Here’s a post from a non-profit I volunteer with that we’ll dissect into 7 pieces.

1. By re-sharing something as your brand, but via a fan or friend, that fan or friend receives a bit of recognition for sharing something with their network. In turn, your brand shows off someone who may be influential or relevant to your brand. (In this case, it’s a YPIN Board member we’re showcasing, but this can be any affiliate, brand ambassador or general user you may be connected to.)
2. Tagging other brands is important as it lets your followers navigate around to news and information resources. In this example, NPR’s page is tagged – tagging is simple but sometimes clunky. If you’re posting as your brand – and using YPIN as an example – you have to first be sure that YPIN (as a brand) has navigated to NPR’s page and ‘liked’ them. Then, once on YPIN’s page again, simply type @NPR and Facebook will prompt with suggested results, click/select the NPR option and then their brand will be tagged in your content. Most of the time this will work for people as well, but there’s some sketchiness around tagging people while posting as a brand versus posting as yourself. If you can forgo tagging individuals (which may rise privacy concerns anyway), this should be pretty easy to manage. 
3. There is a delicate balance between content and engagement. I don’t have a ratio or good model to follow (apart from this one), but in the case of YPIN, we want to remain informative yet unbaised, objective and nonpartisan. It’s best to have a one sentence summary of the article or content shared, written as objectively as possible, followed by…
4. A pointed question. Granted there are a number of people serving as admins for this particular Facebook page, it’s best to use the first-person tone when addressing fans. In their newsfeeds, it will appear as if your brand is asking them individually and they will be more inclined to respond. When asking questions, directly ask as if you were talking to a fan face-to-face. Blanket questions like “what other types of D have people seen in B” or “who has done x, y and z” are too impersonal and usually ignored. In this example we ask directly “what do you think about [what the article is about]” and within a few hours we get responses and likes.
5. Title and description of content shared: not all websites have appropriate titles and descriptions. These can be edited before you share a link. Just hover your mouse over the title or description before you post the link, it will gain a yellow background, then click it, you’ll be able to adjust what title and description show up. This especially helps when the content we’re sharing has long titles, truncated descriptions or other nonsense that doesn’t make sense for our audience. Some of the posts YPIN made for a recent boating event that have custom titles and descriptions. A lot of content shared directly from other brands’ or parent-brands’ sites (even if through shortened urls) can have ridiculous titles and often the descriptions end in ellipses or cut off right at the good parts of a sentence.
6. Thanking participation with likes and follow-up comments (see part 7, as well). If someone responds to a post or content you provided, go back in as your brand and like their action. Even if you personally don’t agree with what they’re saying, you can always followup your ‘like’ of their comment by adding a comment (as the brand) thanking them for their feedback or asking a followup question. If you want to engage the opinion presented, be sure to engage the users as yourself since your brand is needs to remain unbiased. Liking your own content isn’t nearly as important as liking user-submitted content/comments/engagement.
7. Continue to engage. If a conversation is going, a debate is being had, or if someone asks questions like then feel free to clarify with a followup comment or link. Link content in comments now shows a preview (so sharing a link brings up an image, title and description – which you can’t edit, but it is useful for users) so there’s a bit of transparency when you’re engaging with folks.

In the interview, Mr Jensen highlights three “principles and communication strategies” that could benefit all organizations.

1. Do what you know is right.  This strategy provides a roadmap for interacting and navigating corporate business decisions while acknowledging that businesses and consumers are a community working together for the greater good.
2. Be honest and transparent.  No business is environmentally benign, thus communications should be more about being truthful and humble to help mitigate the impacts a customer’s business has upon the environment.
3. Tell stories.  Instead of publishing a list of product benefits, allow customers to tell stories about how your product and company benefited them. Jensen recommends stories about how a product was useful, what features customers felt they couldn’t live without, and what happened as a result of using a product.

What is it about for-profit companies that cause people to loose sight of these goals? Why do inappropriate water-cooler jokes about current affairs make it onto company social media accounts? Why is maintaining integrity even something that needs to be discussed?

A large difference between the socially responsible businesses and the run-of-the-mill businesses are the people. People who are involved in the community are consciously and socially aware of how their communication and actions affect others.

I think my group of friends and colleagues are socially aware. Personally I participate, volunteer and/or mentor in several local organizations that directly benefit the community.  Young Professionals International Network, Social Venture Partners, EarthCorps and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Many of the new friends I’ve made have actually been through my participation in these organizations. By giving a little bit of our free time, we can contribute to organizations and the community in addressing the needs of the greater good.

