Generally speaking, I’m a happy guy.
Generally speaking, I go about my business looking for positive ways to connect with people.
Generally speaking, when I see something that someone is doing wrong (in social media) I’ll try to go about my business and just let it slide.
Generally.
Here’s a few things that made me sad this last week.
This made me sad on multiple levels.
I actually know the answer. There’s a greasemonkey script for Firefox that would do exactly what he wants but I’m not going to tell him that. First of all, why would anyone think that all their “friends” need to be invited to anything? Even if I had the average number of friends (130) I couldn’t think of a single event I would want to invite them ALL to. Can you?
Although I blurred the image, this is obviously someone who stands up in front of a crowd on stage talking to people. To me, that means I hold this person to a slightly higher standard. If this was a Girl Scout Troop Leader from Prudhoe Bay I’d certainly cut her some slack.
To find out more about this person I popped over to their Page (not their profile) and found their cover photo.
Those blurred spots are specifically prohibited by Facebook in their guidelines for Pages.
- Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
- Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
- References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
- Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”
Once again, if you are pushing yourself to be more in the public eye, you better be doing it right.
I’m ok with you “friending” everyone – let’s just do this invite thing better, eh? Read more about that at: Facebook Events Better
On the opposite side of this I got an invite from someone to LIKE their Page. They had engaged me once or twice before so I clicked on the message to view the Page.
Turns out the only person who had liked the Page so far was her. There was no posts, no content, no welcome app, and NO COVER PHOTO. I wrote earlier that “Have you ever been the first one to a dinner party, a party where you didn’t even know the host? It makes me feel a little like that”. Only at this Page I had walked in to find the table wasn’t even set yet. Read more at: Suggest to friends BETTER
Running an ad on Facebook can be great. You’ll need an image and some text. Seems simple enough and since it’s just a small image if you need to buy one you could pop over to istockphoto and for a few bucks buy one. That’s almost what this ad did.
Almost because, if you look, you’ll see the image has the “unpaid” watermarks over the top. Really? In the amount you spend on advertising for just a single day you could have bought that image instead of stealing it.
I also have issues with the image and the size of the text within it. I know there are words there but who can read them? I can barely make out that the image is of a house that is upside down. They may exude Excellence in Lending but they aren’t showing Excellence in Images.
Finally, one of the reasons I like Blogging so much is for the natural SEO. That’s Search Engine Optimization. What that means is that if I write quality content and you search for something like “Custom Facebook Page Apps” I’m going to show up, typically for this blog AreWeConnected.com or my CustomPageApps.com site I recently started. I don’t keyword stuff my content, I just write consistently good stuff on topic. That to me is the “natural” part.
There’s always been a faction of people wanting to “game” the system. One of the factors that Google looks at to decide what shows up on a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) is the number of sites linking to a particular page, the value of those sites, and the relevance of the text that describes what the link goes to. In general theory, a site that deals with Facebook Apps linking out to another site about Facebook Apps tells Google this might be a good article to include in that SERP. This is a public post I ran across.
I know this happens, I know it’s a viable ‘grey hat’ strategy. But to indiscriminately ask for link exchanges and do so publicly just gives me the willies. Just like Sweet Polly Purebred or the high school cheerleader, I have a reputation to protect. If I’m willing to cheat on this, where do I draw the line? Actually where I draw the line isn’t as important as where YOU think I would draw the line.
That’s it for things that make me sad. I feel better now that it’s off my chest.
Want to know what makes me happy?
You. Your comments, your tweets, your shares and you just being you.
Bonus: Monday’s post will be “Things That Make Me Happy!” (after all it’s Mondays that need more help – don’t they?)
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and wants a really small one). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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