A collaborated post with Max Luster over Google Wave

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(haha just kidding.)

To Early Stage Consumer Service Entrepreneurs:

You’ve just gone through the hardship of building early infrastructure and a quality team to lead the way to your future growth and profitabillity. In the process, you built a service you know your prospective customers would love. The only problem: they don’t know about it!

The cost of starting your company was likely significantly higher than what you initially expected (Who knew that licensing and permits would cost over $5000?). The advertising budget for your grand opening just went from a lavish full color ad in popular newspapers and magazines to a limited campaign on Google Adwords.

Entrepreneurs like yourself are in need of costless forms of promotion that are still effective at attracting your target audiences. Social media is seemingly the key to providing effective communication for little to no money.

The first two social media networks that pop into mind would be Facebook and Twitter. Since the websites draw in around 124 million and 23 million respectively - the amount of outreach for any successful marketing campaign would be monumental.

So keeping potential clients and friends updated to your company’s news comes differently with each of the social networks. Danah Boyd, on her blog, writes about the differences between Facebook status updates and Twitter updates.

Here are 3 reasons to use Facebook statuses and Twitter Updates to better promote your company:

Facebook:

1. Establish Personal Connections

• 2 way connection accept/deny: Facebook is about having a connection with a “friend”, not a “follower”. Boyd writes that Facebook “is about people at a similar level of status interacting”. When @replying a person, you are featured both on your own wall and their wall. You have gone through a selection process of whether or not you want to be their friend.

In this situation, my Status update was on both Max Luster’s and my wall.

This allows for you to mention a person on your Facebook Page. Thank them for writing a good review about your product, for coming to your event, for writing a blog post about your company etc. The mention will be broadcasted to both the people that are Fans on your Facebook Page and also on the user’s wall.

2. Make Your Fans Feel Exclusive

Offering fans exclusive information about your products/services gives them an incentive to stay. Pizza Hut’s Facebook Page isthe perfect example of exclusivity.

Their “Order App” Tab on their Facebook Page allow for Facebook users to order pizza off of Facebook. Offering your customers/fans the ability to do something solely on Facebook also establishes loyalty for your company.

3. Develop Community Around Your Product/Service

The option of keeping comments out in the open allows for open dialogue between not only yourself, but also your fans. Likeminded people are able to connect with each other, and at the same time, you have feedback that you are able to gain from your product/service.

Motorola builds community by allowing their Facebook fans to comment on each other’s wall posts. Getting organic comment from fans is a good way to develop community. Posts should not only be coming from you.

Twitter:

1. Join In On Existing Conversations

• By using twitter tracking services like Tweet Beep your organization will be able to conveniently monitor what people are saying about your product, and your competitors products. By monitoring what general audiences are saying, you’ll be able to write status updates that smartly respond to consumer sentiment. This can create excellent opportunities to offer insight, and establish credibility as a thought leader in your space.

2. Drive Traffic

• One of the simplest, but arguably the most important function of twitter is to promote content that you’ve created and hosted on your website. Letting your customers know that you just added a of content to your page will be  a great way to drive traffic to that content.

3. Crisis Management

• Since updates are limited to 140 characters on twitter, information spreads fast. What happens if your traffic spikes and your server crashes? Without twitter, getting message out as to why issues have occured would travel a lot slower. In crisis situations like that, often times consumers are simply looking for a reason why the content they requested is unavailable - but without that simple status update on Twitter, they may never find out - or find out too late.

I’m always hearing scary stories about employees getting fired from their jobs because of things their bosses find on Facebook. I’ve never had an issue where I was hiding something from someone on public profiles. I think of the internet as a public pool, if someone pees in it, WE ALL KNOW.

So I have compiled a list of 7 things that you can do to protect your facebook privacy and to just become smarter in general about what you do online:

1. Change your password frequently.

Just a security measure for yourself. Before you go changing your own personal information, make sure that people who you don’t remember giving your password to or people you don’t want getting their hands on your password don’t get it!

Change your password every 3-5 months and make sure that they aren’t silly things like “happy” or “password” or “12345”.

This is your personal image we are talking about here, make sure that no one has control over that but you.

2. Your Privacy Settings!

If you haven’t been here to change your privacy to settings, do it.This is probably the first thing you should do after you get a Facebook personal page. I personally would not want anyone poking around my photos whom I don’t know, no matter how much fun I had in “Summer ‘09”, I would not prefer it if my personal details were just out in the open to random men in Albuquerque.

BBC News writes an interesting article on how malicious software out there can steal your identity, no matter how private your settings are. Read about it here.

3. Check how different people can see your profile.

Right on top of privacy settings, Facebook can show you how your friends can see your profile. For me, no one can see my wall if they are not part of the Emerson network. If you want to share photos to people that you went to college with but not your employers (BEWARE OF THIS) you can do so by changing the privacy settings. But just a note of warning, if it’s on the internet, its probably not only in the one place you think it is.

4. Leave unnecessary networks.

I am currently in the Boston, MA, Emerson College, and Shanghai American School network. They are all applicable to me, and I live in Boston. Don’t join networks because your friends are on it, don’t try to stalk other people in a network because if you can see what they have on their profile, others can see what you have on yours.

Make sure you are making the correct choices. People are watching.

5. Be smart about your updates.

Facebook updates pose the question “What are you thinking” before you update your status. A good idea is to post a link to something you found interesting, or a remark upon how far/close the weekend is. NOT “My job sucks, I want to die” - those are the sure fire ways to get you on the streets my friend.

If there is any advice that I would say take away from this list is to take a second to think. Facebook, like any other online tool is shared by hundreds of millions of people. Don’t think that only the people you want to see it will see it.

6. Periodically sort through your friends

In the beginning when I had facebook, I would just friend everyone (even the people who I didn’t know). Months later, I have random people commenting on my photos, writing on my wall — eek! Never.

So make sure you are cleaning out your friends. It’s not that great to have 1000+ friends but 800 of them are random people from India, Nepal, or Finland. Facebook is about connecting with the friends that you have, not having creepy ones you will never meet like your statuses.

7. Google yourself!

If you haven’t done this yet, do so! Google is the best way that people can search for you. What is being said about you? Look at the photos. I personally have random people from San Francisco come up on my google search — weird I know. But at least they aren’t photos of me throwing up on my couch, slacking off during a work day, or doing other embarassing things.