Twitter 110: Tools to Automate Cross-Platform Status Updates

Note: Twitter 110 is part of the Twitter curriculum for Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

Here are some great tools that enable you to automatically use one of your social media tools to update others. They save you double-entry of the same information, and also help ensure that your profiles don’t go stale.

Twittersync is a handy Facebook application that turns your latest Tweet from Twitter into your Facebook status update. This is really helpful for me, because I’m notoriously bad at updating my Facebook status. It’s not that I don’t spend time in Facebook; it’s just that I’m doing other things instead of updating status.

Twitterfeed, by contrast, takes any RSS feed, such as this one from my blog, and uses it to create Tweets in an account of your choosing. For Mayo Clinic’s Twitter account, for example, I connected Twitterfeed to our RSS feed of news releases. That way if people want to use Twitter as their all-purpose river of news, we can make sure the Mayo Clinic tributary is flowing into it. And tonight I just added the SMUG feed to my personal Twitter account.

I have previously Tweeted about new blog posts. Now I don’t need to remember to do that anymore. By combining Twitterfeed and Twittersync, I can write a post to my blog and have that fact posted both to Twitter and to my Facebook status.

I like both of these services, and another that’s really helpful is Twittermail. One of the most irritating parts of mobile Tweeting is that when you do it via SMS text message it’s really slow. At least for me. But with Twittermail I have an e-mail address I can use to send a Blackberry e-mail message, which is much faster: unlike SMS, I don’t have to hit keys multiple times to select the right letters.

So, for example, I just used my Blackberry and Twittermail to Tweet the following:

Can YouTube Beat Facebook Video Quality?

I recently had an interesting experience with a video I posted both to our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel and to the official Mayo Clinic Facebook “fan” page. The video was created to provide a behind-the-scenes tour of the new Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla. I uploaded the same file to both YouTube and Facebook, and the quality difference is striking.

Here’s the YouTube version:

It looks fine, but my friend Hoyt, the star of the video, was struck by the superior clarity of the same video on the Mayo Clinic Facebook page. I had noticed this previously with some other videos I had uploaded.

Obviously YouTube has the volume and critical mass for video sharing (and the advantage that you can embed it within blogs, while with Facebook you can only offer a link), but I wonder why YouTube’s quality is so much lower.

Is it because of the sheer volume of videos, that because YouTube is processing so many new uploads every day so it can’t afford to devote the processing power that would render the videos more clearly in Flash? Does the fact that Facebook has a video application for its platform contribute to the quality difference? Or are there some settings that would make YouTube videos look better? The one I uploaded was 137 megs for about a 6-minute video in mpeg format.

What settings would you recommend for export to get maximum quality in videos uploaded to YouTube, while keeping file sizes reasonable?

And do you have to be a fan of Mayo Clinic to see the Facebook version? I’m assuming you have to be at least a Facebook member, although you can at least see the basic fan page without being a member.

What do you think? What’s your experience with maximizing video quality in YouTube? Can it be as good as what you see in Facebook?

Updated: I tried clicking the video link without being logged in to Facebook, and I could see the video, so it seems it isn’t necessary to be a Facebook member to see Facebook video.

Why Facebook Won’t Be Friendster

This weekend I got another firsthand view of why, despite suggestions that today’s kids will chase after whatever is the next new shiny toy, Facebook will have long-term staying power.

I witnessed scores of young ladies (the young men were much less active in this) taking pictures of each other and their dates at the Austin, Minn. High School Prom. Then two of them who are really close to me came home the next evening and started uploading dozens photos to Facebook, and tagging all of their friends.

So, for example, here is a pre-prom picture that showed up in my news feed, after Bekah tagged me:

And here’s a partial group picture from one of the early Saturday evening events:

Some observers warn that Facebook will become uncool because people like me (or at least in my age group) can be members. Others say the concern is that with Facebook being a “walled garden” in which your data goes in but doesn’t come out, users will rebel because they want data portability.

I don’t buy either of those arguments. Facebook’s variable privacy settings (as described in Facebook 210) mean people of all ages can coexist in the same social networking space, just as we all formerly used the same land-line phone network and now use interoperable digital cell phones with text messaging.

Just because we have the technical ability to interact through cell phones doesn’t mean I’m regularly “texting” people of my daughters’ generation. But it doesn’t stop us from peacefully coexisting in the same digital spectrum. And if I needed to reach one of them in an emergency, being able to send a message through Facebook may be just the ticket.

