I didn’t want to share it on my personal Facebook page, as most of my friends and family couldn’t care less.  I thought about Twitter, but I only check that once a day so the conversation would mostly stop after one or two tweets.  Then I thought about posting the link on the Arment Dietrich Facebook community, and I stopped myself and thought, I should find a community where all members are interested in the same types of news that I am outside of my company.

So I went searching.  LinkedIn offered a few options, but after trying to join some groups, I received emails back saying I was up for review.  Up for review?  No way, I don’t want in anymore.  I often get bogged down by the noise LinkedIn groups tend to make anyway so I stuck with Facebook.  (My favorite of all online sites and you don’t get judged to join.)

After finding some cool pages, only to be let down because they were sponsored or created by a company so there would definitely be some type of hidden message coming through, I decided to create my own Facebook community, a digital marketing community.

The digital marketing Facebook community is open to anyone interested in online and digital marketing news, case studies, and updates.  I consider myself still pretty green and I’m open to more education.  Let’s admit it, no one has this down yet, so join if you want to ask questions, give your insight, and possibly learn.

Check it out, let me know what you think, and join the conversation!

But I think the issue here  is less about Facebook letting Google search our walls and more about what it is we put on the web for the entire world to see.

We don’t think about the entire world seeing what we’re posting because we think it’s behind a “locked” door and no one can see it.

Joe Thornley, during the podcast, said, when he speaks, he asks his audience if they changed their security (or passwords) less than a week ago. Typically only a couple of people raise their hands. When was the last time you changed your password, clicked “no” on a new security option, or Googled yourself to see what the spiders are finding?

But this isn’t just about Facebook. I have a story to tell you.  I’m embarrassed by it, but I think it’s important in this conversation. Last Memorial Day, I was in Beaver Creek with some friends. The girls hiked all day so we were adrenaline ridden, plus we’d had a few drinks.  One of my dearest friends LOVES Keanu Reeves. I mean, top five list loves. And we always tease her that he’s gay so she is wasting one of her top five list picks on him (the rule is that if someone on your top five list approached you, you have carte blanche to do what you like with that person without your significant other getting upset). So she made some crazy bet with my husband and, if she lost, she had to admit that she was wrong about Keanu.

Fine, right? Well, I tweeted about the bet. And a prospective client saw it. His perception was that I am homophobic and that I share too much online. He decided not to sign our contract and we lost that piece of business.

So something that was all in fun and fueled by adrenaline and drinks turned into a lost piece of business for us. Sure, you can argue that it probably wasn’t the right client for us anyway (and I did argue that in my head), but the lesson is that I shared too much, I unintentionally offended him, and it cost not only the business but my reputation, in his eyes. And in the words of Warren Buffet, “You can lose money for the firm and I’ll be understanding. But lose reputation for the firm and I’ll be ruthless.”

What you put online is your reputation. It’s your professional reputation. It’s your personal reputation. My rule of thumb is that I don’t put anything online I wouldn’t want my grandparents to see…and I violated that rule in Beaver Creek.

You only have the perception of security and it’s getting more and more open every day. Sure we can all fight it and create a groundswell around what Facebook can and cannot share, but let’s face it, even if they are prevented from sharing everything they want, they still own everything you post on your wall.

So  be prudent. Next time you go to post about a bet that might cast you in a bad light, think about how potential clients, potential employers, potential colleagues, clients, employees, your kids, your siblings, your nieces, your nephews, your grandparents, and burglars (yes, even burglars!) might perceive what you have to say.

Guest blogged by Molli Megasko

Networked Blogs – If you or your company has a blog, this application is a great way to include your posts on your page, but it also distributes on the Facebook blog network. With this app your friends, and your friends’ friends, can follow and subscribe through Facebook.

1. Go to the above link and under “go to application” click “add to my page”.
2. A box opens up and give you an option of what page you want to add the app to – in this case, choose your company page.
3. Now, go to your company profile and hit “edit page”.
4. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see your new Networked Blog app.  Click on “application settings” and next to the tab, click “add”.
5. Close the box and click “edit” under Networked Blogs.
6. Here you register and upload you blog, pretty much just follow all the steps. (We choose “show on tab only” so we can create a separate message when posting to our wall.)
7. Once you have 10 people following your blog on Facebook, you become authorized and searchable.

Social RSS – Just like Networked Blogs gets your posts in front of your fans, Social RSS gets your favorite blogs and your favorite blogs’ posts exposed, as well. We call this link love.

1. Go to the above link and on the right hand side choose your company page.
2. Go to your favorite blogs and copy and paste the RSS feed URL into the feed boxes.
3. Title your news feed and chose the tab settings to your preferences, then hit “update”. (We choose not to update the wall automatically, we don’t want to overwhelm our fans with so many different blog feeds. If we particularly like one, then we add it to our wall status individually.)
4. Now, go to your company profile and hit “edit page”.
5. Scroll down to Social RSS and click on “application settings”, next to tab click add.

