportunity to unsubscribe from your friend (her posts will no longer appear in your news feed – this is like hiding her) or you can unfriend her.

6. OPTION: Instead of clicking “Hide story” in no. 5 above, click “Unsubscribe from status updates by [friend's name].”

Your friend’s updates will no longer appear in your news feed

7. ANOTHER OPTION: click “Unsubscribe from [friend's name].”

Your friend’s stories, or posts, won’t appear in your news feed, and you’ll be given the option to unfriend them.

“But wait! I’ve change my mind!”

HOW TO UN-HIDE FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK

So let’s say your friend has learned a little Facebook etiquette and no longer posts updates like an automated bot. It’s easy to un-hide them.

1. Scroll to the bottom of the page.

Since Facebook loads more post when you reach the bottom of your page, you’ll need to scroll again until you see this:

2. Click “Edit Options.”

This window will appear with the list of names of the friends you’ve hidden:

Click the “x” next to the name of your reacquainted friend and, poof, they’ll no longer be hidden from your news feed.

While you’re here, check out this option:

You can change what you see on your news feed. This is where you determine if you’ll see posts and updates by the friends and pages you interact with the most or by all of your friends and pages.

3. Click “Save.”

Enjoy the friendship!

For more tips, check out “How To Facebook 2011.” Click here.

…

…

The gap between my teeth was generational.  I was not yet seven, so I was years away from the tight teeth of my father. He had busied himself for months in our basement building a radio through which he would tap out Morse code night after night, sometimes connecting with a lone signaler several landmasses away. He would grit his teeth as he worked hard to remember his dots and dashes in real time; it was important to accommodate the experienced traveler on the other end.

A year later he would be the smallest business owner in the U.S. to install the IBM System/3, which was as large as a Manhattan kitchen and less powerful than an iPod Nano. A decade later he would bring home the Apple II, which originally sat on the kitchen table because furniture designers were not yet aware of the revolution.

In recent decades, I have witnessed the evolution of his PCs at work and on his desk at home and have found myself included in them as a folder. I occupy several rows in spreadsheets on family finances, and I hang childless from a digitally generated family tree.

Today, there is a gap between my niece’s teeth, but it’s narrower than mine was. Almost eight, she watches with envy as her older brother, ever occupied by his new cell phone, taps away with blurry thumbs to connect with friends several blocks away. Like Morse code, his language can be easily understood by a skilled reader. But unlike the rigid Morse, my nephew’s language evolves daily to include an increasingly private collection of acronyms and abbreviations and made-up words unique to him and his friends.

My niece doesn’t know it yet, but one day soon, when she begins to speak with her thumbs, if she likes she’ll be able to communicate in a language even her brother can’t understand.

The future is moving toward this generation more quickly than any other in history. We’re witnessing another of the great leaps forward, when human evolution is sign-posted by advances in communication. The emergence of modern human languages 50,000 years ago, Gutenberg’s creation of the modern printing press a short 560 years ago, and the capability to self-syndicate any social object – text, symbol, graphic, picture, video – have marked departure points for greater collective knowledge and awareness and have allowed for the brushing aside of barriers and the building of a new modernity.

The changes we’re seeing in language circumvent literacy, a step toward this new modernity. The clever arrangement of alphanumeric characters to form emoticons or to create some gr8 and efficient alternative representations returns symbolism to language and creates, indiscriminately for all, a visual context for thought and ideas.

For the youngest texters, cognitive abilities within a first language are still developing, so the playful use of a derivative language, an unrestrictive and imaginative language communicated on platforms that encourage innovation and deviation, is more than social. It’s evolutionary. Idioms are compressed into symbols, humor is understood earlier, syntax is not, and so semantic development occurs seemingly lawlessly among a population that will one day write and rewrite the laws that will govern more than just language.

There are many who don’t take comfort in this, and they are typically at the other end of this generation gap. They are the generation who were taught by their parents that language stood still, that neologisms were to enter language slowly if at all and to remain capitalized or hyphenated, and their daily usage was often challenged by a parent or a teacher who regulated attempts at evolving language by pulling from the shelf a dust-free dictionary.