Likewise, I only know one of their peers who’s using Twitter. This tool of the geeky set has a lot of potential, but hasn’t broken through to mass appeal in anything like the numbers that Facebook has, partly because a lot of people look at it and can’t immediately see what good it will do them. But if they ever discover Twitter, they won’t let the fact that Robert Scoble and I are using it keep them from taking advantage of its wonderfulness.

They don’t have a problem figuring Facebook’s functionality, though, which is why it’s the top photo-sharing site on the Internet. It’s just simple to use, and over their high school and college years they will load lots of memories to these servers.

Unlike the data portability purists, who want the ability to integrate data from all sorts of yet-to-be-invented services into whatever container site they desire, my daughters and their friends just want to be able to connect with each other easily. And they LOVE Facebook Chat. Data portability means nothing to them. Functionality does. They want to be where their friends are, and they don’t particularly care about the identity of Facebook’s other 70 million active users.

As long as Facebook keeps developing and improving its service and doesn’t violate their trust in a way that creeps them out, the likelihood that many of its younger users will bail for another network is remote. And as they see how friend lists can make it reasonably easy to separate personal and professional networks in one site, they’ll be less inclined to join a network like LinkedIn.

I still think LinkedIn is likely to do well in the long term, because it has a critical mass in business networking. But with 14 million photos uploaded to Facebook daily, I see its critical mass continuing to grow as well. People aren’t going to lightly leave a few hundred friends and their photos behind.

What do you think? The growth in Facebook’s reported number of active users seems to be slowing somewhat, but do you see anything on the horizon that would cause it to decline? Any possibility of a recession (two quarters of negative growth) for Facebook?

Top 3 Facebook Chat Feature Requests

Facebook’s Chat functionality is really great. My youngest daughter, a big IM user, thinks it’s the best and easiest one she’s seen, and she loves how it is integrated into Facebook. I’ve had several conversations with it in just its first day of general availability.

That said, it still needs some features that would make it exceptionally powerful and valuable for business networking. Here are my top three:

1. Move from only 1-1 chat to allowing chat among multiple Facebook friends. This would enable work teams to have brief virtual ad hoc meetings on a particular tactical topic without the overhead of scheduling, walking to the conference room, waiting for everyone to assemble, and returning to their desks. This could enable more nimble reactions to business opportunities. In the PR world, it could be a great brainstorming tool for story ideas. It also would make it easier to get input from the people who are typically more reserved and quiet in face-to-face meetings.
2. Enable chat to take place in connection with Facebook groups. So, for example, if I have a secret Facebook group and would like to have a chat in which all of the members can participate, whether they are Friends with each other or not, that would be a valuable function, particularly in the work setting. This could be great for customer focus groups, for instance.
3. Enable users to filter their list of on-line friends according to their friend lists. This may not be a big deal unless you get lots of friends and they are all on-line a lot. But I can imagine that Scoble with his 5,000 friends would have something of a cluttered window. But still, since you can search by friend name to find whether someone is on-line, the clutter may not be a problem if you are purposefully seeking out a particular individual. If you’re browsing your on-line friends looking for small-talk, though, being able to filter (say, for instance, by limiting to your list of professional friends) would be cleaner.

How about you? What do you think of Facebook’s Chat function? What additional features are most important to you? Share your thoughts below…and maybe we can form a Facebook group to petition for our top priorities.

Facebook Chat Will Enhance Business Utility

Now that Facebook’s Chat function seems to be officially out of Beta and is deployed everywhere (if it’s on my network, it must be everywhere), I got a chance to try it today.

I haven’t been a big user of IM (Check that: at all.) This is completely new to me.

But I can see how Chat will be a strong addition that will make Facebook even more valuable for business networking, as Adam indicates. I think of it particularly in a PR/Journalist relationship. If you can see whether your journalist friends are on-line and can send them a quick message, that will be less interruptive than a phone call. If you continually send them worthwhile news tips or ideas, you can solidify the relationship. If you start abusing them with off-target pitches, they can un-friend you…or block you. It’s one more way Facebook can put the “relations” back in media relations.

I think this also has obvious applications for workplace collaborations…the ability to have conversations that are much more informal, back and forth, without the ponderous formality of e-mail.

“Can’t you just pick up the phone instead?” Of course. But just as my middle daughter (in particular) uses SMS text messaging to connect with her friends (and don’t get me started on how far she went over her monthly allotment of 300 in March) instead of getting into a long conversation, sometimes a more terse interaction is appropriate in the business world, too. And Facebook Chat could be a great way to do this.