Video – As you know from previous blog posts, video is the next big thing. Enabling this application allows you and your fans to post videos to your page, the same way Facebook treats photos.

1. This one is simple. Under “edit page” on your company profile, click on video, then click “application settings” and click “add” for both the box and tab, and you’re finished!

And now you are letting Facebook work for you!  What are some of your favorite Facebook applications for company pages?

This post is guest blogged by Molli Megasko, an account executive with Arment Dietrich. Molli started her career with us and has been integral in how we’ve moved our business model in the past 18 months. She is our Facebook guru and is here to talk to you about creating a fan page, engaging with your fans, and developing creative ideas for posts and photos.

Yesterday every person wanted to be on Facebook and today every company wants a fan page.  When working with clients I begin with the same five tips and we work from there.  If you can master these five, the fun strategic stuff (contests, crowdsourcing, and word-of-mouth) comes easy.  And don’t forget, I get paid to do this, so I would pay attention!

1.  First and foremost, get a unique URL.  Instead of having the URL be www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/crazylongcompanyname/119081977941, make it www.facebook.com/CompanyName (or something similar).  It’s really easy to do this.

If you are the administrator, go to the Facebook user name Web site and follow the directions.  If you have a unique URL, you can share it with  your customers, employees, stakeholders, and prospects. You can include it in your email signature and in any marketing, communication, and sales  materials.

2.  Now that Facebook pages are a part of Google’s real time search results (as of this week), I suggest using keywords liberally and constantly update your company information.  This helps with search engine optimization and also turns your fan page into a second Web site for potential customers to learn more about you and your company.

3. Add photos of employees and capture fun stuff around the office.  Take a look at the Arment Dietrich fan page (and fan us while you’re there!).   One reason our fan page is a hit is because we’ve turned it into a personality.  By letting your fans see the faces behind the brand, it creates loyalty and customer engagement and connection. Remember, people want to see inside companies; no, they don’t want it, they expect it. Give them the personality of your culture and your team.

4.     Now you can focus on your posts.  Most fan pages post a lot of company info, which is GREAT, but it’s not giving your fans a reason to engage or come back.  This is not another avenue for your news releases, nor is it a sales tool. Asking questions and posting articles that are not self-serving are the easiest ways to get your fans talkin.  Gini says time and time again…LISTEN!  Having a fan page is a great way to listen because you can ask questions and your fans will tell you what they think.  Listen to what they are saying and start communicating WITH them.

5.     Now for my favorite part.  Once you get more comfortable on Facebook, take a look at the insights and download the interaction data (both in the administrator’s dashboard) to help you track and set benchmarks to ensure each post is getting more clicks than the last.  I love tracking our company’s Google analytics and seeing how many people come to either here or to the Web site through Facebook.

What are some of the things you recommend people do when starting a Facebook fan page?

For those of you who’ve been laid off, you likely don’t care what your boss went through before he or she made the decision to let you go, so I won’t belabor the point, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

I am much too emotionally involved with my colleagues. My Vistage group always tells me it’s business, not personal, and I have to distance myself so I can make the hard decisions without emotion. That’s like them telling me I can’t eat gelato anymore because it’s bad for me (so what if it is – it’s good!). It’s not in my DNA to not get emotionally attached so I make decisions that affect people much later than I should.

That’s why, when Arik and Valerie asked if I wanted to help with Help A PR Pro Out, or HAPPO, I jumped at the opportunity. Now I can help some of those I had to lay off last year, the pros I’ve met online who need jobs, and even strangers.

If you’ve missed the hub-bub around HAPPO, click on the link above, or visit last Friday’s FADS post about it. You can also fan HAPPO on Facebook and/or follow on Twitter.

I have heard from A LOT of companies and agencies already and I’ve heard from some of you who are looking for jobs, or looking to move to Chicago.

Let’s keep the momentum going.

* If you have job openings, comment here with a way for me to reach you before next Friday.

* If you are looking for a job, write a creative blog post about why you should be hired and post the link in the comments section here.

* If you are neither but want to spread the message, please let your communities know about this blog post, the HAPPO blog, and the champions below so we can all help.

* If you work for a company that provides services to communication professionals (i.e. Cision, Vocus, PCC, IABC, PRSA, Radian6, Alterian, Spiral16, MatchPoint, etc.) and you want to donate something to the cause, comment below and let me know how I can reach you in the next week.

