... on track
Great to see that facebook pages are letting band page owners cross-reference their events to their group
Tell Mama has some gigs coming up in April that we’re really excited about and I finally took the time on the weekend to create a facebook event to promote the first one on April 7th at The Supermarket in Toronto. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it because, at this point, it seemed that I have to create a new event for my group page and another for my band page just to get the word out to everybody. I created the group event as per usual (sure would be nice to be able to “select all” for invitations or filter the names somehow by region) and then I got quite frustrated when I tried to create a new event to post to my band page – the event function was nowhere to be found. Of course, the moment I complained on a facebook forum I immediately found the feature as an addition to the tabs at the top of the page – how embarrassing is that?
Facebook mobile photo album has room for improvement but is still very cool
I recently decided that I needed to find a more efficient way to take photos from my gigs and post them to my website because, to be perfectly honest, I just wasn’t finding the time to do it and considering that web promotion is my business that just makes me look really bad! I figured that there had to be some kind of widget out there that would let me at least only post them in one place while feeding them everywhere else. I have been playing around in facebook lately comparing groups to pages and exploring the nuances of integrating facebook into my marketing strategy so that seemed like a good place to start.
Facebook has a great photo album feature that lets you upload photos into as many albums as you like and integrates a very nice tagging system which is excellent for the viral marketing end of the equation. In fact, they even have a mobile upload feature that lets you take pictures with your MMS enabled phone and upload them in real time to your facebook page – nice! All you have to do is send a photo email to facebook mobile, receive an activation code back by email and voila, you have an active mobile photo account. I followed all the instructions over and over and constantly received the message that my phone or provider was not able to provide this function and that no photo was received. I have a brand new Palm Treo 700p and would be pretty surprised if it didn’t have the capacity to perform this function.
Long story short I had many conversations with Palm and with Telus who both blamed each other. I finally contacted facebook support and a great thing happened – I actually got to communicate with some real people who not only understood my problem and appreciated it, but ones who were able to and did fix it! Hooray for facebook customer support especially Carter, Lawrence and most notably, Mark Slee http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark_Slee/204686 .
Mark actually took a good look at the problem and ascertained that:
1/ Your mobile email provider doesn’t send via a normal Telus MMS (multimedia messaging service) gateway. Rather, it seems to use a service provided by a 3rd party called VistoMobile, which we’ve just added support for.
2/ Email messages use MIME types to specify what type of data they are sending. Standard webpages have a MIME type of text/html, and normal pictures are sent with a MIME type of image/jpg or image/gif. However, my email provider (Telus) sends the image with a MIME type application/octet-stream. We modified our software to detect when there’s an image being sent as this type — but perhaps not surprisingly this MIME type wasn’t something we initially thought to add support for over the far more standard "image" MIME types.
Now that’s what I call service! Along the way I did try some third-party facebook apps to deal with my mobile photo uploads and they all worked but they didn’t enter the facebook news feed the way the native plugin does and they didn’t offer an option for me to pull those photos directly into my web page/blog.
So, now I have a facebook mobile photo album which can be seen on my personal profile and, thanks to the Fotobook WordPress plugin (http://www.aaronharp.com/dev/wp-fotobook/) I can pull any or all of my photo albums onto my wordpress site (http://www.tellmama.net/blog/photos/mobile-uploads/)
Now all I need is the ability to also pull those photos onto my facebook band page (which is taking a long time to populate because, well, I don’t have any spare time) and the functionality for fotobook to automatically populate my blog site photo section with my mobile uploads. Apparently, facebook pages are unable to share photos with personal facebook sites automatically (I find this strange and hope that somebody will design a solution soon). Oh yes, one more thing, I would really like to be able to upload mobile photos to more than one photo album or site. At this time you can only register your cell number to one personal facebook mobile album.
I have to say that even though there are some gaps, the facebook mobile photo upload tool is a great addition to the facebook portfolio of tools and gizmos and the actual customer support by real people is a genuine welcome surprise. Tell your friends!
Jungle Fever – Our First Podcast
Well, this is it, our first OnCouRSS podcast – Jungle Fever, helping you to navigate the jungle that is social media. This is a good intro to OnCouRSS and what we do, it’s also a great way for you to get to know us a little better. So, sit back and enjoy the ride!
Show Notes:
0:37 Doing it with each other
0:50 Keeping you OnCouRSS…what does that mean?
2:00 where to spend your energy, are there too many opportunities on line?
2:30 could Facebook be a waste of time?
3:00 the Nemo moment
4:45 what makes OnCouRSS unique
5:35 can you use social media to help make money
6:15 do I need a “traditional” web site?
6:38 the difference between a blog and a web page
7:50 blogs as conversations
8:27 ground zero
10:35 get their heads nodding
11:27 social media for both website and blog?
13:23 what is WordPress
14:50 where do “we” come in?
15:15 personality of the year
16:10 customization
Facebook – a must for event planners
So, finished stacking up your friends’ list yet? Me neither. As with many social networking sites, quite often we reach that “Nemo moment”, you know, the spot where we’re all in our own plastic bag floating in the bay after a brilliant escape… “Now what?”. Well, a quick answer is start using Facebook as your event promotional tool.
Being the perfect metaphor for a gathering of friends and the development of acquaintance networks, you naturally find those of similar interests, common habits and the same general geographic locations making up vast concentric circles throughout Facebook. This provides event planners the perfect promitional ground for their events. In addition, Facebook provides the tools to to set up an Event page, one that automatically generates an invitation to all that event planner’s friends, one that gets posting on the geographical map and under any subject of interest to Facebook users. Once up, the fun begins.
Once you have established someone as your “friend” you see all of their posts, profile changes and activity. When they add photos to their Facebook page, you know about it, when they join a group, you know it and, when they join an event, you typically get an invite too. A new event posted tends to spread like wildfire through the event planner’s friends, to their friends and outward at rampant pace to individuals across logical regions of interest and geography.
The important element is the start. There are two basic “feeds” to your event listing one being the natural path news of your event posting will take through Facebook’s event listing system. The second is your own friends. The more friends you have the larger your Ground Zero will be. You can also casually cross post your event to other events, by joining them… your event will automatically be ranked amongst that event’s peers in a link list. Groups are also great targets for a quick posting.
Many corporations and organizations participate in events of all kinds… your company can make great strides in public relations with events promoted on Facebook, Myspace and other networks like this. Typically it takes time to set up your own friends network, but once done, you are ready to see viral promotion of any and all events you create.