In fact, I had a nice conversation with my son-in-law, Kyle, via Facebook Chat this morning (see above); I saw he was on Facebook and had the pleasure of introducing him to this new feature. Would I have thought to pick up my cell phone and call him? Highly unlikely. But when I saw he was on-line, we were able to have a chat that didn’t take a lot of time, but let us touch base.

I think Chat will likely cause me to keep my Facebook status more regularly updated, too. And I like how well Chat and Messaging are integrated. I was called from my desk during my chat with Kyle, and by the time I returned he had signed off. So instead of continuing the chat, I was given an option to send him a message in Facebook. This is a great way of blending the rapid interactivity of Chat with the asynchronous tools already built into Facebook.

Here’s a good Facebook Chat FAQ that outlines some of the current features for those of you who, like me, haven’t been IMers.

I hope you’ll try out Facebook Chat, and if you see I’m on-line, start a conversation. If you’re not my friend yet, you can add me here, and I’ll make you part of my Blog Friends list.

Which leads me to a set of feature requests and enhancements that would make Facebook Chat a really strong business networking tool. That will be the subject of my next post.

Personal and Professional Personas in Social Networks

In the Facebook 210 course I describe a way to use Facebook’s Friend lists to create a “work-safe” profile that is less likely to cause professional problems, when that high school classmate or college buddy tags you in a questionable photo or writes on your wall. This led to a thoughtful comment from Erik Giberti:

I’ve sent you a friend request and of course your on my limited profile. I find this discussion interesting because there’s a fine line between having a personal persona and a professional persona. I go back and forth on this idea, but I believe that they are really one in the same. The way I am at work is often reflected by the way I am when I’m not at work and vice versa. The reality is, many folks create an artificial “professional” persona that masks who they are in the “real world”. It has been my experience that employers and co-workers can usually tease out trends in your real life personality and spot the fake portions of the professional persona. What’s left is really something closer to your personal persona. So why not just present that first and save everyone the time?

I think Erik has a good point, and personally I don’t have a problem with anyone seeing my whole profile. My life is an open book. And I think the ethic of transparency we are coming to expect from corporations also has some implications for personal life. In fact, that’s why I like Facebook as opposed to MySpace or Second Life. In Facebook people almost always go by the name their parents gave them; in MySpace that’s not necessarily so, and in Second Life you are represented by an avatar and aren’t allowed to use your real name. (I did recently try Second Life, I think my name is Allen Atlass.)

On the other hand, even aside from the potentially problematic posts and tags from others, many people put their religious beliefs and political leanings on their Facebook profiles, and many businesses want to keep politics and religion out of the workplace. You don’t typically put that information on your business card.

LinkedIn doesn’t have anything in its personal profiles that would indicate religious or political persuasion, unless of course you have worked vocationally in religious or political pursuits. For Facebook to be an effective business alternative to LinkedIn (I use both Facebook and LinkedIn, but Facebook to a much greater extent), it needs to duplicate this functionality.

That was the point of Facebook 210 and the subsequent SMUG Research Project; creating an example of how you can avoid broadcasting this personal information to co-workers, customers or clients, but yet share it with your non-work friends.

SMUG students who read my post on religious podcasting have a window to my theological beliefs, and because of my previous career information (which is available on both my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles), they would correctly infer my political sympathies. (Hint: I don’t have a direct psychological stake in the outcome of tomorrow’s Pennsylvania contest between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama.) Which leads me to reiterate that the views expressed on this blog are mine, not those of my employer.

So Erik is right to a point; maintaining a sanitized professional persona may not be consistent with the ethic of transparency. One might even call it a matter of integrity in the literal sense. Integrity means being a single person, not having a compartmentalized life. If you’re maintaining a professional profile on LinkedIn and a personal one on Facebook, with completely different friends, you’re already creating this division. Facebook 210 just tells you how to create that separation on a single platform.

I think the key to what Erik says is that a professional persona shouldn’t “mask” who you are in real life. But there’s a difference between hiding information about yourself and not actively promoting things that might be stumbling blocks for some acquaintances.

What do you think?

