Old Facebook Profile Ads

Old Facebook Profile Layout

New Slimmer Facebook Profile Ads

New Timeline Layout

 Compare the Same Facebook Ad Side by Side

239 x 117

128 x 168

Differences in Facebook Ads

While the ad sizes are not exact, the widths are fairly accurate. The new ad is slimmer, at about 128 pixels. The image sizes remain the same at 110 x 80 pixels. The background color has changed from white to the light blue. The number of ads on a traditional page range from 1 to 6. The number of ads on the new facebook timeline layout is 2 or 3 depending on your screen size. Yes, the ads display in conjunction with your screen size, pretty high tech programing there. One of the biggest differences between the two sets is that the new layout keeps the ads on page as you scroll down the page. The old set up will actually scroll the ads off the screen. Very subtle differences, but I am sure someone somewhere at Facebook is monitoring revenues based on the layouts. Curious internet marketers would like to know what that difference is. Facebook marketers want to know how this could effect their ads.

Related articles

• Timeline vs Old – How Our Eyes Look at Them (sociableblog)
• How to sign out of the new Facebook layout update. (haiteq.com)
• 8 Great Facebook Changes (dreamsystemsmedia.com)
• How Big is Facebook? (dreamsystemsmedia.com)

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Just your friendly neighborhood pest control guy reporting… I also Report on Scorpions. =)

-Thomas Ballantyne
Director of Marketing for Bulwark Exterminating
Follow me on Twitter —> @Thos003

Caution: Follow Me At Your Own Risk

Recently, an episode of “Staffers Gone Wild” played out on the internet with the unbelievable tweets of government staff members being broadcast for all to see. Isn’t it comforting to know that your hard earned tax dollars are being spent to fund the watching of Nirvana videos or support drinking while on the job? I’m not here to talk about the politics of this behavior, as I will leave that up to the political pundits to comment on.

What I do want to talk about are some potential legal ramifications that exist in businesses with easy access to the thousands of open eyes and ears reading your posts and tweets. We all know that social media marketing, imaging, and messaging are extremely important in shaping your brand. It takes a lot of time and money to get others to see you as you want them to. However, with one simple tweet your whole plan and message can be compromised, leaving you open to liabilities and harming your brand. Additionally, there are a host of legal pitfalls awaiting you.

It is important to know that each of your employees using social media accounts can be potentially viewed as “agents” of your company. While the law recognizes various types and levels of agents, it has been generally defined as basically someone who is authorized to act for another and/or someone that the outside world would reasonably believe is working on behalf the company (each state has its own “agency” laws and a licensed attorney should be contacted to provide proper legal advice regarding your situation). Any employee tweeting or posting may potentially become a liability to you. Regarding a private (social media) account, employers are somewhat limited in controlling an employee’s personal posts. However, there may be an issue if employees are posting company-related information on their private accounts.

Regarding social media content, businesses need to be aware of laws that govern and limit what can be posted. One of the laws is the Federal Trade Commission’s truth-in-advertising rules, which require businesses to not make misleading, false, or deceptive claims in their advertisements. There are also many intellectual property and copyright laws governing what you can use for your own business without infringing on another company’s ownership rights. Additionally, defamation and harassment laws limit what can be said without invoking other types of legal action from companies or individuals.

So what are some things that you can do to help protect your business?

1. Understand Your Legal Limits – Before employees can understand what information can and cannot be use online, those at the top need to understand first. Seek out those laws that affect your business and understand your legal limits. Of course, if there are any questions, consult a licensed attorney that can address your questions.
2. Empower Your Employee Policy Manuals – In all of your employee policy manuals you should have clear and detailed policies regarding social media use, including who is and is not allowed to post content. When hiring 3rd parties to post content for you, be sure to have clear communications regarding what is allowed and prohibited. It is highly recommended that you hire a licensed attorney to review or write your policy manuals and to draft and review your employee contracts/agreements to minimize your legal risk.
3. Train, Train, Train – Have immediate training with new employees and frequent follow-up training that communicates clearly what can and cannot be said online regarding your business. You should also train employees regarding the potential risks that can occur when using their private accounts, such as defamation, trade secret disclosure, etc.
4. Monitor Content – Depending on the size of your business and the amount of content being generated, this may be a difficult one to accomplish. However, it is extremely important to know what information is going out to the public regarding your business. Have someone in your company that is knowledgeable of the risks to oversee posted content. If something detrimental does go out, the damage may already be done. However, damage control can be better executed the earlier damage is caught.
5. Plan for the Disaster – No one likes think that something bad will happen to them. However, if damaging content does go out, do you have a plan in place? Depending on the harm of the content the plan can range from a quick apology, to reprimanding or firing an employee, to quickly consulting an attorney to defend yourself from legal action. Sit down with your staff and determine what detrimental scenarios can occur from detrimental content and put an action plan in place that can be quickly executed to handle any issues. It is also wise to consult an attorney to review your plans and ensure that proper protections are in place.

