Facebook profiles are for people and pages are for businesses, organizations etc. Does that mean someone can’t say what they do on their profile. Of course not, but what it does mean is that you shouldn’t have several profiles for different businesses or different aspects of your business you need to have business pages set up.  I’ll address dos and don’ts of using your profile to build your online presence without being spammy or breaking Facebook’s Terms of Service in another post.

I see people making the profile mistake all of the time. It’s an amateur mistake and I can understand a person who’s learning Facebook and just trying to get something started making that it. BUT when I see people who are touting themselves as marketing or social media experts building profiles for people it frankly just pisses me off.  This is 101 stuff that no one who’s been doing business on Facebook should be doing.

Why is it a bad idea? Because it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Right, I know, they let you build the profile with a business name. Yes, you managed to slip it through. Yes, you’ve built up a couple of hundred or maybe even a couple of thousand friends.  But that still doesn’t make it a good idea. It’s kind of like speeding or driving without insurance or cheating on your taxes. Yes you haven’t been caught, but sooner or later…you will.

Here’s the info from FB:

How are Pages different from personal profiles?

Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative.

In addition, Pages are managed by admins who have personal Facebook profiles. Pages are not separate Facebook accounts and do not have separate login information from your profile. They are merely different entities on our site, similar to how Groups and Events function. Once you have set up a Page within your profile, you may add other admins to help you manage this Page. People who choose to connect to your Page won’t be able to see that you are the Page admin or have any access to your personal account.

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=904

If you don’t want to have a personal profile you can set up a business account. I don’t recommend them because you can’t add any applications to the page.

What is the difference between a business account and a user profile?

Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.

Here are the terms and the pieces that you are violating if you have a bus

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php#!/terms.php?ref=pf

Section 3
1. You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications (such as spam) on Facebook.

Section 4
2. You will not create more than one personal profile.

All in all, you can do what you want, but I think it’s foolish to violate the terms of service because sooner or later Facebook will notice and they will delete the accounts that are violating their terms.

Doug

When I was at Tony Robbin’s Unleash the Power Within™ seminar in 2002 he talked about Jim Rohn and the effect that he had on his life. For those that don’t know, Tony went to a Jim Rohn seminar when he was 17 and started working for him immediately after that. In Tony’s book’s he talks about being very successful at a young age and then losing it all.

He was successful when he was running an office for Jim, but lost it all when he allowed his ego to get in the way. He ended up destroying his business by allowing himself to go down a negative spiral and chasing away his customers and employees. He ultimately ended up in a little one bedroom apartment working as a janitor and feeling sorry for himself until a friend came and drug him out of the house.

After hearing about Jim I went online to see what I could find out about him.  I found his email list and signed up, I bought a couple of his books and cd series and amazingly I found a seminar only a couple of hours away in Big Sky, Montana that he was supposed to be speaking at and the tickets were only $300.  I think the seminar was called, “Secrets of the Mountain.” I immediately signed up and also bought a ticket for my girlfriend. She kept asking me what the seminar was all about and my only answer was Jim Rohn was going to speaking so we needed to go.

The day the weekend seminar was starting we loaded up and headed to Big Sky. When we got there we noticed that the event was at a pretty small guest ranch and it didn’t seem too crowded. As we were getting checked in we chatted with a nice gentleman named Jim, no not that Jim, but he had worked for that Jim. Over the course of several conversations I found out that this was Jim Britt, the guy that pulled Tony Robbins out of his apartment. I was beginning to get impressed with this event.

Then we got checked in and headed down to the first session. That’s when we found out there were only 25-30 people there. Which I thought was going to be pretty cool. Then I found out that there were going to be several speakers over the weekend in addition to Jim. That was fine and to be honest it was one of the best groups of speakers I’ve ever heard.

That night we ended up at dinner sitting across from Jim Rohn and listened to him and Bill Bailey swap stories. My girlfriend was in Mary Kay. Jim and Bill had worked with Mary Kay Ash, I believe when they were all with Earl Schoef so they talked about her for a while. Then they talked about all sorts of things and I just soaked it up. In fact after dinner we sat in the bar and listened to them swap stories for hours. It was really a great time.

Saturday morning we started our sessions and found that Jim was speaking Sunday morning. I wish I could remember all of the speakers names, but I can tell you it was an amazing line up and that it began to seem like my girlfriend and I were the only people who weren’t speaking, but I didn’t care it was great stuff. I took pages and pages of notes and I noticed that Jim Rohn was actively listening, taking notes and learning from every speaker. I see that as one of the hallmarks of his greatness. He didn’t let any opportunity to learn pass him by. He always had his journal and he was always taking notes.

He also spent a great deal of time answering questions that people were peppering him with. He calmly paid attention to everyone and gave everyone the attention that they craved. I learned many lessons from watching him that weekend.

