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Facebook’s casual attitude toward its users’ privacy is not recent news. However, security specialist Ron Bowes has shown just how shockingly easy it is to snap up user information from Facebook.

Bowes has set up a website after crawling through the Facebook online directory. The open access directory lists all the users who have their profile security preferences set to public. Facebook enacted a universal privacy reset last year, enabling both search engines and netizens to access the profile pages of its users.

Despite the backlash from privacy-conscious users and consumer rights advocates, some members of Facebook remain unaware that their private information has been released online. Or had tried to reset their profiles to private, but found the process too complicated.

As a result, the Facebook open directory contains 171 million entries, relating to more than 100 million individual users. Bowes compiled all this information into a torrent that can be downloaded from his website. The torrent file itself contains user account names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers and each user’s profile page.

Yet given Facebook’s sketchy history with user privacy, this is hardly surprising. In January, the site’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that with the advent of social media, the age of privacy is over. His sentiment is that people have more important things to worry about then who can access their user information.

Given that Facebook boasts 500 million users (and still growing), it appears Zuckerberg may be right.

So the first question is: have you changed your privacy setting on Facebook yet?

If not, then the second question is: is it because you don’t actually care?

For full details on this story, click here.

Social media has its place in every online marketing campaign. However, how you use it to its best effect for generating returns for your business, or for giving value to your customers, will be very different from business to business. I work with many different types of businesses and entrepreneurs, and there is no one single strategy that will suit them all.

The type of social media interactions you want and the motivation behind a social media campaign will differ for every situation. Some businesses wish to simply interact with current customers to increase satisfaction and enjoyment of their products or services. Another reason would be to improve exposure and branding. The more common reason is to drive traffic to a site in order to generate leads and increase sales.

If you are not sure what you want to achieve through social media or even what you could achieve with it then follow these simple steps to test the waters and have a splash around in the Web 2.0 ocean.

1. Focus your attention on one or two choice platforms. Don’t spread yourself too thin or you won’t be able to determine which platform is working for you as you’ll be too busy working hard for all of them! Trial a couple at a time to learn and grow, then evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy and reevaluate it if necessary.

2. Set your performance targets and measure them. Simple yet not often done. Once you have chosen your platform, come up with a rough idea as to what it is you want to try and achieve and set some targets. This will help you gauge their effectiveness, but also help you determine how much time to invest in social media moving forward. Think re-tweets, blog posts, referral traffic, fans, connections, enquiries, etc.

3. Don’t clog the line! As a rule, don’t post information that you wouldn’t want to receive in a frequency that you wouldn’t want to receive it. Avoid over posting information promoting your business as this will spam your followers and turn them off.

4. Are there niche social media sites that serve your industry? Considering the amount of social media sites out there, this is quite likely. Find them and interact. These people are interested in what you’ve got and will be happy to interact and hear about what you have to say.

5. Follow people who are doing it right, take notes and do it how they do it.

6.  Make it easy for people to follow you by adding widgets to your site.

So what are you waiting for? Jump in and start swimming!

Click here to read more on social media tips for beginners.

Social media and iPhone apps have arrived on the Australian and New Zealand slopes this winter, providing the skiing and boarding enthusiast options to track the ‘air time’ from a jump, or the newbie skier or boarder to track their way around the mountain if lost on a run.

Snow resorts such as Perisher, Falls Creek and Mount Bulla have launched mini sites,  iPhone apps, e-news subscriptions and text messages for snow bunnies to track their ski miles, find a friend on the slope, access the snow reports and find a warm food or drink spot on the slope or in the village.

An online community, snowtweeters.com, collates all snow-related tweets for your chosen ski or ride destination.

For the diehard skier or boarder, there are two fun iPhone apps:

• Ski-o-meter: tracks your downhill speed, distance covered, and provides a diagram of the slopes height profile and speed over time.

• Hangtimer : records how much time you spend in the air when making a ski hump in terrain park and where in the world you did it.

Apparently there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico little while ago. A big one.

