Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

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Your Facebook fan page might not be in your control

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On September 4, 2009

In Facebook, Social Media

In the past year or so, tons of media companies have been setting up their Facebook fan pages (with varying degrees of success). In this time, media companies have also been shedding staff members by the hundreds.

If any of those companies are like mine, chances are they have allowed staff members to create these fan pages using their own personal Facebook access. After all, it is the easiest way to do it. Chances are, these companies have also let go at least one person who created a Facebook fan page for their organization. Unlike user access to your in-house publishing systems and intranets, you have very little control over who has admin access to your Facebook fan pages unless you yourself created the page.

If the ex-employee in question as the creator and only admin on the page – there’s really nothing you can do except ask them to make you an admin as well. If they are feeling charitable, they might actually do it. But then there’s another issue.

As of right now, it seems there is no way to permanently remove admin privileges from the creator of a fan page. Tons of Facebook business users have been trying to get an answer to this issue to no avail. As of right now, whoever created your fan page, whether they work for you or not, has full control. If the employee parted ways with the company in a negative fashion, imagine what they could do: Post nasty or libelous status updates, send messages to all fans, delete the page altogether. Yikes, right?

Until Facebook decides to answer this long string of help requests, the best thing you can do is to not allow employees to create Facebook fan pages from their personal accounts. Instead, set up a universal staff account can be set up to create and administrate fan pages. That way a mere password change once an employee leaves your company will solve this issue.

How much does Facebook know about you?

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On September 3, 2009

In Facebook, Social Media, Uncategorized

Just how much do you tend to share on Facebook? Probably more than you think.

Facebook has recently been called onto the carpet by Canada (the country!) for violating their privacy laws. In particular, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner took issue with the social network’s often confusing privacy agreement, their retention of users’ personal data even after they’ve left the network and how third-party apps use members’ private info.

Facebook agreed to implement changes that would affect all users, but would get Canada off their backs. After the changes take place, FB will change their privacy policy to better explain to users how and why their info is used – and it will require apps to explain the same each time a user accesses them.

And it’s a good thing too. Recently, the ACLU has been trying to raise awareness about Facebook quizzes. Sure, they might seem harmless – after all, you’re just finding out what Simpsons character you are, right? Wrong. Actually these quizzes, in particular, can find out a ton of info about you  – like your political affiliations, sexual orientation, religious background, etc. – based on fairly innocuous questions (not to mention the info they are allowed to pull from your account when you activate them).

It’s great that Facebook will be forcing apps to explain what info will be taken and how it will be used – otherwise, where could private info about you end up? In the hands of your employer? The government? A debt collector? The possibilities are frightening to consider.

Even with these changes, Facebook will continue to expand the info it asks users to give up in efforts to expand their “real time search”, which allows you to search the entire network, including news feeds, status messages, groups and more. Just over the past few months, they’ve instituted changes that, depending on your privacy settings, can make your info available to anyone (not just those in your network like before). Even if you’ve got your privacy settings where you want the, take another look to see what’s changed. Need help? Here’s a guide for arranging your privacy settings.

Aside from Facebook’s policies and your privacy settings, you should always ask yourself  exactly what info are you sharing when you update your status or share a photo? Just think – when you share on Facebook or Twitter that you’re going on vacation for two weeks – who might find that interesting? A burglar of course! It wouldn’t bee too hard to figure out where you live (especially if you’re in the phone book), or even what house is yours (ever posted a photo online that shows your home?).

Now that I’ve got you all freaked out (I hope), get back to work.

Roundup: Social media innovations and business models

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On August 20, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models, Recommended Links, Social Media, Twitter

Check it -it’s a rundown of news and notes on social media innovations, more pay model plans and why you shouldn’t look silly on the internets.

Take Note

  • According to the internets, More Employers Use Facebook To Vet New Hires Than LinkedIn, hence why I keep stressing why you should A. Be on these networks and B. Be doing it well enough to not look dumb.
  • And not that it should be news to anyone here, but Twitter is The New Way Mainstream Media Breaks News. I can’t preach it enough around my paper – let’s break news on Twitter first, then worry about the links. We do this at my paper every day – and sometimes I won’t even bother tweeting a headline if we aren’t first in our market or it isn’t original. The traffic from Twitter isn’t much anyway – so it’s better to be first than first with a link. Of course, we still want to be factual, too (that one’s for you, Bruce).

