Facebook Enthusiast #1 - Getting Started

This is the first in a series of tips and tricks on how to become proficient at Facebook and building your brand, friendships and reputation on Facebook.

The first step is to find a way to understand the Facebook culture.


Step 1: Set up your profile. Face book will have many fields for you to fill out, so I would suggest you fill out all the fields you can and then look at your profile after saving. If you believe you are showing too much information, then go back in and you can deselect some of this info. For example, there is a field for whether you are interested in men or women and your marital or dating status. If you are using Facebook for business, then you may not want to have these fields appear on your profile.

2. Inviting your friends -I would suggest you spend the first day, setting up your profile in Facebook and inviting "trusted friends" plus a few others whom were in your AOL, gMail, MSN, Yahoo or hotmail address books.

3. Sharing applications - Facebook has a unique area where there are custom applications which can be integrated within your profile page. These add-on applications range from very useful to extremely fun or humorous. Some will help you show photos and video's, other's may be for showing your mood or even having a foodfight. Since Facebook has been developed since its infancy for the college student, many of the applications appeal to this audience.

4. Joining Groups - You will find one you are linked up with "friends" on Facebook that you can see or be invited to various groups they belong to. This could be a group about a book, movie or politician, or about a subject such as technology or best vacation spots. In a nutshell, groups are about finding people you have a lot in common with and a way to somewhat randomly find some new "friends"

5. Navigate - Spend the first day navigating Facebook. Click on a friend's profile and see how their screens are set up and what applications are on their screen. Try doing some searches for people in the database. Try to understand the various ways of using search to find your friends.

6. College, High School, or City - Facebook makes it easy to find others within your own geographic area. Again, explore this.

And for lucky 7. Find me in Facebook and feel free to add me as a "friend" and let me now how we met.
Facebook me!

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This blog is hosted by google, my gmail account is google, my analytics for watching this blog is now google, my new chat I set up this week is Googletalk, My pictures are stored in Picasa (a google product) and today as I was looking at their new tools area, I found a new tlephone director service called Google Voice Local Search.

I was skeptical at first. I picked up my phone and dialed the number and the recorded voice on the other end said as predicted "city and state please". I said Charlotte, NC. It then said what do you want a phone number for and I thought quickly as it was about lunch hour and said "Pizzeria". within seconds, I heard #1, Amalfi, #2 Brixx, etc. I could just hit the number 1 or say "one" and the service would dial the phone number (I assume for free).

I tried it again with Chinese Restaurants, again it came up with a good list. Then I started to play around. I said "new search" to reaet the searcn and said "Los Angeles, CA" and "Comedy Clubs" and again within seconds was rattling off the names of the top comedy clubs in LA.

I even tried to ask for a "service" instead of a type of product and said "ACT! training" which was the software I spent years training sales people on. Again, went out and started to find companies snd schools offering this.

It also has an option to send the phone # to you as text (SMS) vs. dialing the phone number.

So for a product that is still in the Google Labe, I was extremely impressed. Not only is Google going to collect your searches online, but they are going to track you telephone habits as well and I would guess, start charging companies, if they haven't already to be first in the list in their category.

AOL IM Widget called "Wimzi" Released

Today, I was reading Time Warner press releases via my google reader. As I looked at each headline, this one jumped out at me. AOL announces a new widget for your blog called Wimzi. Instead of paper press releases of old, the hyperlink for the Wimzi was in the on-line press release.

I had an eWarrior moment. At least for today, My AOL Wimzi is on my blog. If I start to get to be a "blog star" one day, I may have to have my team answer my IM's.

If you are a blogger you will find the hyperlink at the bottom of the Wimzi widget.

Into the Blogosphere - Looking to have a traffic jam

Time to build the traffic for my site. It's exciting to experiment and really see how far I can go with this blog. One of my ultimate goals is be a paid speaker for conferences and to sales and marketing professionals.

This weekend I worked a lot behind the scenes on my blogs to build a larger audience through syndication and allowing people to subscribe to my blogs through Feedblitz. I have added a widget box to 2 of my websites and will learn this week about this.

I also continue to look for ways to get the "chicklets" on my site to make it easy for people to subscribe to my blogs where it says, add to yahoo reader, add to google reader, etc.

Also by coincidence, I was browsing the website of a local television station to look at how they handle content. I noticed at the bottom corner of their website an area where they were showing "syndicated blogs". The strangest thing about the article I clicked on was that it was written by the founder of Blogher who is one of the leading professional and educational groups for bloggers. So I got a double bonus. I now subscribe to her blog called "Pause" and applied to have my Media Mensch blog syndicated. I attempted to submit the eWarrior blog, but it told me it already had a blog they had to approve, so I will have to sort this out later.

In addition, I am now using Google Analytics and watching my traffic build. Most of this I will attribute to a similar growth in StumbleUpon.com and the support of my fellow bloggers from LinkedIn.

I have also started a new blog for my LinktoCharlotte venture and am using that to experiment with many of these new tools as well. It is only in its first month and I can see this too we be a great way to attract local traffic and those thinking of relocating to Charlotte.