* And, if you’re not in the Midwest, make sure to connect with a HAPPO champion in your area…or let me know if you’d like an introduction:

• Jeremy Porter (Atlanta)
• Kellye Crane (Atlanta)
• Doug Haslam (Boston)
• Jennifer Wilbur (Southern CA)
• Lauren Fernandez (Dallas/Fort Worth)
• Richie Escovedo (Dallas/Fort Worth)
• Justin Goldsborough (Kansas City)
• Arik Hanson (Minneapolis/ St. Paul)
• PR Cog (New York Metro)
• Deidre Breakenridge (New York Metro)
• Valerie Simon (New York Metro)
• Heather Whaling (Ohio)
• Adrienne Biggs (San Francisco)
• Danny Brown (Toronto)
• Mike Schaffer (Washington, DC)

Following are a couple of our favorites. But they are totally unprofessional, which is why we need your help.

* Arment Dietrich. Better Than Sex.

* Arment Dietrich. The Only Thing We Spin Is Our Bike.

The winner not only gains fame, but will have the tagline (with credit) on our home page. Heck, we might even have a t-shirt or mug to give the winner.

Before we changed the business model our tagline was “Service. Results. Spirit.” Boring, right?

But with the new Web site and our new business model (don’t know about the new business model? Read more here), we figure it’s a good time to get rid of the boring and introduce something really good.

So…I leave it in your hands. What tagline do you think best represents Arment Dietrich?

This happens often, especially because of all of the speaking that I do, and I always thank the person for the invite and suggest, instead, they become fans of Arment Dietrich, where I spend a lot of time engaging with clients, prospects, potential candidates, and our employees. I know some people are put off by this because it sounds like I’m promoting the company. And, I guess I am. But it’s less to promote the company and more to engage with people I don’t know in a place that feels safe to me.

But for some reason, yesterday’s request is bothering me. I think it’s because his  response was, “thanks anyway”, which makes me believe I left a bad taste in his mouth.

If you know me well, you know I want to be liked by everyone. And you also know I have trouble saying no. So when I perceive I’ve hurt someone’s feelings or left a bad taste in their mouth, I wonder how I could have handled the situation differently. At the same time, I am (in my wise old age) finally learning I need to have some boundaries.

Right now, my boundaries are as follows:

* On my personal Facebook page, I have to know you in real life (which is why, Dave Van de Walle, I don’t have very many friends there).

* On the Arment Dietrich Facebook fan page, I will talk to anyone there, even if it’s negative. This is where we’re building our culture and building relationships with people we might like to work with in the future (as well as people we work with now).

* On Twitter, as long as you don’t look like a spammer, I will follow you back and I will get to know you. My friend Nancy Lyons always teases me because I will talk to anyone on Twitter. It’s true. I will. I love Twitter and the relationships I’m able to develop using that tool.

* On LinkedIn, I will accept your connection IF you tell me how we know one another. The “I’d like to add you to my personal network” invite doesn’t work for me, unless I truly do know you. I never click “I don’t know this user,” but I do often just hit “archive” instead of “accept.”

What are your boundaries? How would you have handled the friend request I mention above?

*Photo courtesy of GeekSugar

One thing, however, we didn’t discuss is how to promote and publicize your blog posts, after they’ve been published, in order to attract readers who don’t yet know about you.

This is the process I follow every time I hit publish:

1. Go to Delicious and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

Save your blog post, with the original link (not a shortened link), as a bookmark. I have our Delicious page set up to automatically feed my FriendFeed and Twitter accounts after it’s been posted. To learn how to do that, Scott Hepburn has an easy-to-follow blog post on the topic here. He even goes so far as to suggest you do this with Google Reader. I don’t do that because I want to have read the content I tweet before I actually distribute it.

It takes a couple of hours for Delicious to feed to FriendFeed and Twitter, so I do this late at night (after 9 p.m.) in order to hit the people up, and on Twitter, around midnight.

2. Go to su.pr and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

I love this URL shortener because it:

* Adds your content to StumbleUpon (which helps with SEO AND attracting new readers);

* Gives you times of each day that your tribe retweets you most often on Twitter (so you know when to post);

* Shows you all of the retweets each post has received and who did the retweeting; and

* Gives you pretty accurate traffic information you can then overlay with your Google analytics.

I don’t, however, like to use the timed feature in su.pr because it tends to act wonky at least once a week and it sometimes “loses” your links. So I go there only to shorten the link so I can use it in other places.

3. Go to SocialOomph and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

I like using this service to time my tweets (I do one an hour from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. CST) Mondays through Thursdays (I don’t tweet news on Fridays because of #FollowFriday).

Based on what su.pr tells me, I schedule our blog post (using the su.pr shortened link) to tweet three times the following day. For instance, I know on Tuesdays, 9 a.m., noon, and 3 p.m., are the times I’m retweeted the most. So I set up our blog post to be tweeted at those times every Tuesday.