(NOTE: In any business, legal issues are not to be trifled with. This information is in no way meant to be construed as a legal opinion and/or as legal advice. The author has provided the information provided herein simply for informational purposes only. It is important to properly plan, prepare and protect yourself from legal issues by contacting a licensed attorney to obtain legal advice for your particular situation.)

About the author:

Shaine has always been fascinated with how people interact with each other and shape the world around them. The internet and social media has brought a whole new sphere in these communications and has produced a world our past would have never imagined possible. He is finishing his law degree and plans on being a licensed attorney by August 2012. He will continue helping businesses navigate around pitfalls and have the most success possible. (NOTE: Any information provided by Shaine is in no way meant to be a legal opinion and/or legal advice. It is important to contact a licensed attorney to obtain proper legal advice for your situation.)

Social Media Stats

Infographic & Viral Marketing from Dream Systems Media

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Eating Social Media

Infographic & Viral Marketing from Dream Systems Media

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Disclaimer: This image is a fake. Not to be taken seriously.

Social Media meets SEM

Internet Marketers are competitive by nature. Clearly if you are wanting to rank 1st on the search engine you have to compete.  SEO’s wish to rule the Social Media world as well. Why? Traffic equals money. Going viral can mean a lot of traffic and a lot of money.  To those that want to profit from the online world they must find ways to slice and dice data to see what activities carry a monetary value. So what do these SEO minded people do? They create measurement and scoring to see how well they do in the Social Media arena. Attach a game to it, make it fun, and gamble a bit.

Does your local market carry a good audience for Social Media?

Check it out, right now you can go find which U.S. cities are the most social media savvy. Social Media Rankings .

And apparently:

“The average New Yorker has nearly twice as many total friends across all social networking sites as business people in Houston.“

Also noted that Phoenix ranks #5 for Twitter use. Props to the home town. …. and #9 for being the rudest city in the US. It is unclear if those are related. Cool survey. Great info. But don’t let over analyzing your potential to make a buck off someone make you a jerk. Looking at people as dollar signs makes you a soulless individual. Granted if you are a marketer you have to be honest about marketing value. And yes there is value to marketing via social media.

Your Pout Score:

Perhaps this is a bit cynical, but what does a social media score really mean? Is that a pat on the back because you have impressed a computer program? If you want to beat yet another computer game then go download angry birds. Your true reach?… Does that count the number of DMs that run through twitter? Entire conversations happen on twitter behind closed doors. Granted, it is cool to put a ticker on how far your voice travels. But are you twittering just to get noticed? Are you gaming for influence? What happened to just keeping it real? Clearly extremes in either direction are bad.

What’s your take?

Do social media scoring systems destroy the social media platform or do they help people realize “hey, I am a big doofus so I need to chill on the twitter-thon”?

Facebook recently announced it’s facial recognition software and so shouts of “Privacy Issues” are screaming across the blogosphere. But how much of a privacy issue is it?  The statement used by Facebook, “We’ve automatically grouped similar pictures”. Background, lighting, and other elements of the image can be used to group similar pictures.  In fact, Techcrunch reported that “Google researchers published a paper describing progress they are making in teaching computers how to identify famous landmarks” in a post dated June 22, 2009. Granted this isn’t facial recognition software they are developing, but the momentous task of identifying faces is equivalent if not greater than identifying landmarks.

Facebook’s spokes person is being anything but clear as to what level they are taking this. This statement given, “It’s pretty standard technology that is already out there,” would suggest it’s not an ID system. Identifying people is not a standard technology.  Face.com has been working on developing this technology for some time.  However, face recognition is a common technology.  Many digital cameras quickly and easily identify a face within the frame.  Two eyes, a nose and mouth grouped closely together are pretty easy to find.

Having said that, Facebook could be a learning system with potential to breach facial identification.  Apple has provided a face recognition software that allows tagging with their iPhoto since 2009. Apple’s software does begin to identify faces that you tag regularly. The more you tag an individual the easier it is for the computer to identify and auto suggest an individual, not just a face. When tagging with iPhoto, the program can also find/sort images on your computer for that individual’s face. They also allow places tagging. The cool part is that you can search your photos by places or faces. So to say that Facebook can’t do it would not be an accurate statement either. And even if they cannot do it now, who is to say that they won’t go back and do it later once the technology is perfected?

And for those that want to believe it’s a violation of their privacy and the Big Brother Skynet is just around the corner, Justin Mitchele does state “…to match your new photos to other photos you’re tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos.” So is Facebook creating identification software? The common link in the facebook suggest is you. It connects you to your friends. Connecting you to a random photo of you on the internet taken by a stranger is still a long way off. Without significant input from human users that can teach the facial recognition software with whom to link the image, facial recognition software used to identify individuals is still a light-year away.

Testing the Facebook Identification Software

So far the software is not available for all users. I did get a quick sneak peek and this is screen shot of them grouping Arnie’s photo together.

Photos from AZIMA meet up. | "Who is this?"