In what ways do you reach out to your community? Who does your organization partner with? And if there isn’t a direct connection between your organization, employees and the community, what do you think would be interesting opportunities to give back?

Up-hill-in-the-snow-both-ways-rants come to mind.

What’s the real drive behind purchasing (social) coupons: is it an impulsive purchase or is it a calculated decision? Leah Ingram recently speculated that social coupon sites are driving impulsive purchasing decisions. The article cites PICPA’s comments about the impulsive purchasing satisfies ‘wants’ more than ‘needs.’ A cornerstone of some marketing models for social coupon sites is post-purchase share the purchase event with your network(s).

Personally, I often buy daily-deals is when they promote a brand I already support. I would gladly spend (all my) money at FBC’s Urban Beer Garden, but when an offer ran through Tippr in February I immediately purchased two deals. Already being a customer willing to spend money with this brand, I figured it couldn’t hurt to save a little extra money for my next visit. I treat supporting a favorite brand through social coupons as an investment.

When you purchase a daily-deal what’s the driving force behind your decision? Is it to save money, try something new, try something familiar, as a gift or some other reason?

Social coupon fad confronts the traditional “paying dues” – both money and time – method of attaining additional value from a brand. Regardless of a customer’s purchasing decision there will be (or already is) a disconnect in the relationships between customer and brand.

About two years ago everyone was desperate to have some SEO value so they’d show up in search results. While still important, the focus has been shifted to generating excitement about your brand through a social network. ClickZ posted an article a few days back stating that ads on Facebook that contain social context are 68% more likely to be remembered by users. That is, when Heineken posts an ad on Facebook that links to one of their videos, when I ‘like’ or share the video, my network is 68% more likely to remember the Heineken brand (within the context of the video). Since word of mouth referrals generally hold more weight than search results or email campaigns, a social network would be the best place to cleverly advertise so your fans/users/potential customers will ‘like’ or share your content.

In theory, it may be more cost effective and powerful to focus all of your online marketing efforts on a social media campaign. Having a website is – or was – a standard or rite of passage, much like having a business card. Buy a domain name and have it redirect over to your Facebook page. You’ve undoubtedly seen brands that are using social media platforms for customer service, sales and other communication like all-important Rugby World Cup news.

If the value of a well executed social media strategy is higher than that of the website, why not just ditch the website?

Take a moment and evaluate why you have a website: for customer contacts, to showcase products and services, to provide a resource for customers to get assistance from your brand and what else? Facebook’s platform has a core purpose of allowing users to share information with their network. Is there a difference between what Facebook facilitates and what your website facilitates? For small or local businesses, trying to complete in search results is a painful and sometimes expensive ordeal – competing against companies and campaigns with a broader reach than your small town cause increases in the price for Pay-Per-Click advertising. Larger companies and campaigns also have multiple people guiding and monitoring the interactions and often small businesses cannot dedicate a staff member the same way. On social networking platforms you can even target ads at specific regions and demographics (based on social data stored on the platform). A fine-tuned Social Media presence could very well be the replacement of the website.

On the other hand, having a website for a small business is still a rite of passage. I have yet to find a client or business who has a social media presence and does not have a website. The baseline for establishing a brand online is still a unique URL for your products, services etc. That said, the challenge is now about keeping your website content as fresh and updated as your social media presence. Search engines are constantly crawling your website for new content, users want new content – so why keep it all to the social networks?

Facebook has a series of social plug-ins for your website. Plug and play code you can drop anywhere on your site and it will pull the latest from your Facebook page. Twitter also has a large number of third party plug-ins that allow you to post your latest tweets or even query their search API for trending topics.

I would recommend for small businesses to get their website to a self-sustaining point through social media. The website will have the baseline product and service descriptions, pricing etc – that’s great – but then add social plug-ins for the networks where you’re actively engaged with customers and fans. Keep your fans happy through the social networks – and at the same time your website will be updating with relevant content as your brand’s on the social network will be syndicated through your plugins to your website.

The data comes from a web app created by Vitrue which boasts to have the ability to quantify Social Media into Return on Investment (ROI) figures. Before you go run and try to calculate your page’s dollar value know that the point of a social media presence isn’t dollar value. I’m not the only one uneasy by Vitrue’s misleading ROI calculations and dollar values for fans.

MySpace is a ‘technology company connecting people through personal expression, content, and culture.’ Facebook gives ‘people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.’ The point of these two major social networking sites is to connect people.