Saturday night was a repeat of Friday with a kicker. My girlfriend had gone into town and grabbed a birthday card for me because it was my birthday. She had all of the people sign it including Jim Rohn and Bill Bailey. It was an amazing gift. We then sat around and swapped stories for hours again.

As a side note by Saturday night I had come to realize that we had lucked out in getting a ticket to this event. The wealth of knowledge at the small event was unbelievable. Most of the crowd were multi-millionaires and many of them were professional public speakers who charged thousands for an appearance. In fact my girlfriend kept asking me how I found the event. It was a blessing.

Sunday morning Jim spoke and I took dozens of pages of notes. His wisdom and delivery were unparalleled. I’ll never forget one of the things he said “This stuff is hard work; listen to what I say, but don’t watch me too close” But I can tell you from watching him over the previous day and a half that you could learn a lot from simply watching Jim “too close.” He was truly a man who walked his talk.

In Yesterday’s post I mentioned Warren Buffet and how he overcame his fear of public speaking. Here’s an interview he did on FoxNews. In it he talks about why he took the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking course and what he did to continue to overcome his fear of speaking.

I’m going through the Dale Carnegie Immersion program this month and will be sharing my experience. But before we dig into what I’m learning in this seminar, I want to share with you my experience with Dale Carnegie over the last 23 years. This is the second post in the series.

When I was younger nothing scared me more than having to speak in front of a group, it terrified me. One of the ironies of my fear is that I was a musician and had been playing saxophone and bassoon both with groups and as a soloist since I was in 4^th grade. I had played in front of tens of thousands of people over the years and I was more nervous to tell them my name and what I was playing than I was to actually play. I would break out in a sweat and would forget what I was supposed to say, but when I started playing everything was OK.

I would do everything but skip class to keep from having to speak. When I thought my turn was coming up I would break out in a sweat. Then when I was called in front of the room I would be sweating, my hands would be shaking and I would be reading my notes without looking up.  Then I would rush back to my seat as soon as humanly possible.

Shortly after my introduction to Dale Carnegie through “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” I bought his book “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking.”  This book opened my eyes. I learned that I was far from alone and that millions, if not billions of people were afraid of speaking. I read story after story of people who had overcome their fear and I learned why I was afraid of speaking in public

I wasn’t really afraid of speaking I was afraid of failing while speaking in public. So many of the issues I had in the past were because I wasn’t prepared properly, was speaking on subjects that I had not earned the right to speak about and I simply didn’t have enough practice. It was the equivalent of trying to play a symphony without really knowing the notes.

Two things Dale said really resonated with me: you have to predetermine your mind to success and you have to seize every opportunity to practice. I took action on his advice. I wasn’t able to call up a local University and offer to teach a course like Warren Buffet was able to do, but I did the closest thing that I could and became a waiter. I figured as a waiter I would have to practice speaking every day.

I’m glad I took action, but had no idea hard it would be for me. I laugh when I think back on my first days as a waiter at the Upper Crust restaurant in Braintree Massachusetts. I would be standing in back and the host or hostess would tell me I had a table. I would have to mentally prepare myself before I would go up to my tables for weeks and it was months before I could deliver something as simple as the specials without sweating and not reading my notes.

My next big step towards improving my speaking skills was to get involved with Shaklee, a network marketing company. Though today I’m not a fan of network marketing and may share my reasons in another post, I took advantage of the learning that was available and learned a great deal through my experience.

While with Shaklee I sought out every opportunity to speak in front of groups. I would speak in front anybody that would let me talk. I was speaking 10-15 times a month on top of working as a waiter at nights. I did opportunity meetings for 1-3 people, I did nutritional talks in front of rooms full of wrestlers, I did training sessions for groups of 8-10 people and eventually I was speaking in front of groups as large as 300 people and even shared a stage with Robert Cialidini, the author of “Influence.”

By taking action and seizing every opportunity to practice, I was able to overcome my fear of public speaking. Now almost 20 years later, I still occasionally find myself getting nervous when I’m going to be speaking. But because of the principles that I learned from Dale Carnegie I’ve been able to increase my skills and by increasing my skills, I’ve learned to deliver talks in front of groups of all sizes without fear.

EA games creates great products, the millions of players and probably billions of hours that have been played on them can attest to that. But as with any software development there’s going to be some  bugs that quality assurance doens’t catch.

They had a bug in their game that allowed Tiger Woods to walk on water and it the ball. One of their fans posted a video on YouTube pointing this bug out.  Here’s that video:

Now they could have ignored it and just released a fix in their next update and honestly no one would have not purchase their game. Things like this happen and 99 out of 100 gamers could have cared less. But they responded with a video of their own showing why it wasn’t a bug.

This video was an amazing response and judging by the almost 4 million views that it’s received it has garnered EA tons of great publicity and their fanbase has responded. Check out all of the positive comments. Really a masterful move on EA’s part. What do you think about their response?

Social Media Marketing
Are You Ready?

Introduction social media marketing. This presentation was for GMG a group of marketing professionals that meets in Billings, MT. I focused on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for this presentation.

