Potential buyers got their first look at Facebook financials yesterday, which showed the company produced a $1 billion profit last year from $3.71 billion in revenues. The company derives 85% of those revenues from advertising, with the rest from social gaming and other fees. The initial public offering could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, putting the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time.

Facebook’s membership growth has been staggering. The company said in its filing that it has 845 million users globally, up 39% from a year earlier.

Facebook takes pains to mention the importance of privacy, mentioning the word 35 times in the filing, and even listing its “privacy and sharing settings” as one of the ways the company creates value.

The number of ads delivered on the site grew 42% and the average price per ad grew 18% over 2011 from 2010, according to the filing.

The company attributed the improvement to a vast trove of information that allows marketers to “show their ads to a subset of our users based on demographic factors such as age, location, gender, education, work history, and specific interests that they have chosen to share with us on Facebook or by using the Like button around the web or on mobile devices.”

 (Wall Street Journal)

INVESTORS’ RISK

While all this is quite interesting data to me, there was one particular piece in the IPO filing that caught my attention:

As a matter of required disclosure, to caution investors against buying blindly, Facebook had to release a list of “risks” on the S-1 Registration Statement.

A quick review of those risks, which follows, made me think…this is a terrific exercise and one that law firms could benefit from—a REALLY HONEST assessment of their “risks.” 

SIDE BAR: A SWOT analysis completed during strategic planning—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats—will likely get you to the answers, as I’m thinking threats could be substituted for “risks.” With one caveat: your list of threats cannot be unfounded nor cliché. I’ve seen many law firm SWOT reports, and I have to say that too many have made me wonder if they were just filling in the blanks or if they really knew or understood their actual market risks?

Now, if a law firm did plunge into a market risk assessment, what if instead of keeping risks hidden in the executive boardroom, what if that list was distributed among the firm’s stakeholders (not just partners but also employees whose careers are dependent upon the success of the law firm)? Couldn’t that help the firm’s best interest? After all, they are all investors at various levels and…they have ability and responsibility to protect the firm’s best interests from its risks. How can they do that if they don’t know what they are? Management? Do all your attorneys know? Is it practical to share that information with an associate who might be on his way out in another year and off to a competing law firm?

What do you think? Maybe not? Just saying…I think it would be of great benefit on several levels.

 Here is the list pulled from the Facebook SEC Form S-1 Registration Statement. Thanks to Brian Solis for pointing it out on his blog post of Feb 1, 2012.

FACEBOOK RISK FACTORS

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.

The size of our user base and our users’ level of engagement are critical to our success. We had 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 31, 2011. Our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in adding, retaining, and engaging active users. We anticipate that our active user growth rate will decline over time as the size of our active user base increases, and as we achieve higher market penetration rates. To the extent our active user growth rate slows, our business performance will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement in current and new markets. If people do not perceive our products to be useful, reliable, and trustworthy, we may not be able to attract or retain users or otherwise maintain or increase the frequency and duration of their engagement. A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously. There is no guarantee that we will not experience a similar erosion of our active user base or engagement levels. A decrease in user retention, growth, or engagement could render Facebook less attractive to developers and advertisers, which may have a material and adverse impact on our revenue, business, financial condition, and results of operations. Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:

1. users increasingly engage with competing products;
2. we fail to introduce new and improved products or if we introduce new products or services that are not favorably received;
3. we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;
4. we are unable to continue to develop products for mobile devices that users find engaging, that work with a variety of mobile operating systems and networks, and that achieve a high level of market acceptance;
5. there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;
6. we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;
7. there are adverse changes in our products that are mandated by legislation, regulatory authorities, or litigation, including settlements or consent decrees;
8. technical or other problems prevent us from delivering our products in a rapid and reliable manner or otherwise affect the user experience;
9. we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;
10. we fail to provide adequate customer service to users, developers, or advertisers;
11. we, our Platform developers, or other companies in our industry are the subject of adverse media reports or other negative publicity; or
12. our current or future products, such as the Facebook Platform, reduce user activity on Facebook by making it easier for our users to interact and share on third-party websites.

______________________________________________________________

As a bonus, here’s the open letter from Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, included in the S-1 filing. The Facebook mission statement:

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

I found this news alert from the Wall Street Journal fascinating on a couple of accounts:

“Interest in shares of Facebook is so strong that Goldman Sachs plans to stop soliciting interest from potential investors on Thursday, after the securities firm received orders worth several billion dollars.” (Link to article -subscription may be required – unlike Facebook they have to cover the overhead of producing professional content!)