Social Media Research and Weekend Reading

Here are highlights of the last week:

• Your Chancellor did his taxes using TurboTax in less than an hour. It was Form 1040 with itemized deductions. If SMUG ever goes for 501(c)(3) status, I’m sure it will be more complicated, but for people like me who have used TurboTax previously, it is wonderful how it carries forward information from the previous year, such as charities previously supported, mortgage lenders, employers and dependents. It’s an excellent program and well worth it. Next year I plan to not procrastinate; I think the price is higher closer to April 15.
• The first new class for the week was in the Podcasting curriculum. It’s Podcasting 104: Adding ID3 Tags to Your Audio Files. We’re well on the way to showing you how, as a SMUG student, you can do your own free podcast. I also did a related post on Religious Podcasting.
• We also added an advanced course in the Facebook curriculum, Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy. It shows you how you can create a professional friend list that will enable you to use Facebook for both your personal and professional networking, without worrying about co-workers, clients, customers or other professional associates running across information that is too personal.
• We also launched SMUG’s first cooperative social media research program. I hope you will use the recommendations from Facebook 210 to establish a professional friend list and participate in the research project.

I also have begun exploring the Flip video camera, based on a recommendation from PodcastSteve (a.k.a. Steve Lubetkin). My initial experience has been quite positive. And check out this guy’s comparison of HD and Flip. I will be reviewing the Flip here after I’ve spent some more time with it.

SMUG Research Project: Facebook Professional Privacy Best Practices

As an online institution of higher learning, Social Media University, Global has two elements in its mission:

1. To provide practical, hands-on training in social media for lifelong learners, and
2. To conduct research that advances our understanding of the business applications and implications of social media.

In Facebook 210: Professional Profiles, Personal Privacy I offered guidance for people interested in using Facebook for one-stop personal and professional networking.

Now I’m inviting all SMUG students and others who are interested to join me in testing those recommendations so we can learn together whether Facebook’s variable privacy settings make it safe for both kinds of networking.

Please do check out that course for the full rationale, but here’s the short version of my recommendations for how you can use Facebook’s variable profile access settings to minimize the risk of having your co-workers, supervisors, customers, clients or other professional associates (such as journalists for people working in PR) stumble upon something on your Facebook profile that would be potentially embarrassing or unprofessional.

1. Create a “Professional” friend list in Facebook
2. For your existing Facebook friends, add any of your professional associates of the types described in the paragraph above to this “Professional” list.
3. In your Privacy settings, add your “Professional” list to the friends who are excluded from viewing certain potentially problematic profile elements. To my mind, these would include:

Basic Info

Personal Info

Photos Tagged of You

Videos Tagged of You

Your Wall

If you don’t know how to create these exceptions, check out slides 11 and 12 of the Facebook 210 presentation.

I think these settings will alleviate 99 percent or more of the possible problems anyone might experience by doing their personal and professional networking on the same site.

But let’s find out! If you add me as a friend, I will do likewise to you. I’ll make you one of my Blog Friends, which is a list I have set up with the same profile limitations as my Professional friends. Then you can see for yourself if anything about me that shows up in your Facebook News Feed is potentially problematic. I’ll do the same for you.

I would really like to find out whether using these settings can prevent your personal Facebook activities (and those of your less-professional friends) from causing work-related problems, and I hope you will help.

So I’m starting a research project. Please go to the SMUG group in Facebook, and join the discussion board on this topic. Indicate your willingness to participate, and then all of us can add each other as limited access friends. Hopefully, we’ll get a critical mass of friends in this class, so we can look at each others’ profiles and watch our news feeds, and see whether we run across anything that could conceivably have career-threatening implications.

I’m betting that with these settings as I have described above, we’ll be just fine. I’m not doing a $100 SMUG challenge as I did with Secret Groups; let’s just call this a metaphorical bet. But maybe we’ll see some additional tweaking that might be necessary.

And after a month of so of not having any problems (or after having made adjustments that we find are advisable), we may have a set of Professional Privacy Best Practices that would enable people to use Facebook for both personal and professional networking.

Then you will be able to fearlessly invite your co-workers, customers, clients and other professional associates to be your Facebook friends, and will be able to use the collaboration power of Facebook to enhance those relationships and to enable you to work more effectively together. You’ll have closer relationships and provide better service.

In this way, I hope SMUG can add to the academic body of knowledge about social networking, and can practically contribute to society by helping to drive adoption of a single multi-purpose platform for networking.

My research thesis is that Facebook can be that common platform. Let’s see if we can prove or disprove that thesis.

Perhaps this could be project in which the Society for New Communications Research could participate. I also will be trying to connect with others who have an interest in this issue of personal vs. professional networking. If you know people with such an interest, I hope you will invite them to join the research project.