This list is slanted towards SEO tools so I will be doing follow-on post that digs into some of my favorite Social Media tools. I also tried to keep this as a toolset that someone with average web skills could use and skipped some of the geekier tools that I use less frequently.

1.       Mozilla Firefox

I was a Microsoft partner for a decade and it took months to get me to switch to Firefox, but now it’s by far my favorite browser.

2.       SEO for Firefox

If you are interested in understanding how your website ranks and why all from one interface the SEO for Firefox tool is one of the best free tools available.

5.       Roboform

Managing passwords is one of the hardest things for those of us who work online, especially if we are managing client websites and social media sites. Roboform helps me manage the hundreds of logins/passwords that I have to manage. You can get a free 10 site version here

6.       Quantcast

Quantcast.com has detailed traffic statistics and estimates for websites so you can get a feel for how big a site is when looking for sites to place ads on. Compete.com is a similar site with free and paid versions .

7.       Google Reader

a.      There are a lot of readers out there, but Google Reader has the best set of tools for segmenting and sharing blog and other RSS feeds.

8.       iGoogle

a.       With iGoogle  can get a quick glance at what is important to me. The modules I use are

i.      Google reader

ii.      Google docs

iii.      Digg

iv.      SEOBook competitive research tool

v.      What’s popular

vi.      Duct Tape Marketing

vii.      Seth Godin

9.       Google Analytics

a.       If your website designer doesn’t share some sort of analytics from your website with you they are an amateur or they don’t want you to know.

b.      I find GA is better than 90% of the paid tools that I’ve tried, yes there are tools that are better and if you control your own server and have a big budget you can purchase them, but none of the low end tools come close to the results you get form Google’s free tool.

10.   Google Keyword tool

There are two ways I use the Google external keyword tool:

a.    Find out if a market is getting any search traffic

Just because a market doesn’t get search traffic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a potential business there, but it does mean that you will need to find another way to get to your market – that will affect tour strategy and your marketing mix

b. To find out what Google thinks a website is about

When we type in a website address we can see what keywords come up. With our own website we find quite often that Google has a very different idea of our site than we have. It can also help when setting up a website you can

Posted via web from dougmcisaac’s posterous

There are a only a few people who’s blog posts I eagerly devour and learn from as soon as they appear:  Seth Godin, Simon Ford and Chris Brogan. I’ve read most if not all of Seth’s books, I’m CEO of one of Simon’s companies and I’m gleefully waiting for my copy of Chris’ new book Trust Agents to appear in my mailbox from Amazon.

Chris understands how social media works on a level that most will never truly understand and many of us are struggling to reach; at least I know I am, sorry to make assumptions about you. The core of social media and in truth all marketing is Trust. In any relationship someone must have faith and believe in the other person for the relationship to work. Business relationships are no different. Our clients must believe that our product or service will deliver at least as good as we tell them that it will.

I’m confident that Chris’ book will give us a deeper understanding of how to earn that trust and build influence using online tools.

In case anyone is thinking I’m  just pushing this for an affiliate commisison, I’m not, I trust that this book will be well worth the time invested in reading it.

Simply click ont he picture of the book and it will send you to Chris’ website for a list of locations to buy the book.

Trust Agents

Recapping some of my favorite Twitters tories from the week starting witha great post from the always informative Chris Brogan. While some will argue with Chris’ take on Twitter etiquette, I think he nails it on alomst every point. Check it out and let me know what you think:

A Brief and Informal Twitter Etiquette Guide

I love Twitter. I think the service is a wonderful tool that permits a whole new way of communicating. The thing is, it’s also a place where newcomers might often make some mistakes in their choices that will likely be …

I found this post interesting because I’ve been speaking in front of a number of local business groups an the most common question is “Isn’t Facebook/Twitter/Social Networking just for kids?”  They are always surprised to find out the demographics of the main sites and the dramatic increase in 35+ on Facebook an Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are for oldies — NevilleHobson.com

If you pay attention to such metrics as have been published over the past year, it probably won’t surprise you to note that the older you are, the more likely you will be to be a Facebook or Twitter user, according to the study. …

I like this idea, but feel it will have limited application for me and the others in less populated states like Montana.

JustBought.It Turns Twitter Into a World of Mobile Shoppers

It’s no secret that people often buy things based on the recommendation of a family member, friend, or celebrity that they respect. And now, with.

Twitter has changed tehir look, I’ll have to go back and redo my Twitter Getting started videos now is changing

Twitter Blog: New Front Page!

Today we’re trying a redesigned front page for folks who are new to Twitter.com. If you’re a regular around these parts, then you won’t notice the new look unless you sign out of your account. Helping people access Twitter in more …

Thanks for stopping by to see my weekly recap. This is going to become a feature of my blog so let me know if you have great stories for me to share.

I’ll be adding some of my favorite Facebook stories in a couple of days.

Doug