I don’t know about you, but, I love the service Facebook provides and I’m glad they are doing well. It is probably the most powerful media holding on the Net – much to the surprise of many – and it may eventually become the NET – well, it is sure to be headed somewhere big with this new round of capital. The communities on Facebook are strong. There’s a lot to like about that for advertisers. And, obviously that’s not being missed by the  gold-rush investors. So I’m wondering, how are law firm marketers seeing it? Are they ready to invest boldly? Here’s how I see it.

What Make Facebook Valuable?

What makes Facebook extremely valuable is not that 500 million (or whatever the new number is) people gather there, but that those people share their information freely allowing Facebook to give advertisers the data they want and need to target their audiences. Never before has it been so easy (and so profitable) for a media company to do this.

(As an aside, in the early days of Facebook I was often unhappy about how they used my personal data without telling me, but these days anyone who uses an application within the service or shares information with EVERYONE has fair warning that their data is working in the background for Facebook’s commercial gain. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? We have fun sharing pics of the kids and Facebook makes boatloads of money.)

Advertising and Media.

Advertising has always paid for media —the whole kit and kaboodle; content, production, distribution, overhead and profit, for TV, magazines, newspapers, radio, etc.. But, Facebook doesn’t have content production costs; users do it for them, leaving only hard costs in making sure the “press,” so to speak, keeps running smoothly. It’s very attractive and it must be awfully lucrative for investors. What to do with all this profit –or am I missing something?

For advertisers it’s both a blessing and a curse. Sure they have access to amazing user data, sliced and diced digitally, but they now have to create the ad AND the content. That’s time intensive and expensive to do it right. (see chart below)  It takes bodies to produce and maintain quality content (reference old media) and bodies cost money. The new media, such as Facebook, is now passing along content creation costs to the advertiser leaving more profit for them. Hmmm. Very attractive for investors and advertisers don’t seem to mind as the data from Altimeter Group shows in this chart of projected corporate spend on new media in 2011. Staff and ad spend take the two top spots. Are law firms prepared to jump in?

Law Firms’ Facebook Pages.

More law firms are setting up Facebook pages – it’s tough going, right? A lot goes into creating the content and few lawyers are willing to pitch in. The burden right now is squarely on the shoulders of the marketers – many find it to be just another underfunded challenge. Worse, law firm management gives it little or no strategic value.

So, they assign the task to a marketing coordinator (Thinking….they’re Net natives, right, they know all about cool Facebook content. Hmmm… jump below***), throw up some press releases, and get employees, partners and families to “like” the firm page. Ho hum. Is that what it’s really all about? I say no. Legal marketers need to be preparing their next steps now.

I want to hear from lawyers, law firms and marketers who are taking Facebook seriously. How are you leveraging the demographic data available from FB?  Would you share with us how it is going? And, what about content creation? I’ve heard a few very large firms have added staff. What are your plans for 2011? Do you have any secret plan of attack – not asking you to share what that is, just curious to know if we’re getting closer to a truly strategic mentality about Facebook in the legal marketing profession.

Thanks in advance for your contributions to this stream of thought.

Content production and the staffing conundrum.

***I’m not implying here that entry level marketers of the Net generation aren’t entirely capable of producing good content, however, this will only happen when the law firm and the CMO empower the content builders. That takes an awful lot of trust, not to mention training so that the content builders understand and apply professional ethics and confidentiality where it is needed. The content builders must also understand the law firm’s market (whoa – big job) and what is at stake for the entity, as well as what measurements will float the boat. This, in my opinion, needs leadership. Senior leadership. Trouble is, leadership doesn’t have time to devote to something that is not directly tied to business results – generating real revenue. So, it gets pushed down. This, I think, may be where we need to rethink what we’re doing. I think the benefit of early adoption in leveraging new media, specifically Facebook, is potentially huge. What do you think?

Last week the National Labor Relations Board launched a legal case asserting that employees have a right to free speech on Facebook. It announced that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

According to the New York Times, Lafe Solomon, the board’s acting general counsel, said, “This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.”

That act gives workers a federally protected right to form unions, and it prohibits employers from punishing workers — whether union or nonunion — for discussing working conditions or unionization. The labor board said the company’s Facebook rule was “overly broad” and improperly limited employees’ rights to discuss working conditions among themselves.

Moreover, the board faulted another company policy, one prohibiting employees from making “disparaging” or “discriminatory” “comments when discussing the company or the employee’s superiors” and “co-workers.”

