Digital Always Media Inc.
: Search, Social & Analytics :

With over 1 billion Facebook members, it always astonishes me when I run into old friends and others in the 35+ age range who don’t have a Facebook account. I understand why some might not have an account (i.e. employer policy) but when I hear they don’t because they’re scared of the loss of privacy or of identity theft, I have to giggle.

It just takes a few basic steps to protect your privacy and reduce the chances of identity theft. Let’s remember that people toss personal papers into the trash and recycling bins containing far more sensitive, identity-rich data  than a basic Facebook account contains. In other words, you give away more personal information every time you recycle a credit-card offer than most people do in their basic Facebook profiles.

In an age where identity theft is an industry, personal privacy is important. At the same time, it is also an age of communication, networking and social interaction. Wiring virtually 1/7th of the world’s population together, Facebook has become a global directory. If you’re reading this post here but you’re not present there, where exactly are you?

If privacy concerns abut Facebook make you want to scream, take a look at these 7 basic tips and share them with your friends and family. By following these tips they can help to ensure themselves of a safer social experience. By the way, are you practicing all of these “Social Safety Tips”?

1. Unique Email Account –  When registering for Facebook, create a unique email address for your Facebook profile and those in other social networks. Use a disposable email address. You can easily create on Gmail, Outlook.com, or Yahoo Mail. Just forward it to your primary email address for ease of use.*

Why should you do this? Simple, if your Facebook account is ever hacked, the hackers will have stolen your email address and can then have 1 key part of access to most of your online accounts. You can always change your email address at any time, but your social media email address won’t be the primary email address you’re using for banking or bill payments. **

2 Password
a. Create a memorable password, but don’t type it the way it is spelled. Use at least 2 special characters to spell it. For example substitute an ! for either an “i” or “l”, an @ for an “a”, or 8 for a “B”.  Make sure your password has a combination of special characters, upper and lower case letters, and numbers. Also be sure it is at least 7 characters long. Longer email addresses with randomized characters discourage hackers because it takes far too long for their password cracking software to figure out. Hackers are lazy and if you’re a difficult target there is a better than even chance they will pass you by.

b. Don’t write your password anywhere. That’s why I suggested making it memorable like your maternal grandmother’s maiden name, or the name of your best friend in nursery school etc.

c. Set a reminder to in your personal calendar to change your passwords every 90 days or so. If you have the memory, change them every 30 days.

3. Be Selective with Friends – Once you’ve joined Facebook, others will be able to search your name and find your account. Normally this will be current friends, friends from the past and relatives, but occasionally it might be a complete stranger. Why strangers? To some Facebook is a game and to win the game you need the most connections (friends) possible so they connect with everyone. In other rare cases, it can be a scammer trying to make a connection in order to try to win your confidence for a scam at a later date.

This is why, when it comes to Facebook, the best way to protect yourself starts with who you accept friend requests from. Only accept friend requests from people you actually know and trust. After all, they’re going to see everything you post. All too often people accept friendships on Facebook because the person making the request is already a friend of a friend.

Just ask yourself, “Would I let a stranger into my house who knocked on my door because they said they knew a friend of mine?” Most likely not. Always makes sure someone knows this person personally and not just virtually.

4. Account Settings – Go to your Facebook account settings and select Secured Browsing (this  means that some 3rd party programs won’t work with your account). It also ensures anything your sending over the Internet to Facebook is encrypted.

5. Privacy Settings – Go to your Facebook privacy settings and select “Ads, Apps and Websites”.  Then click on Public Search . Make sure public search is disabled. If not Google/Bing can actually index your Facebook posts and people who are not your Facebook friends can search on Facebook and see your posts.

6. Group & Categorize – Once you get comfortable with Facebook you can start setting up list/categories to classify your friends. This will allow you to keep in contact with people and message them, but you also restrict them from seeing some posts. This is ideal if you want to separate social friends from business friends from general acquaintances. You can control if a post is visible to all friends on Facebook (public), or restricted to specific groups of people.

7. Watch What You Post! I give this advice to everyone especially my kids. Don’t post anything on Facebook that you would be embarrassed if your grandmother saw it. My son once asked “Why my grandmother?”  I explained to him, there are things you can talk to me about and he giggled. He’s only ten so when I asked, “Would you want to talk to your Bubbie about it?”, he then turned a deeply embarrassed red.

Simply put, don’t put anything on Facebook that you don’t want the whole world to see or read. You can make it private, but there’s nothing stopping one of your Facebook friends from sharing it with everyone they know in a split second (not out of malice but because they think it’s cute) and from there who knows where it will end up.

Ultimately, Facebook is a great place to connect with old and new friends and family from around the world.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at alan -at- digitalalwaysmedia [dot] com or message me on Facebook.

Now get out there and be social!

*Disposable Email Address: create a unique email addresses that you’ll only use for specific online activities (1 for social media sites another for online contests, etc.). Use one of the many free services that provide this service. The key here is to separate these applications from your primary email address, this way if a spammer gets a hold of it and you start getting too much junk on this email account, you can simply stop using it (dispose of it) by creating a new one and then updating the applications that used it with the new email address.

