Views of a Modern World

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How-to: Forward a Facebook event to your friends

October 13, 2009 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

My son’s school, REED Academy has a Facebook fan page as well. I created that page since I’ve been using social media, including blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to expand awareness of causes important to me as well as teach people about my legal expertise in corporate governance and my practice in special education / IDEA law for families of autistic children like mine.

One way to continue the flow of the conversation and activity on a Facebook page is to schedule events through the page and invite your fans. You shouldn’t just make up events; they should be meaningful to your audience from their perspective.

Since REED is having its Seventh Annual Fall Fundraiser next month, I added the event details to the Facebook page. The tools allow you to easily signal all the fans, but even though the school has 200+ fans (not bad for a school of about 20 students), each of those fans has hundreds of facebook friends who they want to invite.

Using our event as an example, here’s how to share an event with your friends on Facebook:

Step 1 – go to the right fan page, like this REED page: http://www.facebook.com/reedacademy

Step 2 – find the event you want to invite people to

Step 3 – look at the menu at the bottom and select the “invite guests” option. (Follow the arrow in this picture.)

Arrow showing "invite guests" option

Arrow showing "invite guests" option

Step 4 – this brings up a neat dialog box that will let you select from everyone in your friends list. It then sends off the event as an invite.

Bonus step – if you also send a link to these instructions to your friends, they could send an invite to their friends as well.

(As an aside, if you just share the event, it’s much harder to add everyone to the list, and there’s a “send as message” option in the lower let of that dialog box.)

If you find this useful and would like more information about how my social media consulting can help you shape and share your message, contact me here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: blogging, networking, tips

Logo contest on crowdSPRING

April 10, 2009 by rickcolosimo 1 Comment

We’re running a logo contest on crowdSPRING for a social network-based site serving the ASD (autistic spectrum disorder) community.

Besides wanting to see a greater variety of designs from different people rather than a number of variations on a theme from one person, I wanted to see how the original “thoughtstorm.com” might have functioned. My friends know that the genesis of “thoughtstorm” for me was a play on “brainstorm” as part of my C2B business idea.

So, please feel free to spread notice of the contest to folks who should design an entry. Also, you can vote on the entries yourselves at the project page.

If there are designers who want to improve the project pro bono but don’t like crowdSPRING or others on principle, send me a design (I obviously won’t use unless we agree to a deal), post a link here as a comment (and then everyone else may get to coment), or enter and you can agree to donate the money to REED Academy, Alpine Learning Group‘s Outreach Program, or Autism Speaks. If you agree to that and do it, I’ll match the donation myself.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: autism, marketing, networking, Orphan ideas

Social network badges & opportunities

December 11, 2008 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

The title of this post links to the page pinged by a Facebook badge I just created. I’m considering adding these to our contact pages (http://www.imetrick.com/ and http://www.imetmikeprinci.com/). Are these useful to anyone? I’m not sure — I think it depends greatly on whether you have a social networking strategy (even if that strategy is just keeping in touch with more people). This is what it looks like as an image:

Richard J Colosimo's Facebook profile

It seems to me that people are still missing a little bit of the secret sauce in the use and interplay between social networking sites and the parts of the web that live outside these sites. I suppose that someone could do all their blogging, picture posting, and everything inside facebook, which would probably make some sense to facebook, but it doesn’t work for most people I know. They’ve already done blogs of their own (I work on three right now as it is) and compartmentalize their lives a bit more than any of these sites currently allow.

For example, the original sixdegrees.com site (IIRC) more explicitly recognized that there is a difference in depth and closeness of the relationship that doesn’t really affect whether you want to hear about the person or be in some level of contact. But there is a difference between family members, close friends, friends of friends, and business colleagues and former colleagues. Why should facebook treat them all the same?

People I worked with on deals a few years ago may be great people and very friendly, and some level of relationship is welcome to us both. But I imagine that facebook’s faux-friend feed filter doesn’t really do the job as well as it could. Why not interpolate an algorithm that measures how closely you relate to the person? Spoke did a similar thing early on (back when its graphical depictions and interface dramatically overwhelmed its peers, and it still beats anything that you see today).

Speaking of early generation tools, why doesn’t facebook take over the function that planetall.com provided, that of universally updating first-person contact information and spreading it? That would put Plaxo out of business in probably a week, which would not only be payback for all those spammy messages they used to send but personally please me because they send me messages but don’t recognize my email address when I try to unsubscribe or register or find a lost password!

TIP: unless your internal system is really bulletproof, it is not brand dilution to outsource mailing list management to a quality third party. There are several companies whose footers I don’t mind seeing on mailing list emails. Knowing that I can more easily unsubscribe makes me more willing to put up with a marginally useful email rather than putting me over the edge and making me decide to unsubscribe now.

QUESTION: how many of you actually unsubscribe from mailing lists rather than just hit spam? I’ve tried on multiple occasions to unsubscribe from the Palm newsletter that goes to one of my gmail accounts, but it keeps coming back. Now, it’s spam. Does Palm know (or care, which is a different problem, meaning that it really is spam) how many of its emails are spam? Doesn’t that dilute marketing effectiveness and send the wrong signals to the sales force?

WANTED: developer interested in social networks and visualization to collaborate on graphical interface tools that help people manage social networks in a realistic degrees-style method rather than an unrealistic, 1990’s flat-file list of friends. I’ve got ideas and there are precedents that can be improved on.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: networking, Orphan ideas, tips

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