Keeping News Alive

  • The Online Journalism blog asks if the (UK) Times’ Culture subscriptions is a potential model for charging for online newspapers. Why? It’s more than just a newspaper subscription – it’s a membership with incentives like ticket deals, exclusive access and more. It’s just one way to make a pay wall worth it if this kind of model would move to the web.
  • Speaking of paying for news, a CUNY project sought to find New business models for journalism to answer, “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?” There are four total – some of which have been panned and a couple of others that have real legs (though none are really earth-shattering).

Innovations in Social Media

  • Mashable reports that our friends at TweetMeme are working on Retweetable Comments. Huh? You’ve seen on several blogs and articles where you can tweet article from a button, but this would allow people to tweet individual comments on those blogs. A very cool way to get comments to go viral (and encourage commenting in the first place).
  • Speaking of Twitter, Patrick Thornton has been hard at work at Bringing engagement to an old, one-way medium. His marketing plan for a new novel is exactly what social media marketing should be – fun, creative and original. While his exact approach doesn’t exactly work for a news entities’ needs, using social media as a customer service platform is a must. Why else even be on Twitter if you can’t answer questions?
  • If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Huffington Post has embraced the  age of “My” news with a new Facebook Connect hookup that allows interaction between Facebook profiles and user activity on their sites.  The sync is  a no-brainer for an operation of their kind – and a lot to live up to. Something like this takes a lot of work, but it would be great to see more news orgs (and yes, smaller ones) jumping into a forward-thinking arrangement like this.

Recommended reading this week

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On August 14, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links, Social Media, Twitter

The Big Must-Reads
  • You have to read Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing from Bill Wyman at Splice Today. It’s an excellent analysis of How We Got Here from someone with perspective both inside and outside the news business. A lot of it we newspaper types know already – but a lot of it we don’t want to acknowledge is part of the problem.
  • Part Two: On how the monopolistic mindset, terrible web design and a rejection of new technology contributed to the fall.
  • Newspaper war raises a question: Who keeps the tweeps? – Once a reporter builds a base in social media – who owns that base? If a newspaper gets claim to/responsibility for a reporters’ tweets (which seems to be the case), do they also own those followers? In this case, at least, I say yes. but not always. Likely not the last we’ll see from this debate.

How-Tos and Ideas:

More Social Media News

Recommended links in brief

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On August 8, 2009

In Recommended Links

Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories? – Daggle has been on the case with the AP for months now. He examines the irrational fear of the likes of Google – and questions what their resources are worth if they were to start charging us for their services.

How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks – eMarketer – Great stats on who’s using social media tools by age group. We’ve seen these before, but the numbers seem to change so fast…

Quick links and an update

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On July 16, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links, Twitter

It’s been a busy time professionally for me, so I apologize for not updating with any regularity. If you haven’t been reading about it, my company Gannett, has laid off more than 1,000 employees, including 101 at my paper. I am one of the lucky ones, thankfully.

While I still pull my head together, I have gathered a few links of interest. Check ’em out.

Recommended reading for June 22-25

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On June 25, 2009

In Recommended Links, Social Media, Twitter

These are my recommended links for June 22nd through June 25th:

Recommended reading for June 16th – 17th

By

On June 17, 2009

In Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for June 15th through June 17th:

Recommended reading for June 10th-12th

By

On June 15, 2009

In Recommended Links, Twitter

These are my recommended links for June 10th through June 12th:

  • 5 Twitter Tools to Help You Manage Unfollowers | WebProNews – I can’t recommend Qwitter to anyone – it simply doesn’t work. Try these other services to keep an eye on who is unfollowing you – and possibly why.
  • Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp – Is this the end of the world as we know it? Maybe. I’m not ruling out that a good Twitter stream is worth paying for – I just haven’t seen it yet.
  • A new Colonel Tribune? – Daniel Honigman, the voice and creator of Colonel Tribune, is no longer with the Tribune. While I give him big congrats for getting out of the business on his talents in social media, I don’t think Colonel Tribune can really be the same with a new voice. We see this on a smaller scale when we change voices behind @cincienquirer – anyone can see the difference.
  • The ‘branding’ of the journalist – Editors Weblog – I’m always bugging the reporters at my paper to market themselves as brands – particularly in the current job climate.
  • Facebook | Recession Survivors – You’ll need to log into Facebook to see it, but this project is an excellent example of how news outlets can use the crowdsourcing tools built into Facebook to involve the community in a story. Click on the videos tab to see the fan videos that Facebook users have contributed to this project.
  • To Tweet? To Twitter? The Final Word On Proper Twitter Lingo – The AP Stylebook has officially added Twitter and it’s words for usage (“to tweet” “to Twitter”). Who says we’re behind?
  • Lead, Follow or Block: When to Use Twitter’s Block Function – A reporter today asked me about Twitter’s block function – when it should be used and what exactly it does. I found this post to be helpful in explaining the issue (the comments also add some insight).
  • Twitter Dividends | Knight Digital Media Center Weblog – This was an interesting discussion amongst alums of the Knight Digital Media Center’s fellowship workshops about what sort of gains news organizations can or should expect from Twitter. Yours truly is part of this discussion – and I suggest the answer doesn’t lie in analytics.

Facebook URLs for the rest of us

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On June 12, 2009

In Social Media

The other day, I wrote about the new Facebook vanity URLs being made available Saturday.

In case you hadn’t heard, Facebook has decided to let Fan Pages with less than 1,000 fans get a custom URL – but they’ll have to wait until June 28.

You can reserve a name right now so long as it is trademarked and you have the trademark registration number by going here. Of course, if you’re like me and have no idea if your name is trademarked or if there’s a registration, you’ll just have to wait.

Promoting your work online

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On June 11, 2009

In Social Media, Surviving

You’re a reporter, blogger or photographer – and we all know you’re working hard. There’s only so much your website and newspaper can do to get readers to your stories – the rest is up to you. You are in charge of your own “brand” as a professional journalist, so here’s some ways to get your work to more people:

•    Tweet links to your stories, photos and blog entries on Twitter.

•    Link to your stories or some of your photos on Facebook.

How? From your Facebook profile page, click in the empty box where it says “what’s on your mind”? It gives you the option to add a link. Paste in the URL to your story. Now all your Facebook connections can find your stories.
•    If you’re a blogger, put the RSS feed to your blog on Facebook.
How? On your profile page, click on Settings just under the “What’s on your mind?” box. From here, you can add links to blogs and other social networking sites (if you’re into that sort of thing).
•    Add your stories about national topics to Publish2.com.

Wha? It’s a site just for journalists and news organizations to share news between sites.  Submit your story there and it could show up as an “additional link” on lots of other websites like this: http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/jobcuts/
•    If you’re on Twitter – make sure people know it.

Put your Twitter link into your outgoing email signature and with your online updates.
Submit your Twitter account for inclusion onto “expertise” sites like http://muckrack.com and http://wefollow.com or manage your account on http://twellow.com.

Get a Facebook url of your own

By

On June 9, 2009

In Social Media

Facebook announced today that starting this Saturday, they will begin offering vanity URLs – custom web addresses – for all of their users.

As it is right now, Facebook offers these links to select businesses and entities (like the New York Times). Soon, pages* and profiles will be eligible to receive them on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Why would this be useful to you?

Just like every other social media site, a vanity URL would be an easy-to-guess, short and direct path t your Facebook page. As it is now, you are merely a long series of numbers according to Facebook. If someone goes to search for you on Facebook, they may or may not find the right person with your name. If you have facebook.com/your.name, it’ll be easy to find and simple for you to link it in your emails, put it on business cards, etc.

Because it is the Internet, there will inevitably be a mad dash for these vanity URLs. If you have a common name or you want to be sure to get your company’s name first, you’d better hustle. They are available at http://facebook.com/username on midnight Saturday.

* Mashable notes that pages will not be able to get a vanity url unless they have at least 1,000 fans and have to have been created before May 30. Better get to recruiting new fans (I know I will).

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