Admittedly, I’m a little out of touch with current events, unless of course they relate to search engine marketing. Which is how I came to hear rumours of this alleged oil spill – according to articles on online marketing sites, BP caused a massive environmental disaster on May 19 with the accidental detonation of one of their offshore drilling rigs.

What interests me as an Internet marketer is how BP is fighting the public relations fallout of their Gulf catastrophe with an extremely aggressive online PR campaign. The oil giant’s level of commitment to the damage control of their brand name online is extraordinarily comprehensive.

For a start, the BP website has undergone a revamp, with the creation of a new section dedicated to the disaster. There are daily news updates and blog posts, press releases and videos, and the interface capability for site visitors to share information on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

BP’s Facebook page is also being utilised as part of a social media initiative dedicated to minimising bad press. The company has also bought the keyword phrase “oil spill” in Google AdWords, so when a user of Google.com enters that search query, a PPC ad runs linking back to the BP website.

A quick look at the page’s source code reveals that even some SEO work has been done to optimise the site’s relevant keywords.

After looking around the BP site, I’m forced to concede that the company’s apparent ongoing dedication to cleaning up their spilled oil is impressive – almost as impressive as the effort they’re putting in to make sure that everyone knows about it.

Buzz at the moment is on how Amazon has thrown its hat into the social networking arena with the online shopping giant’s recent acquisition of patent for a ‘social networking system’. 

How Amazon plans to use the patent is The Question. Its social network patent was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last Tuesday, meaning that Amazon may be planning to offer similar services to social media users as those provided by Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz and Friendster.

The patent “provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users” and “automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.” Ring any bells?

Back to The Question: what Amazon will do with this patent? The history is that Amazon planned to develop a network service (PlanetAll) which it acquired in 1998. However this was shut down after two years in 2000.

What Amazon may plan to do now is a little mistimed considering the level of competition in the current market. Pre-MySpace and Facebook, Amazon had the technology and the concepts but it culled PlanetAll and absorbed its features into Amazon’s Friends and Favorites technology.

Does Amazon hope to compete on a large scale with the likes of Facebook and Friendster? Would it seek legal avenues to enforce its rights to the patent, trying to make other networks change their current models?

This is unlikely in my opinion. It’s more likely that Amazon would use it to build its own social network based around its products and services, in order to benefit the sharing of information and increase sales.

With so many different types of social networks around at the moment and the many more we will surely see in the future, each changing how web users interact and find information, I am keen to see what eventuates and to find out what Amazon can bring to the social networking table.

Yahoo Inc is currently undergoing a revamp to its layout in an its attempt to establish itself as a social network hub. With Yahoo Inc partnering up with Facebook in December 09, personal updates from the social network, known as their ‘news feed’, will be available throughout the Yahoo’s website in the coming days. The new interface will only require a simple click of a link by Yahoo users to activate.

Other tools are also in the pipeline such as Twitter ‘tweets’, and features of popular Zynga games such as ‘Farmville’ and ‘Mafia Wars’, all intended to be incorporated on the Yahoo Inc site. Its aim is to retain its status as a popular social hub and encourage users to stay on the site longer.

Yahoo already has large share of the internet audience, with many of its millions of monthly visitors using the site to access information through search, read world news or check emails. With the rise of market share competitors like Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo wants to keep and grow its existing user base by providing integration through various social media networks. Net increases in site visitor time equals more opportunities for Yahoo to sell online ads to grow its revenue.

With the current concerns of various social media security issues, Yahoo has said they will simplify its privacy controls and encourage users to review the privacy settings.

The competition for social media supremacy online is heating up between Google and Facebook, as both are realising the potential long term revenue stream of that market.

The Basics

Google created Google Friend Connect to allow people to become a member of a network. But the benefits of using this service were not as clear cut. Then came Google Buzz, which again was integrated with Gmail but has not been widely adopted. Then came Google Wave which would allow complete engagement with Google profiles and most websites.

Facebook Connect allows you to leave a comment on any sites that have this function enabled. If someone decides to leave a comment, it will copy the profile picture and then provide a link to your profile on Facebook.