For every other tweet during the day, I set up news, articles, and blogs I read that support my thinking, but aren’t self-serving (i.e. not information coming from Arment Dietrich).

Keep in mind that you can not use the same copy for the multiple scheduled tweets. They must be different copy or Twitter will consider it spam.

So this is what my scheduled tweets looked like yesterday:

4. Go to Facebook and, using the original blog link (not the shortened one), I let our fans know what they can read about on the blog.

5. Go to LinkedIn and, again, using the original blog link, update my status to drive my connections to the post.

6. Answer all comments you get on your blog. I typically answer on the blog, but also send an email to the commenter thanking them. This not only makes people feel good, but sometimes creates an offline conversation that builds my relationship with that person.

Rinse and repeat each day. I know this sounds like a lot, but I timed it when I wrote this post. It took me eight minutes.

Are there things you do to publicize your blog posts that are not listed here?

I get this question ALL THE TIME! How much time should I spend on social media?

How much time do you spend on your email? Do you have it down to a science that you can manage it effectively, while still doing your job?

When email first entered our work lives, none of us knew how to handle it. We all thought it was evil and we didn’t know how we were going to manage it. But we’ve figured it out and technology now allows us ways to manage it efficiently.

Same goes for social media. This is a new way of being able to communicate. Of working more efficiently and personally with your customers. Of interacting on a more personal level with your employees and stakeholders. It creates PERSONAL relationships with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people you wouldn’t otherwise even know.

All this being said, you should spend an hour a day on social media. You can do it in as little as 15 minutes a day, but to have true influence, create thought leadership, prospect for new business, recruit talent, and create customer loyalty through engagement, it takes an hour a day. No more.

Here’s how to do just that:

* Sign up for an account at TweetLater.

* Spend 15 minutes every day finding industry articles, news you find interesting, and thought leadership pieces that have nothing to do with you or your business and set those up to be distributed throughout the day. A good rule of thumb is that 60 percent of your tweets should not be self-serving. I set up my tweets 30 minutes apart.

* Spend 10 minutes every day setting up your “self-serving” tweets – these are links to your blog, white papers the company has written, any articles written about you or that quote you, Webinars or podcasts you’re hosting, etc. A good rule of thumb is these should be only 40 percent of your tweets and you should space them out so they don’t come out all at once.

* Spend 10 minutes going through your groups on TweetDeck and find things to RT (retweet) for your followers. This expands your follower base, shows that you listen, and provides great influence.

* Spend five minutes setting up ping.fm and using that to distribute your content to your other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Delicious.  I only use ping.fm for our daily blog content. I use Twitter for everything else.

* Spend 10 minutes going through your LinkedIn groups and answering questions where you have expertise and can position yourself as a thought leader.

* Spend 10 minutes responding to people on Facebook and Twitter.

It’s a science and this method works, if you stick within the limits and use your time efficiently.  What other tips do you have for managing daily social media time?

I said, “A ha! That’s a great blog topic! Writing it right now.”

Let’s start with the fact that, if you’re graduating from college or looking for a new job, potential employers always look at your social networks FIRST…before they decide to call you and schedule an interview.  Knowing that, are you immediately embarrassed as to what they might find? If the answer is yes, fix it. Fix it NOW!

Now think about the business relationships you have. Are you friends with them on Facebook? Do they follow you on Twitter? If they don’t yet, they will. Are you representing yourself, both personally and professionally, in the very best light possible?

I’m a communication professional and, by the nature of the beast, have a lot of friends who are reporters. I hear HORROR stories of how PR people treat reporters. Just a month ago, I had a Wall Street Journal reporter tell me that she is astounded that PR people never return her phone calls. I mean, it’s just the Journal; why would you want to return her calls?

Whenever someone tells me something like this, I always say, “I love it when other PR people make us look good.”  If you work at Arment Dietrich, you’d be fired, on the spot, for not returning phone calls or emails within 24 hours.

That being said, I have a reporter friend who told me he was trying to reach a PR person for a story he was working on…and he was on deadline. This particular PR person refused to answer his phone calls or return his emails. But then, three days after his initial call, she friended him on Facebook. Curious, he accepted the invite and was astounded to see that her page was full of not only business information, but also of her drunk photos from Friday night and, gasp!, swear words!

To make matters worse, he went to her Twitter stream and found that she was running around, playing hooky, instead of returning his phone calls and emails.

He didn’t tell me this, but I’m 99 percent positive he will never want to work with this woman again. She could end up being the CEO of the largest global company and he would refuse to ever include her in a story or write anything nice about her or the company for which she works.

This is a whole new world. How you represent yourself online cannot be any different than you act on your very best behavior. One thing that has not changed, even in this world of constant evolution, is first impressions last forever!