If you don’t have a Google Profile yet, you may want to consider setting one up for a number of reasons.  To see what one looks like, take a look at mine.

First, what is a Google Profile?

It’s a personal page where you are able to share information about yourself on the various Google services, but it’s a lot more than that too. It’s a publicly available page you can use to tell people a bit about yourself and your business, and add links to your blog, website, Facebook page, Twitter account, etc.

Why should you have a Google Profile?

• Think about it – it’s a Google product! Since they like their own stuff they’re going to make sure your profile shows up when people search for you. If you have a profile, and use your full name, it’ll show up at the bottom of the first page when someone searches for you on Google. (Search for me to see what I’m talking about – Therese Kopiwoda.)
• Your Google Profile can serve as a holding page for all your stuff. Since you can add links to all your social media accounts and websites, it’s a great way to give people a snapshot of who you are. Rather than directing people to your accounts separately, you’ll give them the URL to your page on Google and they can go from there. Better yet, get your own domain and redirect it to your profile. It’ll be easier to remember than the default URL (and probably shorter). Mine is simply www.ThereseKopiwoda.com.
• If you have a business you want people to find it, and since people want to know who they’re doing business with, your Google Profile is an excellent way to give people the info they’re looking for. In this way it helps build your total online presence – both for your business and yourself.
• Anybody who’s looking for a job needs to have a Google Profile! Hiring managers will look for you online before they call you for an interview. If you have a well-crafted profile with links to some of your accounts, and even some recommendations, your potential employer will find it.

How to set up your profile
Google Profiles are super easy to set up. Go to their setup page and follow the directions. It’ll only take a few minutes, and  you can tweak it as often as you’d like.

With over 400 million active users on Facebook, you know there’s a lot of spamming going on. A lot of Facebook spammers are looking for that small percentage of people who will fall for whatever sales pitch they put out. There are others though, who are making a real effort to use Facebook to market their business, make friends, or just learn their way around the most popular social networking website around. Unfortunately, they may not be aware of the fact that what they’re doing is getting them labeled as a Facebook spammer by the very people they’re trying to reach out to.

These five Facebook activities just might get you a big bad spammer label. If you’re guilty of any of them, you might want to rethink your Facebook strategy.

1. Your only activity is Friends, Groups, and Pages

Chances are, you’re trying to build up your friends list so you can blast people with your message – whatever that might be. As a result, the majority of the updates on your profile looks like this:

• Joe and Mary are now friends
• Joe and Andy are now friends
• Joe joined the group We be spammers
• Joe and Frank are now friends
• Joe likes Marketers and Spammers
• Joe and Michael are now friends
• Joe likes I Love Spam!
• Joe and Susan are now friends
• Joe likes I’m going to sell you all sorts of stuff
• Joe and Angela are now friends
• Joe and Steven are now friends
• . . . and the list goes on . . .

2. You should LIKE THIS!

You’re constantly sending page suggestions to all your friends – sometimes for the same pages over and over again. It’s fine to send a suggestion now and then, but when you send your friends suggestions constantly they’re likely to get tired of it.

3. You send friend requests to people you have absolutely no connection with.

You send a friend request to somebody you don’t know, and have no common friends. When the person you want to be friends with sends a message back asking if you know each other, you either don’t respond or you send a snotty reply.

If you really want to be friends with someone you don’t know, and have a good reason for wanting to do so, include a short note with the friend request. Just click the “add a personal message” and let the person know why you’re sending the friend request.

4. Using other Fan Pages and Groups to sell your stuff

You join Facebook Groups and Like Facebook Pages so you can post messages about your business. Recently someone became a fan of the PetsitUSA Fan Page and promptly posted a message that said

“PetsitUSA is now a favorite page of @my-facebook-page. Please make our page a favorite of yours.”

When I went to the Facebook Fan Page mentioned, I saw about 40 favorite fan pages listed, and each one of them had the very same message posted that was posted on the PetsitUSA Fan Page. Spammer.

5. It’s all about YOU! YOU! YOU!

Everything on your business page is all about you or your business. “Buy this!” “Look at me!” “Our company is wonderful!” Blah … blah . . . blah . . .

Sure, we all know Fan Pages are quite often set up to help sell a product or service, but rather than giving a constant sales pitch, interact with the people who like your page. Remember, it’s called social media for a reason.