How do you value a relationship? Is it pure dollars? How would you calculate any form of ROI based on relationships, in this case between a brand and followers/fans? Let me throw two thoughts out there: (1) communicating through social media channels is the same or similar to driving traffic from a blog: you provide something your readers/followers want, they identify and discuss around your content. (2) Besides very few, how many people are purchasing goods and services from a Facebook page, or as a result of traffic from a Facebook page to an eCommerce website? How can any Facebook page or social media campaign even guess at potential ROI?

I’m throwing hypotheticals out there to guide you to my point: the bottom line is Vitrue adds false dollar value. Their calculations are not based on analytical data translated into dollars and sense but made on unsubstantiated speculation. The real problem ends up not being with Vitrue’s faking ROI values, the real problem exists with the Web Analysts at corporations (Fortune 200′s to small businesses) who buy into the idea that fans X daily interactions X percentage of annual revenue could equal ROI.

Despite how upset I may be with the concept of ROI association with social media interactions, we should probably ask: Are the folks at Vitrue jerks for obscuring social media value or are they geniuses taking advantage of naive Web Analysts’ and large-scale companies who don’t know better?

For a enterprise level Facebook Application I’m working on, I have been trying to use the Open Graph API to determine where a user’s network, current city or states (of interests) exist and then serving up content based on the the response. If you’ve seen anything from popular fast food chains such as McDonalds and Burger King you’ll know that not all goods, services and specials are offered nationwide. McRib is a good example: despite availability of ingredients, labor for processing etc, the McRib is only ever around for a short period of time and in certain markets. If a brand like McDonalds wants to promote the McRib on Facebook – they can but they have to add a ton of disclaimers saying ‘price and participation may vary.’

Facebook Ads can be targeted at a particular user group, why not target your custom applications’ content? At the end of the day, a lot of brands utilizing Facebook‘s platform, like Yelp, are trying to provide more accurate, socially relevant and locally available content. While I want to be the first to provide the service, we can all benefit from network-relevant content. Universities – and Facebook’s other programs attempt to target types of users with relevant content and best practices.

I ‘like’ Universities and I have a major take away from this campaign (albeit only a few hours old):

I can target the set-up of my content on a demographic and then through carefully planned code I can target sub-groups of my desired demographic.

I keep harping on Facebook campaigns, but what are some of the focuses of your Facebook campaigns? Is it to be informative and interactive, present fun things for your clients and fans to do, cross-promote products or brands?

What I have a hard understanding is why people don’t communicate in person about tagging on mobile applications. Look: the only way to tag someone through Facebook Places is if they’re already a friend of yours. Unless you’ve mass-added a bunch of folks so you can play an online-game without paid advancement, your friends list should be people you actually know. Why is it Facebook’s problem if your friends, who are presumably physically near you, are tagging you in content?

There’s an argument about a casual Facebook users being tagged without their knowledge of such functionality existing. Moreover: if they have a mobile device that doesn’t connect to the internet, they may not have any ability to monitor where they’re being tagged until they’re in front of a computer again. Acknowledging all of that – the point remains: people tagging you are your friends.

Two things: (i) if your friends are tagging you and you don’t approve, talk to your friends, don’t get upset with Facebook; (ii) be honest with people and all will be well: if lie about your location or activities, expect to get caught – maybe even from a tag from one of your friends checking in with Facebook Places.

Facebook’s purpose is to create a vehicle for sharing. Not just for you to share and broadcast about you, but to enable others you’re connected with to share their content. The main advantage in any of this share is the idea that connections (i.e. users) can experience each other’s shared content without being in physical proximity to one another. Facebook Places brings another level of location-free sharing: by actually enabling the sharing of physical locations.

There are some privacy concerns about friends tagging friends in posts and with the launch of Facebook Places, concerns arise around tagging. If you actually watch the video I linked a bit earlier, listen to the scenario the ABC’s Linsey Davis says:

Let’s say I happen to tell my boyfriend I’m working late tonight. And then I go out to the bar with some friends of mine. Someone someone unbeknownst to me can say ‘Hey guess what, Linsey Davis is at this bar.’

Let me digress for a moment: I will accept that different social networks allow an individual to reinvent themselves, their persona, personality etc. But one fact remains true throughout life: lying and deceit is bad and there are repercussions for involvement in bad things.

