Update, 10/11/2011: Facebook has postponed the beta version of timeline afterTimeline.comfiled a lawsuit. Timeline is currently only available to those who have Facebook’s Developer application installed.
I've been playing around with the Facebook changes recently announced at f8 in San Francisco and freaking most of the public out soon thereafter. The real-time ticker and subscribe button makes sharing quicker and easier. The popular stories and recent stories seem to be confusing.
The feature that's really caught my eye is the timeline. The timeline rolls out to the public around October 6. To sample it ahead of time, you can access it through the developer apps. For personal users, the attraction of the timeline is obvious: it's attractive, artistic, much like a scrapbooking page layout. The timeline is fun – with one click you can go back to any year, any month and see status updates, photos and important events. It was described by Nir Refuah, vice president of McCann Digital in Israel, as “a digital autobiography.” Refuah said, “First Facebook became the digital ID of everyone, and now it will try to gather our whole life story,”
For brands, the attraction is more subtle. I had trouble at first understanding why a brand would like the new timeline, then the content developer in me kicked in. The timeline's all about story – history -- content. Acquiring as many 'likes” as you can is no longer a driving force. For content-driven non-competitive people like me, that is great news. Awesome content is what will get you in the stream. The popularity contest is no longer about star power, it's about authenticity and the human component of your business. Campaigning for the most “likes” won't do much for you.
To sum up what I've learned so far, the timeline benefits for your business include:
The cover. The cover is a big photo across the top of your page. It is prime real estate and very easy to change. This will be great for promotions and product roll-outs.
The Information blurb. Currently, a viewer has to dig deep to find a company's information tab. When found, it is surprisingly limited, weak and bland. The new timeline will feature the information right under the cover, above the fold, in an easy-to-read format, easy to click through to more info.
Infographic format. The new timeline format will propel brands to focus more on engagement and back story rather than getting more likes. Getting more comments and likes becomes less valuable than sharing authentic content. I believe the mom and pop shops that I serve will benefit more from this than the big corporations. Mom and Pop have real stories involving real people. Mom and Pop shops have a back story and biography that is generally more personable than the giant conglomerates. Admittedly, I'm a little biased on that.
The timeline rolls out soon for personal facebook pages. I'm not sure when it rolls out for brands and business pages.
Just when I was starting to flirt with Google+, Facebook has gotten back in the game and lured me back. Imagine that.
Sure.... your customers like you. Your friends like you. Your mom likes you.
But does Facebook like you?
Edgerank is Facebook's way of "liking" you. Edgerank is a search ranking algorithm designed to help Facebook choose which posts should be placed on a person's feed.
Creating a business page and updating your status does not necessarily mean all your fans will see that status update in their wall feed. The default view for all personal facebook accounts is the Top News view rather than the Most Recent view. The Top News will show the updates that Facebook has determined the viewer is most interested in.
There are several things you can do that will increase the chances of your page landing in the status stream on a person’s facebook page.
Post a video with your update. Posting a link doesn’t help that much anymore, but photos and videos are still effective. If you don’t have a video to upload from your site, you can go to any video site like vimeo or youtube and get the embed code. Include that embed code right in your status update.
Post a photo with your update. A small thumbnail will automatically appear if you include a link in your update, but simply using the thumbnail is not as effective as using a different photo. Using the “Upload a photo” button is much more effective. Either load a photo from a file on your computer or you can go to your website and take a screen capture photo and upload it to facebook.
Post an update that will encourage your fans to interact with your update. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not interesting to them either. Interaction includes when a fan clicks “like” or “share” or clicks the thumbnail, clicks through to your page, or comments, etc. Comments carry the most weight -- asking a question is usually very effective. The more popular your update, the stronger the edge rank and the more likely it will get into the Top News feed on your fan’s wall. Everytime a fan interacts with an update, it increases the edge.
Post daily if possible. The frequency of activity on your page will increase your EdgeRank. Having said that, you don’t want to post too often. You’re a business, not a “friend” and facebook users will just get annoyed and block you if you fill up their feed with your updates. Also, don't let the pressure of posting daily cause you to post dry, boring updates. You have to up the awesome, social media marketing loves awesome and is brutal on boring.
I had a problem appear this week that I've seen before, but couldn't remember the best resolution for it.
If you don't setup your ImageCache Presets correctly, you sometimes get caught with black stripes down the sides of your images. In my case, this was happening in a view used on the Tyler Brothers website, in this case the page for Youth and Children's Carhartt clothing.
The solution to the black stripes is to define your "canvas" color within your imagecache preset. Here's what I believe to be the best way:
First, install the ImageCache Actions module. This module gives you a great number of options to transform your uploaded images.
Then, add a Define Canvas action. The position of this action is important. In my case, it needs to go between the Scale and Crop actions.