Doing some of these things may seem like the right thing to do to get business, but think about how you feel when someone is constantly trying to sell you something. It gets old real fast and tends to backfire! There are lots of people who will go out of their way to avoid companies that are use the “in your face” approach to selling their products or services.

Facebook is at it again. This week they’ve announced some pretty major changes in the way your personal information is used. One of these changes is how your Facebook profile will be integrated with other websites – currently Microsoft Docs, Pandora, and Yelp. They call it “instant personalization” and you may or may not like it.

The way instant personalization works is that when you are logged in to Facebook and then go to Yelp, for example, you will see what your friends are up to on Yelp. And, of course if you have an account your friends will be able to see what you’ve been up to as well.

In addition to you and your friends seeing what you’re all doing, instant personalization allows the partner websites (Microsoft Docs, Pandora, Yelp) to access any information on your profile that you’ve set as viewable to everyone. This includes your name, profile picture, gender, where you live, friends list, and pages.

By default, Facebook has instant personalization set to be on but if you’re concerned about having your information carried over to other websites there is a way to opt out of it. There are a few steps involved in opting out though – it’s not as easy as just checking a box. You can uncheck the “allow” box in your privacy settings, but doing that doesn’t stop your friends from sharing your information. (You didn’t really think Facebook would let you out of it that easily did you?)

The folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation have put together a good step by step video on how to opt out. The thing to remember is that you’ll have to opt out of each website individually. And because Facebook intends to partner with more websites you’ll need to go through the process in the future if you want to opt out of each one.

Here are the links to the applications so you can block them:

Microsoft Docs
Pandora
Yelp

One of my pet peeves is how often people forget to say thank you. I know we’ve all been there. Maybe you sent a quick email to answer a question, did a favor in the real world, held a door open for someone, or any number of things. After all is said and done, the person goes their merry way and we’re left wondering why there wasn’t any acknowledgment. It’s not that people should bow down and pay homage, but a simple little ‘thank you’ can go a long way. Honestly, it doesn’t take long to type or say the words but oftentimes it goes unsaid.

It happens online and in the real world. We just aren’t as polite and respectful as we once were. So, when I went to listen to Peter Shankman, founder of Help A Reporter Out, speak at SXSW, and heard him talk about this very same thing, I loved that he was calling us all out about it. It may seem like a little thing, but it’s not really.

The bulk of Peter’s talk was about how smart self-promoters aren’t out there spamming people with the all too common “I’m great I’m wonderful, I can save your life” type talk. Instead, they’re willing to help others, and as a result they become the type of person who’s looked at as a resource – an expert in their particular field. They respect people enough to understand the 24/7 sales pitch is a real turn off.

Peter also talked about saying ‘thank you.’ It’s all part of being respectful and having manners. It doesn’t take much energy to type out ‘thank you’ and hit the reply button. And it takes even less time to say thank you. So why don’t we do it? Laziness? Disrespect? Too absorbed in watching the world revolve around us? I’m not entirely sure, but we sure as heck don’t do it enough.

With this in mind, I thought I’d try a little experiment – I set up a Facebook page where you can say thank you. You may want to thank your first grade teacher for opening up the world of reading to you. Or maybe you want to thank the guy who let you squeeze into traffic this morning. It doesn’t really matter, just go thank somebody! My hope is that it’ll spark something in each of us and remind us just how important those two little words are, and we’ll all start showing our gratitude a little more often. If we do it enough it’ll become a habit, and what a great habit saying ‘thank you’ could be for all of us.

Now please,  go say ‘Thank You.’

Do you have nightmares about your Facebook profile going away and losing your friends, photos, profile and wall status updates? You’re not alone!

If you were on Facebook at all this past weekend you may have experienced a certain level of panic as things got wonky (prompting some good subject matter for that nightmare.) They were having some server problems that seemed to take forever to get fixed. Strangeness was the norm. The wonkiness kept people from posting status updates, wouldn’t allow people to post on their friends’ profiles or to join fan pages, and even made some fan pages disappear for a while. If you spend much time at all on Facebook, you know this type of thing isn’t new. Unfortunately, it seems to be part of the whole experience.