The board’s complaint prompted Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm with a large labor and employment practice representing hundreds of companies, to send a “lawflash” advisory on Monday to its clients, saying, “All private sector employers should take note,” regardless “of whether their work force is represented by a union.”

The firm added, “Employers should review their Internet and social media policies to determine whether they are susceptible to an allegation that the policy would ‘reasonably tend to chill employees’ ” in the exercise of their rights to discuss wages, working conditions and unionization.

American Medical Response of Connecticut denied the labor board’s allegations, saying they were without merit. “The employee in question was discharged based on multiple, serious complaints about her behavior,” the company said in a statement. “The employee was also held accountable for negative personal attacks against a co-worker posted publicly on Facebook. The company believes that the offensive statements made against the co-workers were not concerted activity protected under federal law.”

Law Firm Social Media “Policy?”

So, folks, what does this mean for our law firm social media policies? It certainly raises some interesting questions. Is social media the watercooler or is it something else? And if so, what is it? A permanent record that has the potential to be scrutinized by millions? Is it publishing: Like old school media where libel is a real concern?

There are some typical conditions included in law firm social media policies that may be impacted by this case sending us all into a tizzy.

Will this send us back to GO?
Will we lock down all social media sites and services?
Ban Facebook?

If this case wins and even if it only directly affects union workplaces, I’m pretty sure law firms will also want to revisit several policy points — just to be on the safe side. As innocent and full of common sense as the following language may seem, I’ve used them or seen them in law firm social media policies. With this case, policy statements like these may tip the balance between protecting the law firm brand and permitting free speech.

1. Individuals are personally responsible for the content they publish. What is published will be public for a long time — protect the firm’s good reputation as well as your own.
2. If you choose to add your place of employment to any profile, you must use common sense in all postings and comply with our workplace policies, ethics, and other requirements.
3. Respect for others is mandatory. Do not use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, or engage in any conduct that would not be acceptable in the workplace.
4. Show proper respect for others’ privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory. We take this very seriously and any act to the contrary will be subject to discipline or result in termination.
5. What you publish reflects not only on the law firm’s brand, but can also impact your professional advancement, the achievement of your goals and your success in the future.  Use common sense and judgment. Ask if you are uncertain.
6. For your protection, be aware that your associations with others in online social networks and other user generated content sites are a reflection on you. All is revealed in search results. How you represent yourself can be a slippery slope.
7. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of the firm. Speech that appears to represent the firm, even remotely, takes on the appearance of an official stance and is not permitted in any circumstance.

Lawyers Please Share Your Comments.

I’m not a human resource professional nor a risk manager so I don’t claim any authority on this, but I have been an employee. Policies, in my mind, mean that there are consequences to the employee when they are violated. Guidelines on the other hand are simply strong suggestions. Something to consider – are your social media do’s and don’ts policy or guidelines? If they are policy, are they overly broad? Do you need to be very specific and keep in mind the issues now being vetted by the NLRB?

At the end of the day, is firing someone over poor choices, bad judgment and such protected? I’d like to hear from an employment lawyer on this issue. I would think that any post that impedes the good will of the law firm or company could be considered bad judgment and cause for dismissal, but then I could be wrong on that.

I’ll be watching this closely. Meanwhile, please share your comments!

Facebook estimates that only 20% of its members take advantage of the privacy features. As a business professional using Facebook, privacy settings allow you to manage your network so you can speak discreetly to certain Friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “Friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. Last week I posted some general considerations about Facebook privacy here. If you want to know more about how-to-use-privacy-settings on Facebook read on.

TIP: You may recall that when you logged on to Facebook during December of 2009 you were prompted to either retain your current privacy settings or switch to the new default setting of EVERYONE for everything. That’s because Facebook had just opened up site content to public search engines for the first time and they wanted your content. From a business networking perspective, you do not want to share everything on Facebook with Everyone.

Five Steps to managing your Facebook privacy.

STEP ONE: ACCOUNT

Find the Account tab in the upper right hand corner of the Facebook main screen. There are four primary sections that affect your privacy – Edit Friends, Account Settings, Privacy Settings, and Application Settings.

STEP TWO: EDIT FRIENDS

From Account, select Edit Friends. On the left sidebar of the Edit Friends page you’ll see LISTS; under Lists, click on Friends. Click on “Create List.”

Lists are organized around the type of posts, photos, notes, status updates, etc. that you want to share with specific categories of Friends in your FB network.  Name your list something like Professional, Family, Tennis, School, Limited View, etc. Select the friends that fit that list. You can always add more Friends to a list after its been created. Remember to add any new Friends that you welcome into your network to the appropriate LIST. Friends can be on multiple lists. Make as many lists as you think you need, but try to keep it simple for your own sake.