Social E-Commerce

The next step is obviously doing business via the web of social networks. Based on Forrester reports, there are 5 eras of social media, with the final step set to begin in 2011. This is termed “social commerce”, where social networks become part of the buying process.

Virtual products are profitable (Facebook gifts, smartphone applications, elements from the game Second Life). The market has the potential to exceed $1 billion in just the USA alone. China’s larger population and social networks is worth and estimated $5 billion.

Streamlining the Social Media Buying Process

The next step is for Google and Facebook to create simple e-commerce platforms for anyone to purchase any product with a one-click stop shop process like Amazon.

The only thing I would be concerned about is security, which needs to be more secure than it is right now.

Would social network would you feel more comfortable purchasing products over, the Facebook platform or the Google platform? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

A new search engine known as ‘Openbook’ has come about on the World Wide Web, collecting data from Facebook users which have been made public. It collates Facebook information, focusing on status updates, and allows it to be searchable on the Openbook site.

Users of this new search tool can type in a certain keyword or phrase, such as “hate my boss” in the ‘Search Facebook Updates’ field, and a list of results for all those Facebook users who had updated their statuses with that phrase will be generated in what seems like a never ending list…WOW!

As with many of the recent changes to Facebook privacy settings, the newest updates have made it very confusing and also very complicated for users to determine what is private and what is not to the online public. Many users also agree that the privacy rules are changing too often on Facebook, and reading all the fine print becomes annoying and time-consuming.

If you are worried about your privacy settings with your Facebook account, you can use the tool ReclaimPrivacy.org which shows you what is public about your profile and shows you how to secure your privacy settings easily.

On the Openbook website, the investors claim the whole site is a “parody” with no relationship to Facebook, but their main goal from this website is to “get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it will no longer work.”

Twitter has recently become a platform for cross boundary politicking as the Dalai Lama reached out to Chinese followers to take questions and provide some solace on issues from Tibet to his succession.  The Dalai Lama held a one-hour question-and-answer session via Twitter. It was not done through his official Twitter account but facilitated by Chinese writer Wang Lixiong who ran the feed from a New York hotel room. The Dalai Lama’s responses were translated into Chinese by an interpreter and then tweeted on Lixiong’s Twitter account.

According to the AFP’s report, “Nearly 12,000 people selected the 250 questions by online voting done on a Google Moderator site, which was blocked in China on Thursday.” It’s not known how many Chinese people were able to follow the tweets as Twitter is a restricted site in China. There are an estimated 150,000 people in China who use Twitter, and access to the Dalai Lama’s responses were accessible via third-party Twitter applications so it’s very hard to gauge.

This blogger does not want to get too much into the political issues surrounding this case but more so wants to point out the amazing boundary that social media has succeeded in crossing. As much as the Chinese government attempts to blindfold its citizens, another way to see has been found. Kudos is given to Lixong and the Dalai Lama for their innovative efforts to use new technologies to reach out a hand directly to the Chinese people.

The latest comScore figures show that in the first quarter of 2010, Facebook became one of the largest display advertisers on the web. It served about 176.3 billion ads compared to Yahoo who could only serve 131.6 billion banner ads. These figures were only measured on display ads within the company website and not through external networks.

According to The Wall Street Journal,

By revenue, Facebook has a long way to go to catch up to its more established rivals. The social-networking site earned more than $500 million in revenue in 2009 and is forecasting revenue of more than $1 billion in 2010, according to people familiar with the matter. Yahoo earned $6.5 billion in revenue in 2009, mostly from advertising.
Still, Facebook served more ads as people spent more time on the site and loaded more pages. The growth also reflects increased demand from both small and large advertisers, says comScore Chief Marketing Officer Linda Abraham.

Although this is still early stages for Facebook in terms of being a proven advertiser that converts, there are a growing number of small businesses that have invested into it for promotional purposes, and affiliate marketers have also invested a budget into it as the site’s audience continues to increase. Similar to the early stages of Google Adsense, the cost of advertising is still cheap so the opportunity to run a successful campaign is cost effective.

For more information on how E-web Marketing can help you create a successful online campaign that will help a cost effective return on investment, contact us now.