If you’re looking for a little peace of mind to help keep your profile safe, Social Safe may just be the solution. It’s a downloadable application that backs up your Facebook friends, photos, profile and wall status updates. So, rather than just having all of your data on your Facebook profile, it’ll be safely stored away on your own computer where you can access it at any time. It doesn’t download your friends’ contact information, but you’ll at least have access to who they are. Should you need to restore your entire profile in the event of a catastrophic Facebook episode, you can at least be sure you’ll know who to get reconnected with. (Trying to remember a few hundred Facebook friends if my profile went bye-bye would drive me nuts!)

SocialSafe isn’t free, but it’s pretty darn close at only $2.99. It is well worth the money – and super easy to use. You’ll download SocialSafe, login to your Facebook account with Facebook Connect, and click on download. Once it’s finished you can view your Facebook profile content on your own computer.

Right now SocialSafe is just for personal profiles – it doesn’t backup Facebook Fan Pages yet, but the folks at SocialSafe are working on it. Hopefully they’ll get that worked out soon. And, of course Social Safe is on Facebook.

SocialSafe Explanation .. Introducing Wall Backups from Pascal Wheeler on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, social media tools, social media backup

As I was at the grocery store the other day, a young woman in front of me was busy texting as she slowly put her items up on the counter. The girl behind the register worked as quickly as she could given her customer’s unwillingness to put the cell phone away for a few minutes. I was tempted to say something but decided to keep my mouth shut. Since I wasn’t in a hurry, I just watched. I wanted to see if the woman would eventually put her phone away and pay attention to what she was doing.

She didn’t.

When it came time to pay, and only after she had finished sending a message, she swiped her card, picked up her bag and left. Not once did she make eye contact with the cashier. Not once did she even acknowledge the cashier…at all!

When the cashier started to ring my things up, I asked if that type of thing got to her. She just shrugged and said, “I’m used to it.”

What a sad statement!

There have been other times too, when I’ve seen cell phones get in the way of in-person communication. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been having face-to-face conversation with someone and all of a sudden they put one hand up, palm toward me, while they tap their ear with the other hand. Suddenly they’re whisked way from what’s going on in front of them and are deep into a conversation with someone who isn’t even there. An example of this is when a guy came to my home to give me an estimate on some work I wanted done. As we were standing in my living room talking about the work, the guy’s phone rang. He flashed me the hand, tapped his Bluetooth, and turned his back to me as he started talking. It was only when he finished talking to the person on the phone that he turned his attention back to me. He was politely escorted out of my house and didn’t get the job.

As much as I love social media and all the technology surrounding it, I honestly believe cell phones, texting, and the Internet in general are to blame for a lot of the anitsocial behavior today. It’s ironic actually, that the very technology that’s helping us become more social is also helping us become less social!

So what’s the solution?

It’s actually quite simple, really.

Turn the phone off. Take the Bluetooth out of your ear. Close your laptop. Pay attention to the person in front of you. Please!

Seriously…it’s that easy!

Honestly, what’s that important that you need to totally dis the person you’re face-to-face with so you can talk to someone who has interrupted you? Let your voice mail do what it was created to do – take a message. And if it’s a text, that can wait too. Technology is great, but remember that it’s supposed to help us be more social…not less!

Technorati Tags: social media, anti-social behavior, technology

People who signed up for Google Voice are starting to receive invitations to set up their new accounts. Google Voice allows users to have one phone number that can be re-routed to ring at any number of other phones. There are a number of ways it can be set up. For example, it can be set up so that if certain people call your Google Voice number it will ring your home, office, and cell number. For other people you might set it up so that when they call your Google Voice number it rings only on your home phone, or even so that it goes directly to voicemail. And, since your Google number is permanent, even if you change your numbers all you need to do is re-route your Google number to the new number.

It’s not just forwarding numbers though – Google voice offers other features like voicemail, conference calling, call blocking, outbound calling, and more.

Here’s a short explanation from Google . . .

I signed up, but haven’t received my invitation to set up my account yet.

Technorati Tags: Google Voice, Google

Imagine you’re hanging out with some friends and along comes this person you don’t know, who gets right in your face and blurts out . . .

“HEY YOU! My widgets are on sale today. When you buy two, you’ll get one free. Go to my website right now and buy some!”

If you’re like me, you’re probably going to say something like . . .

“Uhh, ok. I’ll keep that in mind. And if I need some Widgets I’ll call Widgets R Us, not you!”