The fact that it grouped Arnie’s images together at the top is not too alarming as it could be attributed to the lighting, background, and sequence. But Arnie’s profile image was also in sequence and the lighting background is similar. Further David Mihm’s profile image following Arnie’s was not grouped in. With these as indicators, the software is certainly more sophisticated than a simple face recognition program. The software very well could be a photo identification/privacy nightmare.

Although I must admit that I did appreciate the auto rotation Facebook threw in with their new program. Yes, they now have auto horizontal/vertical image rotation. Man I love time saving inventions.  Just wish I knew how to bank that time saved.

-Thomas Ballantyne
“Don’t mind me, I am just the pest control guy.”
Find me on twitter @Thos003

Check out this recent contest he had on his Twitter stream:

Step 1.  Bait your followers:

Step 2.  Give people a reason to follow you. Larry does a great job with opportunities for for fans to “win” something.  With Larry baiting fans, he  makes them pay attention to his Twitter stream.  (It doesn’t always have to be about controversy and getting fired over Twitter with athletes!)

Step 3.  Make it fun – He makes it fun for his fans, and makes them “earn” it, not just “reply” back with an answer or something.  I use to love when Shaq did this, and made people find him, or go to some crazy location.  It keeps fans on their toes and makes them connect better.  It’s brilliant!

Step 4.  Ever wonder how to bring sponsorships in without being obvious? This works great.  Good for Larry, and good for Coldstone!  Who knows if this really was planned by the two, but its awesome.

Step 5.  Getting people to interact on your Twitter stream – Uploading pictures, talking about you – all of this is making you more popular, and I promise its getting Larry more followers.  This works for everyone, of course it may be on a smaller scale for us normal people that are not superstars, but the basic concepts are still there – if people are interacting on your Twitter stream and talking about you, other people will want to know you and follow you.

Step 6.  Wait for it. Drag it out, why not.

Step 7. Kick Ass Prizes – If you are going to have contests, then make sure your prizes are kick ass.  I would take 2 tickets to the Vikings game please … and you know they are good because they are Larry’s tickets! (Oh, AND I get a signed jersey – yes please)

Other professional athletes should take a lesson from Larry.  He is doing social media right.  He gets Twitter, and understand how powerful it is to connect with and find new fans.  He is an Arizona Cardinal, but did you notice that it was a “nationwide” contest.  The NFL can take a lesson too from Larry, They need to stop banning players from social media and help them better understand it.

We can all learn from this too, its basic – give people a reason to follow you, be interesting, get them talking and gain new followers.  It really is brilliant.

I get confused on the social media sites like, Facebook, Twitter, even Skidoo etc. Should I be setting up a profile under my name to follow me specifically or setting up something that tells people to follow my website?

Here are my thoughts:  My answer depends on the specific network, as well as what you are trying to accomplish, but let me first touch on the specific networks you mentioned in this question.

Twitter

Twitter: If you are trying to gain more business, and use Twitter as a platform to attract more customers and get more of the word out then you need to set up a more formal business account.  For example; If my name were John Doe and I had a business called ISellWidgets.com I would set my Twitter account up to be:  Twitter.com/ISellWidgets (or something similar depending on availability) and NOT Twitter.com/JohnDoe.  This way you could do a better job at attracting the right kind of followers, and get the word out to the correct industry.  Reason being – Lets just say you are into fishing, and that is fine, but that would do much better on a personal type account, where you can find, talk and connect with other people who love fishing, but do you see how that would do your business no good?  The business account would be better left to connect with same industry minded people.  Now you can also set up a personal Twitter account if you want to use it for those kind of reasons mentioned above, but hopefully this does a better job showing you the line between the two style of accounts.

Facebook

Facebook: Create a personal page so you can have access to all that Facebook, but once you have a personal page set up, you can also create a FAN page for your business.  Use the personal page for your personal matters, but the fan page to get the word out about your business matters.  If you don’t want to create a Facebook page to connect with people you may not even like from back in the day, that’s fine – just use the FAN page/business portion of it to connect with potential customers.

Squidoo

Squidoo: Wow, do I even touch this one with a 10 ft. pole, or make a joke after all the attention it’s got this week? Ha Ha -  My thoughts are to create a page for your brand/company on Squidoo, but don’t pay Seth 400$ a month for it.  I mean, Squidoo is free (as far as I’ve ever used it), and if you even have any (even) small ability as an SEO or Internet marketer, you can get the page you create to rank pretty easily for your brand.

I think there are other networks out there that you can use as personal accounts that would also serve your purpose as a business owner, but you have to get in and really understand what that specific network is about, and how to best use it.  If your main goal is to drum up business, and that is THE ONLY REASON you are using social networks, then the answer is simple – always create it for your business.  Create the domain/ID name/profile/brand whatever centered around your business.  I think this is what you are really asking with this question because it does not seem like you are the person that is wanting to set up these accounts to keep in contact with friends or find a long lost love?  Am I right?