In Linsey’s scenario, and in may other nay-sayers about Facebook places, the idea that I can tag you in a check-in is something you may not consent to, you don’t want your boyfriend finding out you aren’t working late or that after working late you went to a bar. Sorry Linsey: fact of the matter is independent of Facebook people have the ability to see you at the bar, to call up your boyfriend and tell him where you are and who you’re with. If you step outside your home people can see you. Maybe later in the day, maybe later in the week, someone may say “hey have you seen [you] lately?” and the response may be “yeah I saw them outside of their home yesterday.” It may not seem like it but this is the same sharing interaction as Facebook Places.

Still, people will inevitably complain about privacy concerns and being automatically opted-in to such functionality. You know the real way to solve your Facebook privacy concerns regarding Facebook Places: talk to the person who is an arm’s-length from you, checking in and tagging you. It’s not Facebook’s fault if someone tags you and it is by bar easier to talk to someone you trust. By the way, someone has to be a friend of yours on Facebook in order for them to tag you, so it’s not like it’s some random paparazzi following you around reporting on your location. And communication with your friend(s) is far better than to gripe at Facebook about their privacy settings.

Enough on the negativity, how can you benefit from Facebook Places? Compared to other location based networks, Facebook Places lets you share your check-ins with your Facebook network. (Advantage over a group like Foursquare, who requires one-to-one friend invites/acceptance.) Claiming Facebook Places (as a business owner) is pretty simple, takes maybe a few hours for Facebook to send you a confirmation to then administer your Facebook Place. There’s even an API to allow read and writing to Facebook Places, which can be pulled just like all other Open Graph data. You’ll get to create promotions for your Facebook Places, similar to the game-like promotion activity offered by Foursquare.

But most importantly, I would wager that for small businesses that have a tight or non-existent budget for marketing, Facebook Places allows for them to have a mobile presence aside from a website or Facebook Business Page. I personally am still waiting for more local businesses (especially my clients) to jump on the idea that they don’t need a website, they just need a perfected Facebook Business Page and (now) a strong Facebook Places page.

Facebook is currently rolling out Places to the US markets, there are a few threads about it’s progress – it seems the west coast (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, et al) have already been deployed. I would estimate international availability for Facebook Places to be near the middle-to-end of September.

What I’m interested in now is how will non-brick-and-mortar businesses benefit from Facebook Places? Moreover: how does any business that doesn’t have a storefront or physical space to take advantage of location based services? My immediate reaction is: get out into your local community and make a temporary location centered around an event. Good example: if you are a business in Denver, Colorado go throw a party at Lucky Strike, create a check-in location (on Foursquare, etc) for the “Nick-is-Awesome, Inc. Party Hosted by Lucky Strike.” Check-ins warrant a free drink or hour of bowling care of “Nick-is-Awesome, Inc.” and any achievements earned by users get some kind of promotion. Keep in mind: using Facebook Places does mean your users will automatically have the visibility to their network – which means your brand will have visibility to their network – but don’t neglect other location-based services. Foursquare lets you create your own places, too – you can play location-based services against each other by promoting each one for different/same events. For our example: free drinks if you check-in via Facebook Places, free hour of Bowling if you check into the party via Foursquare, etc. As it turns out, claiming a Facebook Place is easy, if you have a ton of business documentation. Yielding Facebook Places as a great local business directory and Foursquare a great ad-hoc (and event-based) location based service for business.

For those of you who don’t know, the short story behind the whole movement is to take traditional desktop software and make it available through the browser, hosted online and eventually accessible anywhere.

These days, someone says ‘Apps’ and immediately ideas surrounding mobile apps crops up. The reality about mobile apps, they just provide easier access and simplified approaches to tasks you would normally do through a website or desktop software – naturally with the advantage of being with you at all times.

Think of the apps you use on a daily basis. Right now, for example, I’ve got Photoshop, Dreamweaver, an Instant Messaging client, spreadsheet software, a game, and a browser (with WordPress and YouTube rockin’). Of these pieces of software, only one is through a browser, everything else is dependent on a desktop. Granted the IM Client, Dreamweaver and maybe even my game could all be accessing the internet, but they are all software I’ve installed locally to access their features. The core drive behind the Chrome Web Store is to make this traditional desktop software available through a browser. When you open a new tab, you can click screenshots of your bookmarks (to go to those websites) or icons for applications such as photoshop (and access your files either stored remotely or locally).

