The Challenge is Out. Will You Accept?

At ProspectMX we know firsthand the value that social media can play on a business. In our own backyard, the United Way of Lancaster County is currently looking to expand their Facebook Fan base to 1,000 followers by 1/1/11. Therefore, in efforts to help the local community, we have agreed to put up $1,000 when United Way of Lancaster County reaches their goal by the New Year. The purpose of this challenge is to keep Lancaster County informed and engaged on health & human service issues throughout the county.

What do we ask of you? Simply visit United Way of Lancaster County Facebook Page at UWLanc and click the “Like” button to the right of their name. On the page, you will find photos, videos, articles, event listings and a deeper look at the work of United Way and their partners. Feel free to write on their wall, ask questions and even post pictures of how you are living united every day. This page is maintained by their staff but it is created for you!

For additional information, visit UW eNews: Facebook Challenge here.

Thank you for joining hands with us and keeping the LIVE UNITED movement going strong through 2011!

It is true…..Ken just broke up with Barbie using Twitter. I could not believe my ears when my 6 year old daughters latest Barbie DVD was playing in our car during our last family road trip and those exact social media and more technical phrases were being referenced as common place.

Uncommonly, I began to pay extra attention to the dialogue that was taking place and the references of Twitter, email, texting and Facebook kept repeating themselves throughout the story line. I can only imagine what it must be like to actually watch these activities take place on the screen.

We are losing the art of conversation and I am just as guilty of this crime. What is worse our kids are going to completely be conversing via technology and losing site of traditional methods. How can we help keep the art of conversation alive and well, especially with ouryouth?

One good thing from the Barbie video is that one of the characters spoke and stated “you don’t break up with someone using Twitter….that is wrong!” Perhaps this a step in the right direction.

It’s amazing who’s watching you…

Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing

Because the site’s 122 million+ monthly visitors (according to July ’09 Compete stats) needed one more reason to use the social network, Facebook can now help its users in the fight to manage their online reputation.

Unlike its competitors who always seem to fail at adapting their service offerings quickly enough to match the constantly evolving landscape of social media/networking, Facebook has now added the ability to tag friends in status updates.

The ability to tag friends in updates isn’t particularly fascinating, especially for those who “tweet” regularly. But Twitter-tagging is limited in terms of effectiveness for online reputation management (ORM).

Why? Because anyone who has a unique username (“unique” = not the same name as your birth name) in Twitter loses out on ORM-benefit because the link text is irrelevant. When I have a Twitter conversation with “@bhawk988″ (known to his friends and family as Kevin Doory), the link at the beginning of my Twitter message to him doesn’t help his profile rank for the search “Kevin Doory” in Google.

However, when tagging a friend in a Facebook status message, placing the “@” symbol in front of the person’s name creates an anchor texted, SEO-friendly link from your profile to your friend’s profile. It also creates a similar internal link to your Facebook page on your own Facebook wall. Check out these images below for an example of this concept at play:

How Facebook Tagging Can Help Protect Your Online Reputation

There is plenty of documentation out there stressing the importance of managing online reputation. Facebook tagging helps manage online reputation because a user profile earns a quality, authoritative, internal link with each tag in a Facebook status.

Anyone who was part of the Facebook username rush back in June and managed to secure their own name is likely concerned with their online reputation. Getting these internal links from across the Facebook universe to a Facebook profile naturally increases the authority of that profile. Those same links also improve the chances that a Facebook profile indexes in the Google search results for a related search term (like my Facebook profile for my name, for example).

Facebook tagging is likely to create a classic case of “he who has the most links wins” in search engine results for people and company names.

The implications of Facebook tagging don’t just end with the Google search results benefits, either. I don’t have confirmation on this, but look for Facebook tagging to begin to have an impact on internal searches within Facebook. If a searcher is looking for a certain “Jonathan Bentz” in Facebook, for example, the fact that I am tagged in more status messages than my co-Jonathan Bentz’s will likely cause me to rank higher than the others.