In my situation, I set the canvas to white (#ffffff), make it appear under the image, and it works like a charm.
Seth Godin had a good post called "What did you ship in 2010?", which listed out all his accomplishments for 2010 and asked readers to think about our own. Read it at Seth's Blog.
Sometimes we get caught up in the daily busy-ness of business and don't take a breather to see what we've accomplished. Well, here's a list of things we've done Broadstreet Consulting, 2010.
Spoke about Drupal at DrupalCamp SC, DrupalCamp Asheville, and BarCamp Charleston
On a personal note, it's been a year of wins and losses.
I lost my Dad at age 79, who was always a good friend and supporter, and my favorite golf partner.
I've seen my youngest daughter complete her first year of college with excellent grades, and make some great decisions along the way.
I've seen my son earn his college degree and demonstrate amazing talent in music, art, and Web design.
I've seen my oldest graduate from Law School at the top of her class, and demonstrate a servant's heart and a mother's heart with consistency and grace.
All in all, it's been a year to remember, and 2011 is shaping up to be even more memorable.
I'm a little late sharing this but I just wanted to take moment to mention the very successful Bar Camp Charleston (www.BarCampChS.org).
There were dozens of interesting sessions covering everything from Linux to Web Design to Salsa dancing. There were 3 Drupal sessions. The first was 'Intro to Drupal' which was given by Nikolai Burton. Nikolai runs Charleston Drupal Users Group (http://chsdug.org/) and also presented a session called "A Whirlwind World Tour of Film." Nikolai was asked to do this session att the last minute and he filled in admirably. He presented to a packed classroom of more than forty people and it was a valuable session.
My second Drupal session was at 5 pm when most of us were approaching a brain-dead state after a full day of information consumption. The Topic for this session was 'Drupal Next Steps - an Introduction to Drush & Performance Tuning'. By this time the Drupal crowd had thinned considerably. It didn't help that the time slot put me in competition with he very popular 'How to Make Your Own Beer' session. All in all, it was a very productive day and I want to express congratulations and thanks to the team that made it happen.
We tested Boost on www.busbeetruckparts.com and a test version of www.tylerbrothers.net. Both of these sites have mostly anonymous users and fairly static content. They are both hosted on a shared hosting service. These factors make them good candidates for Boost.
Apache Bench (ab) is a performance measurement tool that comes with Apache. It comes natively on a Mac. If you are using a PC, you need to load the WAMP or XAMPP stack to get Apache and ab. Some links about ab and XAMPP:
Like most people, I started doing business with GoDaddy a long time ago, when I first started registering Domain names. Actually, my first domain—sliker.com in 1997—was done through Network Solutions, who I think had a monopoly back then. But like most people, when GoDaddy came out with $9.99 domains it was irresistible. Since then I have had hundreds of domain registrations and renewals at GoDaddy, and two different hosting accounts for my various customer sites and my own Web properties.
While I still host my domains their, I left Godaddy hosting for HostGator In 2007, when I first got turned on to Drupal. GoDaddy has a very unorthodox hosting system and does not support standard tools such as CPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) for managing LAMP hosting. (LAMP is an acronym for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, which is the open source platform that Drupal runs on. At the time I left, the only way to install and run Drupal was using Fantastico, which was very limiting. Since then, they’ve improved their Drupal support—I recent did a job for [county bounty] and created a Drupal Multi-site on GoDaddy’s hosting system. It worked out fine, but it was difficult due to the odd programs and interfaces we had to use.
The other reason I was glad to leave GoDaddy was due to the company’s marketing and the general attitude of the owner, Bob Parsons. When I want to login and check on my domains, I don’t want to feel like I’m checking in to a strip club. Now granted, there is no pornography or nudity on the site, but there is a lot of scantily clad women and a general attitude that makes me feel kind of … dirty. I would just prefer not to participate, or limit my participation to a bare minimum.
Meanwhile… HostGator has been great! They have great service. Their ticketing system and engineers are top notch. Their phone support is very good. And I love the online chat support—I can talk to a tech support agent via chat at any time of day or night. The HostGator experience has been all good, and I highly recommend them for your Drupal hosting.
The first ever Drupal Camp South Carolina is coming up this Sunday and I am giving a presentation called "Which Drupal Modules Should I Use?" The presentation is geared toward people who are new to Drupal and lost in determining which of the 5000+ contributed modules to use.
Broadstreet has been in business in its current form for about 4 years. By all measurements, business is good. We have a handful of excellent customers that really understand the Web and how it can transform their business. We continue to grow, mostly by word of mouth, and we become more productive and more efficient, making more powerful and better looking websites, and branching more and more into the marketing end of the business.
So now we enter a new phase - old school paper-based advertising which supports a paper that supports our community. I like it. What do you think?
This month we ran our first advertisement in the 