If you saw the Mashable post on Facebook you may also notice that within a few minutes of the article posting, there were some 50 people commenting ‘No, I will not use or pay for apps through my browser’ – but not in so many words. The general public – and I’d like to think that Mashable’s audience is more tech savvy than the general public – has a hard time accepting certain change. Apps on mobile devices (that aren’t games) are simplified ways of accomplishing tasks you’d do on a desktop or through a website. Now we’re talking about doing the same approach but doing it independent of any mobile device and dependent on a browser.

How many of you host or support websites that are Software as a Service (SaaS)? Would you consider putting your application into the Chrome Web Store? You know if you dig down deep into documentation, there’s a lot of detail on using OpenID and OAuth to interact with Google’s Licensing services – licensing paired with Google Checkout?

Ok let’s back way up and give you some food for thought, look at all Google’s apps have to offer and integrate with: Open Social, OpenID/OAuth/Google Accounts, Google Checkout, Google Maps, Google Places, Google Base, YouTube, and there are so many more that you’ve probably never seen or thought about. Now think about what your SaaS does, or what your desktop-software does: do you think you have enough tools to let people, let your users, actually use your software through a browser? Use and license your material through an online resource that’s separate from your website?

Feel free to pursue the documentation yourself.

<?php
/**
 *
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage DeptofAwesome
 */
?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?> >

We’ll want to change the xmlns (XML Name Space) of our HTML document. Note that changing the header.php file will update all pages that use this include file will be affected. We want to add the Open Graph protocol and the Facebook protocol like this:

<?php
/**
 *
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage DeptofAwesome
 */
?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
     xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"
     xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"
     <?php language_attributes(); ?> >

Adding the following code attributes to your <html> tag allows for Open Graph and Facebook objects to work on your site:

xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"
xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"

Now to add the ‘Like’ button to your posts. The button is based on a page’s URL. If you have a blog that’s showing multiple posts, we just have to define the button to pull the URL for each post. A simple and standard button code looks like this:

<?php
/**
 *
 */
?>

<fb:like href="yourlinkhere" show_faces="false"
     width="300" font="arial"></fb:like>

There are additional configuration options, little tweaks to the button to try and match the motif of your design, but we’re just keeping things simple for now. You’ll want to now go into your main index template found in /wp-content/themes/[themename]/index.php – there’s a tag that’ll have a class of id named ‘postmetadata’ that we care about. In this example, the post meta data (tags, links, comment count, etc) are all contained in a custom function called ‘othergoodness’ – which we can ignore for now. Add your ‘Like’ button code within the tag labeled ‘postmetadata’ and immediately after all other functions are called (you can change placement later). It should look something like this:

<p class="postmetadata">
  <?php othergoodness(); ?>
  <fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" layout="standard"
     show_faces="false" width="450" action="like" colorscheme"dark"
     style="padding-top:10px;"></fb:like>
</p>

Note there are a few extra parameters for this example, just trying to show a little more detail and how you can control some display elements.

Our link, defined by the href attribute, utilizes the permanent link for that particular post. So on a page of 3 posts, each post has unique meta data and a unique link associated with it, we are piggy-backing on that predefined info by calling the_permalink() function for our link.

You’ll also want to add the like button to your single-post and page templates. You can use the same code snippet from your main index template on both of those pages. I recommend you place the code near your comments-template declaration. If you have comments turned off within WordPress, still add your like button near where the comments would be. In our example, the single post page, typically found at /wp-content/themes/[themename]/single.php becomes:

<fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" layout="standard"
     show_faces="false" width="450" action="like" colorscheme"dark"
     style="padding-top:10px;"></fb:like>
     <?php comments_template(); ?>

Adding the button to a page will work the same way. Find your page template and drop the same code. Page template is typically at /wp-content/themes/[themename]/page.php – and you can place it just before the comments template again. I add it after any admin-specific functionality that’d be relevant to post content to keep interaction elements (likes, comments, etc) separate when visually editing the front-end of the site.

<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.','<p>','</p>'); ?>
<fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" layout="standard"
     show_faces="false" width="450" action="like" colorscheme"dark"
     style="padding-top:10px;"></fb:like>
     <?php comments_template(); ?>

And that’s pretty much it, now the Facebook ‘Like’ button will be on all of your relevant pages and posts. The ‘fb:like’ tag works like any other ‘a’ tag where you can add it to just about anything.

The key to everything with the like button is the URL. What we learned here was how to just go in, drop some open graph and FBML code to dynamically pull the URL per-post or per-page so you don’t have to worry about it. On static sites, naturally you’ll have to add the button to every page with the appropriate URL. There are other methods to add meta data and social interaction to pages and posts, but we can cover that at a later date.