Who is looking at your Facebook? 3 Privacy Options you NEED to set

Back in September we reported that Facebook had, at the behest of the Canadian government, implemented a host of new privacy options. However implementing these features meant changing users privacy settings, and while Facebook took lengths to make sure that users were prompted with a message about the new privacy settings and given immediate options for securing their profile, the pop up left many people with a false feeling that they had secured their Facebook profile from prying eyes.

In fact, the update left many things open and accessible to the public, things that you need to secure.

One of the first things that happened after the Facebook switch over was that everyone’s albums became public, including profile pictures.

1. Reset your Album Permissions

To correct this, click profile and then at the bottom of the page click “Album Privacy”. Now you have to set each album manually to be viewable by everyone, groups of friends, friends of friends, or custom settings that will allow you to do such things as make photos only available to specific people.

If you have photos from parties, photos of yourself drunk, or any other embarrassing pictures you will want to set those to private, friends, or custom.

2. Set what your friends can share about you

One of the more insidious Facebook privacy loopholes was that if a friend had an application installed, that application could mine information from your profile without you knowing—even if you had locked that information away. This persists, but you can limit it by changing your settings under privacy settings>Application and Websites>What your friends can share about you. You can’t keep them from sharing publicly available information, but you can limit a lot.

By default a strange selection is on. It doesn’t share innocuous information like religious and political views, but it shares your pictures, personal info, notes, status updates. Read more at blog.vkistudios.com

Question: What market is going to grow in double digits through 2014? Answer: The mobile market.

Next Question: Do you have a mobile presence? Answer: If you have a “regular” website you also have a mobile presence.

That’s right: your existing site is a player in the mobile market, but chances are it’s not too mobile friendly. So, what easy changes can you make right now to better serve a mobile market? Keep reading and we’ll walk you through some.

How Desktop and Mobile Sites Differ

Coded specifically for smaller mobile browsers. The most common languages for mobile sites are: cHTML (compressed HTML), XHTML Basic 1.1 XHTML MP 1.2 and WML 1.3 (wireless markup language).

Less page content

Fewer images

Less navigation

Designed with specific user-tasks in mind

Desktop Site

Designed to be viewed on a desktop/laptop computer

More images

More content

Flash

More navigation

Mobile Searches Return Non-Mobile Pages Google dominates mobile search leaving Bing and Yahoo! with about 2% of that market, so we’re going to focus on Google SERPs only. Google has a unique bot for mobile sites (Mobile Bot), but not a different index. The pages (mobile vs. non-mobile) are just treated differently. Due to the lack of mobile specific pages, Google is “borrowing” desktop sites for mobile SERPs. That means if you don’t have a dedicated mobile page, you’ll still show up in mobile searches.

Google is about relevancy, so if a non-mobile page is the best result it will rank for now. Google will also adapt your desktop page to render in a mobile browser. Many desktop pages render decently in mobile browsers, but issues include overlapping navigation, non-functioning flash, pop up windows that cause browsing issues, and a page width that requires too much scrolling.

Does This Browser Make My Site Look Big? View your desktop pages in a mobile emulator so you can see how it looks on different smartphones screen sizes/browsers. Compare this to the PC version of your site. Mobile Phone Emulator is an excellent tool that lets you view pages on different screen sizes for different mobile phones/browsers. It shows you a working version of your site in mobile form. Click the links and navigate your site just as a mobile user would.

Easy changes to make your site mobile friendly. After viewing your pages on different platforms you’ll begin to see page changes you can make that will improve mobile browsing without hurting desktop browsing. These may include: Read more at blog.seorevolution.com

“Why should we have a blog?”  It’s a reasonable question.

Nevermind the fact that millions of businesses are blogging and multiples of those millions of customers are reading said blogs. In fact, 23% of the primary Fortune 500 corporations have an external corporate blog.

Blogs as a content management system make it very easy for content publishers within a company to surface informative, useful content directly to their “customers” and indirectly via search engines and social channels. Business bloggers report their activities have resulted in greater industry visibility, new customers & sales and thought leadership.

My take is that if a business has something interesting to say and stories to tell, then a blogging platform can be one of the most productive channels/methods for publishing and engaging. If not, then there are other, more important problems to solve.