** Email Forwarding: All of the free email services have a way in their settings to forward any email they receive to another email account. Simply enter your primary email account here. By doing so, you won’t need to log into multiple email accounts to receive messages from applications like Facebook.

If you’re active in Social Media and interested in measuring your performance using a variety of social applications, then you’ve no doubt looked up your Score. Klout and similar tools attempt to measure and quantify how effective individuals are using all the different social tools. By applying these various interactions across various applications to an algorithm, these scoring tools derive a score that purports to be some kind of measure of influence in the social media world.

Klout being one of the highest profile social scoring tools has marketed itself as, “The Standard of Influence”. With this marketing position, Klout has come under fire over the past couple of years as people start comparing their scores to friends, co-workers, industry peers and celebrities. Little insight has ever been given on how Klout’s algorithm works and why for more than an year Justin Bieber scored a perfect 100 while the President Obama scored significantly lower. Was Bieber truly more influential that the President of the United States? Of course not, but Bieber and his staff (under his moniker) were more active at Tweeting, Facebook updates and other social interactions to which his fans, would retweet, like, share, G+ and more. All of which contributed to his perfect score. As popular as President Obama might be, his fans rarely faint at mere mention of his name, much less reTweet everything he posts.

Two weeks ago in an attempt to address this issues plus the ever changing landscape of social applications (combined create the on-line social networking sphere known as Social Media), Klout once again revamped its algorithm. And just like when Google changes their algorithm, people got bent out of shape and stopped paying attention to the improved results, unless of course they’re the beneficiary of the change.

What changed in Klout this time is a significant increase in measurement points in the the algorithm from a few dozen to several hundred. The result of this change has, for the most part, been stabilized scores. It’s much harder now to get a major change in score over night (up or down). One thing Klout has always done when ever they updated their algorithm is work the number backwards so you can see the overall impact.

Take my score for example.

Prior to the change

After the change

Now the big question… Yes, President Obama now has a higher Klout score than Justin Bebier. The next big questions are, “What did Klout do and and how can I leverage this changes to get a higher Klout score?”

To answer the question about how you can manipulate the score to your advantage I have to counter with, why do you care? The score is ultimately a measure how effectively you personally are using various social applications. If you manipulate the score, the number to you becomes meaningless and you’ll have spent more time doing things to manipulate your Klout score then actually using social media applications for what they were indented for (your benefit).

But to give you an idea of some of the changes that have taken place, here are a few that were revealed to members of the Klout Squad, (an unpaid advisory group that I am a member of), just before the release of the new algorithm:

• A look at the make-up your contacts on LinkedIn including their titles and how many recommendations they have received
• How many +K you’ve received and who gave them (their Klout score)
• Do you have a Wikipedia page, if so how often is it update and what category is it in
• Likes of LinkedIn posts

This goes hand-in-hand with some of the previous key measurement points of:

• Total number of Facebook status update likes and shares
• Total number of Twitter reTweets, and by whom
• Number Foursquare comments that were liked, and by whom
• Number of Foursquare tips left that were liked or completed by others

These are just a few of the most high profile components of the Klout Algorithm. The weight each one gets along with all the other key measurement points is part of the secret algorithm. What is helpful is that Klout is also releasing a new interface which is making many of the above elements more transparent which I’ll cover in a future blog post.

What all this boils down to, is that Klout is evolving its scoring model as the world of social marketing evolves and not remaining static. Just as Google and Bing are constantly tweaking and occasionally releasing major updates to their algorithms. If you care about your Klout score, then treat Klout like a search engine and think long term benefit and not just a short term gain. By simply using the appropriate social tools for your specific needs and using them as effectively as possible, you’ll get the best possible score from Klout and more importantly you get the biggest bang possible using social media.

Once again, I’m thrilled to be participating on behalf of Digital Always Media in the latest on-line  conference series “SEO WebConference 2012”. This series of live 1 hour guest lectures has been taking place since August 3 and I’ll be speaking on Wednesday August 29th on “Web Analytics for SEO“.

What I love about participating in this series is not just the ability to give back to the community, but the ability to participate in something I strongly believe will be come more common in the near future. Yes on-line conferences are and will be common part of everyone’s learning process.

The benefits of on-line conferences in this format are:

• No need to travel, saving countless hours of travel time and expense
• The ability to spread out the conference sessions over several weeks to minimize the impact of being out of the office for 2 or more days when attending external events
• Allows conference organizers to get high quality and hard to get speakers who can more easily schedule in 1 hour instead of giving up 1 -2 days (because of travel etc.) to speak for 1 hour

However, there is one major short coming to on-line conference. That is the networking that goes on before, between and after sessions. I’ve been to many conferences over the years where I learned more in a impromptu 15 minute breakfast conversation than I did by sitting through countless sessions. I’ve  also mad life-long friends during the non-session times as well.

But the missing element of the conference networking is slowly working its way into the on-line world. I know during my on-line classes for the s Digital Analytics program, I set-up specific time for the students to get to know each other during the live classes and have heard from some of them that they did in fact form bounds with the other students. I’m sure components like this will slowly start working their way into on-line conferences as well.

The lesson here, don’t be afraid of on-line conferences or even on-line events. You can still learn a lot and save time and money on travel.