Now the dictionary has become a lagging indicator. It is more often accessed from online spell checkers than slid from shelves. Increasingly, we dispense with words when they present barriers, and turn instead to symbols. The speed with which symbolism imparts understanding is amplified exponentially by the fiber that wraps the globe, and so in this connected world derivative language fills the communication gap. Through the added use of symbols, communication happens faster and more often, and missed meaning is made up for in repetition.

Much of this repetition is recorded for the ages. The younger generation is the first that will find it difficult to lose touch with their friends along the way. Digital breadcrumbs will keep it connected, good or bad, and it will never know what it’s like, for instance, to lose track of siblings during wartime, as happened with my grandfather who was separated from his two brothers for seven decades. Thanks to the Salvation Army, they were reunited, and a fanfare played out in newspapers across England.

The world ahead for the young generation will be one less of individual strategy than of collective reasoning as derivative language opens new pathways for opinions and understanding and empathy and compassion and facts. This generation will define the post-cyber age by globally addressing time-sensitive and relevant social issues.

My father and I still communicate the old-fashioned way, through email. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account, two PCs and a Blackberry. We text each other occasionally, but our patterns and methods of communicating with each other are pretty much set. Still, we’re both amazed at how recently we marveled at the utility of punch cards and dots and dashes.

Just got off the iPhone with my friendly AT&T customer service rep. When the new iPhone 4 was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, I had to know if I was eligible for the upgrade. The new iPhone 4 comes in two configuration, 16 gig and 32 gig, and is available for $199 and $299, respectively, for those who are eligible.

Here’s the deal. AT&T says that typically you would have to be at least 21 months into your current 2-year contract to purchase the new iPhone for the prices listed above. However, they’ll also consider your monthly recurring charges; if they’re high enough, you can upgrade sooner than the 21 months.  When you upgrade, you’ll begin a new 2-year agreement.

Your plan and plan charges will stay the same. But here’s an important little piece of information: If you’re lucky enough to have an unlimited data plan, hang on to it. If you ever decide to downgrade to AT&T’s 2 gig or 200 MB plan, you’ll never be able to go back to an unlimited plan. AT&T no longer offers one. Subscribers lamentably attest that AT&T wireless network can at times be excruciating slow, so AT&T is taking measures to reduce activity. (Hopefully they’re also taking measure to increase capacity.) If you have an unlimited data plan, consider yourself lucky. With the new FaceTime video phone and multitasking features, you’re going to want that bandwidth.

There is a one-time $18 upgrade fee, and AT&T offers new insurance plan called Mobile Protect for $13.99 per month. You can purchase this insurance within thirty days of your iPhone 4 purchase, and it covers you if your iPhone 4 is stolen, lost, flushed down the toilet or left at a Silicon Valley bar.

Check out Apple’s infomercial for the iPhone 4:

In April, Twitter bought Tweetie and tweaked it. Now they’re releasing it as simply Twitter, the only official Twitter application in the app store. And they dropped the price from $2.99 USD to free. Tweetie fans are already calling it Tweetie 3. Yesterday, Tweetie 2 was removed from the app store, raising speculation that the new version could be released sometime very soon. There are reports the app is currently available on the New Zealand App Store. TechTree.com was lucky enough to get several screen shots.

Facebook recently unveiled several changes to its service that give users more sharing options, but in the process the company demonstrated what many have come to believe is its intentional disregard for user privacy.

This mistake feels a lot like Facebook’s February 2009 debacle when the company changed its user agreement in an “all take, no give” arrangement that gave the company the right to use, in perpetuity, all information shared by its users on the site. Users rebelled and Facebook backed down immediately.

But this one’s different. With these recent updates, Facebook has given users two important things: Easier ways to share and participate among communities of interest within the network and more privacy and protection settings to accommodate this new structure.

Facebook’s mistake is two-fold. First, the default privacy settings for the new Facebook are not Friends, Friends of Friends, or all of Facebook, but the entire Internet. This Facebook Privacy info graphic by Matt McKeon shows the evolution of Facebook’s default settings. Second, Facebook has provided no easy road map for just how to navigate to the 50 privacy settings in order to choose from among the more than 170 privacy options.

Users’ confusion over the default settings and how to change them, along with lackluster explanations of the benefits of the new changes, has created the usual uproar we’ve come to expect each time Facebook tweaks our home away from home.