For companies that are new to the idea of blogging as a brand, vs. individuals going out on their own and blogging about their professional passions, the notion of starting and maintaining corporate blog often invokes fears of being sucked into a black hole of “counterproductivity”. Writing, researching, IT support and hosting, plus marketing and measuring something that wasn’t forecast in the first place and without certain returns, can seem a lost cause.

1. Become a blog reader. I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t understand blogs from an information consumption point of view, it’s debateable whether you’ll be able to produce a successful one of your own.  If you read certain magazines, newspapers or email newsletters from certain sources, try subscribing to their blogs instead – or as an alternative. That way you’re not spending additional time (outside of a few seconds subscribing) and you might even save some time.

2. Set goals for your business blog. If you don’t have a destination for your blogging effort then “time suck” will become your unwanted friend. Don’t waste time trying to serve everyone. Be purposeful in your blogging effort by identifying a few, reasonable business outcomes and timeframe.  KPIs (key performance indicators) are a good starting point for measurement that can lead to outcomes.

3.  Create a schedule. A blog editorial plan serves multiple purposes, including putting into action the above suggestion. It also helps direct content creation for business blogs with multiple contributors. It keeps writers on track with content that will most likely meet customer and business needs.  A planned blogging editorial schedule also helps when writers run into dry periods.  Yet another benefit is that it creates a set of expected editorial for readers. It creates an element of predictability readers can count on to return to week after week.

4. Be efficient with content. There are many ways to get more out of less with content creation and knowing what does well already in combination with an understanding of what your target audience is interested in is essential.

5. Make blogging a team effort. Our 7 year blog birthday for TopRank’s Online Marketing blog is coming up in a few days. After 7 years of blogging, I can tell you that very few individuals have what it takes to create unique, useful and compelling content for more than 6 months, let alone 7 years. That’s why a corporate blog really needs to be a team effort in the long run.   It might fall on the shoulders of one person to start, but a smaller amount of effort from multiple people is more interesting, expands audience reach and it’s far more sustainable. Read more at www.toprankblog.com

What “Shifts” Have Occurred

Shifts represent a systemic change that impacts the behavior of people, industry, institutions, governments and society. A change in behavior creates a demand for change in people, processes, commerce and interactions with markets aiming to serve the demand for change. When the behavior of a market changes everything tied to the market must change or be left behind clinging to the old ways. When the behavior of a market changes suppliers to the market have to adjust to the changes. When change becomes dynamic and frequent markets react rather than think about the implications of the changes and what is likely to happen next. Strategically speaking dynamic and frequent market changes  create chaos for the uninformed.

Thinking Ahead Of Change

Before you can apply critical thinking about what will likely change in the future you must put past changes into perspective. In an effort to put past changes into perspective we will provide the following ten summaries:

Market consumption has shifted away from mass media to conversational media

Commerce is moving towards conversational currency and away from traditional market currency

Meaningless and irrelevant chatter is shifting to meaningful and valuable conversations that create the most value

Cultural changes are fueling market changes. The culture of control has shifted to individual control by preference and privileges to communicate

Economics are being disrupted and redefined by the influence of digital economies. Digital economies are fueled by innovation created by the exchange of ideas and collaboration of the many rather than the few.

Business as usual is rapidly being replaced by the unusual. The unusual is driven by participation, freedom of choice and peer influence rather than control and command structures that steal  joy of  work and experiential learning.

Advertising and marketing methods of the past are no longer relevant. Signs (mass media) are being replaced by conversational influence. Buyers influence and recommendations will replace advertising. Trying to converge the old with the new is a waste of time, money and reputation.

Knowledge is in demand. Information overload is clutter. Value creation enabled by knowledge shared is the currency that attracts markets to engage. Pushing your information that is not in context with your markets interest is considered anti-social.

Smart vs. dumb technology is the route to efficiency and effectiveness. Knowing the difference and how to use relevant technology separates the leaders from the followers.

Having and being able to quickly change strategic  directions in alignment with the market changes requires a change in strategic thinking. Strategy provides the direction for everything. Not knowing how to think about strategy differently and subsequently being able to execute efficiently means you cannot provide effective organizational direction. Without clear directions in alignment with the market you end up going in the wrong direction. Read more at www.relationship-economy.com