Bing Loves Facebook January 3, 2011
Posted by carolhagen in Facebook.Tags: AEC, Bing, construction, Construction Business Development, Facebook, SEO, social media
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Bing loves Facebook more than Google these days. If you haven’t noticed, Bing displays Facebook profile pictures in their search results using Facebook’s Instant Personalization Notifications so now you can we see all your connections to the right of the regular search results. This is great if you think your friends tastes match yours but you need to think about it from your business friend’s point of view – as a tool for branding you and your comapny – construction or otherwise.
Bing will display your Facebook friends “likes” as it pertains to your search. This is wonderful for TV Shows, restaurants, movies and music thanks to Pandora, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes and Clicker. But there’s more to it. With Docs.com and Scribd businesses and entrepreneurs can extend their search reach and position themselves as experts with original content. What am I suggesting to the AEC industry? Architects, Engineers and Homebuilders that cater to the homeowner and are using Facebook need to get on board!
You may also want to think about whether you wish to opt out of certain applications. Here are good instructions from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how to opt-out…yes it is one application at a time. Again Facebook makes it cumbersome to keep your privacy private.
Bing people searches will also provide recommendations for people you should friend in Facebook. Will this increase visits to profiles? Absolutely! It will also expose you to more ads, but as a public speaker discussing social media topics I’m hoping it leads to more opportunities.
I’d appreciate it if you “like” this on Facebook. You may be interested in reading how Google loves LinkedIn.
Facebook is Scary October 29, 2010
Posted by carolhagen in Facebook.Tags: business, Facebook, permissions, privacy, search, social media
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Facebook is scary to me this Halloween. Facebook has been criticized frequently on their default privacy settings, but what’s frightening is they continue to want permission to access more information. As a business owner doing business with business (B2B) I was looking for more tools to improve my Facebook search results earlier this week. Low and behold Facebook has Advanced Profile Search 2.2 (Beta). What’s scary about this application is what you have to allow access to if you want to use it. I’m glad I noticed the Birthday, Political and Religious views in the Request Permission notice. 
So the dilemma is do I want to test a beta version of Facebook’s Advanced Search app, that has been rated with low marks, when I must grant access to birthday, religious and political views? Perhaps I need to change the content on my political views and religion to “Not applicable” before proceeding. I noticed that more than 27,000 Facebook monthly users have jumped on and started using the beta version already.
Yesterday I met Karen Thomas, Director at Global Diversity Consulting, LLC at the American Subcontractors Association membership mixer in Phoenix. Diversity is more than skin deep and having just considering trying the Facebook’s advanced search app I just had to ask her what she thought about granting Facebook this permission. “There are two rules of thought. One, it’s Facebook’s product and we have to abide by their rules…after all it is free”. Karen continued, “Two, Granting access to the religion and political affiliations is either to increase fear or revenue. Free enterprise has no limits, we should monitor ourselves to not offend or use this information to support any bias.”
By now you no longer wonder why some businesses ban Facebook at work. By talking about this in a public setting, perhaps we can all become less fearful, or just more skeptical. What do you think? Let’s share our thoughts with the public and Facebook in the comments section. All perspectives are welcome (no expletives please).
Google Loves LinkedIn October 13, 2010
Posted by carolhagen in linkedin, Software plug-in.Tags: construction, Facebook, Google, linkedin, socialmedia
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Google loves LinkedIn and I’ve been including this fact in many powerpoint presentations and national speaking engagements for over a year now. There’s more to this love than how Google searches LinkedIn profiles. We can now see the extent of the relationship with today’s LinkedIn blog post announcing LinkedIn Labs (sounds and looks like Google Labs) and the great new projects contained within Labs to prove my point. I’ve used filtering on construction as examples throughout to keep my focus on the construction industry.
First, let’s peek at NewIn. This is a plugin for Firefox (not yet available on IE), that integrates Google Earth with the users on LinkedIn. Not sure of it as a valuable application but it is very visual as seen in this screenshot: 
Next, I had to try out LinkedIn Signals. The LinkedIn Blog post today offered the 1st 500 people to request a sneak peek access. I added it after 2pm today. Signals makes LinkedIn status updates from connections look similar to Facebook as seen here: 
I have to believe that LinkedIn is answering Facebook’s copycat of groups with a more business-like copy of the Facebook Wall. Perhaps this isn’t so much Google’s love for LinkedIn, but their answer to a possible adversary.
Finally to prove my point about LinkedIn and Google is the introduction of INstant, a Google-like search for the LinkedIn User that displays the connections you have based upon your search criteria. I can’t believe that there are over a million instances of construction but this screen shot verifies that very fact! 
Then there’s ChromeIn, which I didn’t try out, but then I haven’t used Chrome yet. Being able to see your LinkedIn connections’ status updates in your Chrome Browser must be a good thing for Google.
My take is that with all the Google love for LinkedIn, Facebook is none too happy with their Business to Business audience performance. What’s your opinion?
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