Unfortunately for Facebook, this update has also created what analysts suspect is an increase in the number of users wanting to delete their Facebook accounts. The number of searches for “how do i delete my facebook account [sic]” have increased dramatically since the changes were announced, and a mass exodus from Facebook has been scheduled for May 31.

Nothing On the Web Is Free

Facebook has over 400 million users, and after the mass exodus, the site will have over 400 million users.

The changes Facebook has made are part of Facebook’s inevitable monetizing strategy. And that’s the point. Nothing about Facebook is free. Facebook has never been in the game not to make money. And it’s finally doing so. This year the company is expected to have revenues of between $1.2 and $2 billion. And yes, some of that will be profit.

Facebook will ultimately strike the necessary balance between its bottom line and its users. They always do. But what users have to realize is that one fact will remain: Facebook will make money off of the information users share on its site.

To those for whom this is a bad thing, Facebook is not the place to be. Profile information is the most valuable information for marketers on the Web, and no single Web service has more of this type of information than Facebook. Facebook will continue along its path to use this information to make money in order to stay in business and to continue to give users the services they sign up for in droves.

The critics are right: Facebook wants to make mountains of cash. But they can only do it if its users are happy.

The Wild Wild Web

A lot of the information you share on Facebook – your email address, phone number, physical address – is already public on the web and would remain so if Facebook went away tomorrow. This information was there before Facebook and exists online independently of Facebook.

Take a look at Pipl.com. Type in your name or the name of your best friend, or your worst enemy, and see what pops up. A recent search on this writer’s name produced the following information:

• Contact details from Whitepages.com, Spokeo.com, and two others
• Background reports from Intelius.com
• Personal profiles from MySpace, Spokeo, LinkedIn, Members-Base, Bebo and Flickr
• Email addresses from Inelius that are so old I caught myself wanting to say they pre-date the Web
• Public records including birth records from BirthDetails.com and Intelius
• Videos from YouTube
• Web pages
• Blog posts
• Documents

Many sites like this have emerged over the years. Pipl, Spokeo and Zillow.com, to name a few, all publish information many users feel is private. But in fact, it’s not. It’s quite public, and sites like these aggregate this information from public sources.

Which leads to a not-so-recent trend in social media, but one that is about to see the roof blow off because of yet another new initiative by Facebook.

The trend is social media aggregation, where information from different social media sites is pulled together in one location so that it can be more easily digested. Many aggregation services, like Gist, FriendFeed and NetVibes, offer tools and widgets that let users combine messages, search multiple social media sites at once, track friends, and even access their profile data all from one place, all in an attempt to simplify an individual’s social media participation.

With the recent introduction of Open Graph, Facebook will attempt to take social aggregation into the stratosphere. In fact, Facebook wants to turn the entire Web into your personal aggregator.

Currently, different social media sites contribute to some part of the social graph. Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that connects people to local businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part related to music. With Open Graph, Facebook plans to bring these graphs together.

“If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together,” says Zuckerberg, as reported by CNET.com, “then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”

He goes on to say, “These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together.”

If you use Facebook, you might be surprised to find you’re already participating in its new social graph. Go to Account > Privacy Settings and click on Applications and Websites. There you’ll see, as of this writing, Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Click on it to see the beginnings of a monumental change on the Web.

Good Rules of Thumb

Just consider that anything you say on Facebook is public, and don’t say anything that you would have to whisper to anyone whom you’re dining with at an outdoor cafe.

Each time you allow a Facebook app to access your profile information, read the Terms and Conditions for that app. Apps are bound by neither Facebook’s Privacy Policy nor its Terms and Conditions. They are third-party relationships, and when you share your Facebook information with them you do so independently of Facebook. Apps are how a lot of profile info leaks out of Facebook. Facebook should be clearer about this and should be more concerned for users’ privacy when it comes to third-party apps, and it wouldn’t be surprising if their approach to apps changes sometime soon.

Sites offering FacebookConnect are safe. FacebookConnect is a service that lets users enjoy their Facebook relationships on other websites. Users can sign in with their Facebook username and password and discover what their friends find interesting on a particular site. The third-party website does not have access to your Facebook profile information.

For more on Facebook Privacy Settings and how to change them, check out these resources:

Tips to Maximize Your Facebook Security (NY Daily News)

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (New York Times)

Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature (SearchEngineLand.com)