Interacting with people online works much the same way. The fact that the word social is the first word in the phrase “social media” isn’t an accident. These days, if you want to be part of social media, one of the keys is to actually be social. Sure, old time advertising still works, but it’s important to know when to do that and when it’s not appropriate. Blurting out a sale on widgets is quite often considered spammy. If, on the other hand someone starts a discussion, and things lead to a point where it makes sense to mention a widget sale, that’s great. People are interacting and having a discussion, which is way different than sticking a widget in someone’s face and shouting “BUY MY WIDGETS!”

I have a group on LinkedIn for people who work in the pet industry, which I set it up so that I, and others, could network with like-minded professionals. I’ve been on many forums over the years, and have seen some very good ones go downhill fast once the “widgets for sale” folks took over. Because of that, I decided right from the get go to limit the amount of advertising that would be acceptable. So I wrote up a short list of guidelines for posting, including some info about advertising. Here’s the blurb about advertising . . .

Whether it’s on a personal or business level, the idea behind LinkedIn is to make connections that might be beneficial in a variety of ways. One of the many tools LinkedIn provides to do this is the discussion area. This area serves a way to interact with each other, talk about new ideas, get advice etc. With that in mind, I’d like to ask that everyone refrain from advertising in the discussion area. Feel free to introduce your company, product, etc. when you join the group and introduce yourself. Following that, include a signature line that includes your business name and a link to your website. Posts that are strictly advertising in nature will be removed.

If you have news about your business such as sales, press releases, special events, etc. please post it in the news area.

I think it’s pretty clear, to the point, and explains what the discussion area is all about. When people join the group, the advertising guidelines are brought to their attention, so it’s no secret. And, as the last sentence says, they can post some of their advertising stuff in the news area, which is set apart from the discussion area.

Thankfully, I haven’t had to delete very many advertising posts. Most people tend to understand why I don’t allow a lot of advertising and have emailed to thank me for keeping things on track. They aren’t interested in having widgets in their faces either, and appreciate having a place to network with each other without having to wade through advertisements.

There are plenty of websites where people can advertise for free – many are set up just for that purpose. Before posting advertising though it’s a good idea to find out if it fits in with the general theme of the website you want to post to. If it’s a discussion forum, like you’ll find on LinkedIn and other websites, going with the flow and trying to stick to the guidelines may get you farther than trying to set your own rules.

It’s not just advertising though. Regardless of what social media website you’re on, whether it’s a discussion forum, photo sharing site, video sharing, or other type of social media site it’s a good idea to get an feel for the written and unwritten rules.

Sure, there are places where it may be totally appropriate to shout “BUY MY WIDGETS,” but just be sure it makes sense!

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, netiquette, online advertising, social media

Over the past few months I’ve been doing social media teleclasses as part of the monthly teleclass series at Six Figure Pet Sitting Academy. The first one, which was a huge success was a general overview of social media, and in the second one I helped people understand Twitter and how it can be used for both business and personal purposes. The classes have been very well attended by people from all walks of life – pet sitters, writers, retailers, therapists, and others. Some are interested in using it for their business and others just want to learn what all their friends are talking about.

Both of these social media teleclasses are now available, and include a Tips and Tools sheet that covers a lot of what I talked about during the class, and a bit more. You’ll find them on the products tab above.

Technorati Tags: social media teleclasses, Twitter, social media

Social Media: How to Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
to Make Money in your Business

A Teleclass with Therese Kopiwoda, of PetsitUSA.com
and Kristin Morrison, of Six Figure Pet Sitting Academy

Join us April 28 for a teleclass on using social media
to give your business a boost!

——————————————————————————–

Knowing how to put social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to work for your business can make a big difference in your marketing plan. Savvy business owners are harnessing the power of the Internet to boost their bottom line, and you should too! Are YOU ready to catapult your business to success?

Don’t be left behind. Learn how to make social media work for you and your business!

In this 90-minute teleclass, I’ll give you an overview of social media and how it can be used to drive traffic to your website, gain more visibility for your company, and help you get started with social media.

Date: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Time: 5:00pm PST / 8:00pm EST
How long is this teleclass? 90 minutes
How much: $20 (Registration by April 21) / $30 (Registration April 22 or later)

For more information and to register:
Kristin Morrison, of Six Figure Pet Sitting Academy, is hosting this event. You can find out more about the class and register on her website. This class isn’t just for pet sitters though. It’s for anybody who wants to learn more about social media!

I hope you’ll join us!

Technorati Tags: social media, pet sitters, pet sitting business