Practical Pointer: You also have the option to dynamically control visibility for each individual piece of content as it is posted. Simply select a visibility setting for that specific post from the drop down menu beneath the post box.  In addition to the global choices of Everyone, Only Friends, or Friends of Friends, you can customize the post visibility to exclude individuals or Lists.  For example, a businessperson using Facebook may want to share a status update about a speaking engagement, article, or something clever. Selecting “Everyone” makes that post visible to public search engines. This, of course, is a good strategy for increasing your exposure and gives your online footprint one more hit. Other times, you may only want to share content such as a photo of your vacation with a narrower community. Keep in mind that even if you select Only Friends you will be sharing with your entire Friend list, but not with off site search engines. If you want to exclude certain Friends from a list you created, select Custom and add the list.

STEP THREE: ACCOUNT SETTINGS

Go back to the Account tab at the top of your screen and select My Account. The My Account Page covers a lot of categories. Let’s start by clicking the Notifications tab.

Notifications: To get notifications for the various actions other people take on Facebook (recommended for monitoring your reputation) check every box to notify you by Email (some notifications have the option of mobile delivery SMS). Keep scrolling down.

If you don’t want to get a lot of email from Facebook, you may want to uncheck the notification for “Friends Updates.”  Keep scrolling down.

Applications: Applications are things like those games and quizzes that your friends have tagged you on. It’s best to uncheck ALL the boxes unless you want your information being shared with applications your Friends use. Don’t forget to view the Show More.

Go back to My Accounts page and select the Facebook Ads tab.

Facebook Ads: On this page there are two separate controls. By default, Facebook occasionally uses your name in conjunction with advertisements, such as “Joe is a fan of Diet Coke.” Configure your appearance in social ads to “no one” and HIT SAVE.

Scroll down. The next action determines how your social actions, such as joining groups and fan pages effect the Facebook Ads you see on your Facebook page. If you want those ads to be relevant to you, go ahead and share your information. Otherwise, select “no one” and HIT SAVE.

STEP FOUR: PRIVACY SETTINGS:

Go back to the Account tab at the top of the page and select PRIVACY.

On the privacy settings page there are several categories: Profile Information, Contact Information, Applications and Websites, Search and Block List. Go through all of them carefully. I’ll mention a few below that I think need special attention. Remember that the default setting on your Profile Information depends on which default setting you chose when prompted during the December 09 change over.

Also note that content posted prior to December 2009, such as photo albums, notes, and videos that did not have a particular visibility setting, probably defaults to the most liberal setting, EVERYONE.  Therefore, you should go back and reassign the appropriate visibility to everything you ever posted – especially photos.

PRIVACY: PROFILE SETTINGS:

Each setting allows you to select from a drop-down list to “Make this visible to” ….

There are standard options or Custom, edit. Here is where your Friend LISTS come into action. Click Custom Edit. In the “Hide This From” box start typing in a List that you created to control who sees what, generally. You can always override the default settings for individual posts. I recommend making the default Only Friends, unless you feel comfortable with the broader network you are creating.

TIP: Think carefully whether you want to share your birthday information with anyone. It’s nice for your close friends to have a handy reminder, but it also makes it easy for hackers to connect the dots on birthday/birthplace/social security number.

Photos: You can control who sees each of your photo albums. Click Edit. It will take you to a page that shows all your photo albums, including mobile uploads. Again, any photo albums added before December 2009 will probably default to EVERYONE, so go in and reselect your privacy level.

Posts by Me: This is where you set the default visibility for your Status Updates, Links, Notes, Photos, and Videos that YOU post.  If you want the tightest control over each post you add to your wall, default to Only Me and then dynamically select visibility for every post you make.  If you use FB mostly for personal stuff, customize by excluding Business Friends (list) and then dynamically select visibility for business oriented posts.

Posts by Friends: You can control who can see posts by your friends on your Profile Wall under the setting “Allow friends to post on my Wall.” And you can control who can post a comment on the posts you create. However, you cannot approve individual comments on your Wall or photos, you can only approve whether or not a Friends are allowed to post/comment on Wall and photos. You can always delete their comments if you find them offensive or inappropriate.

PRIVACY: CONTACT INFORMATION

This is important. Selecting Everyone for any of the options here will make that bit of profile information visible to, well, everyone with a computer, an Internet connection and a search engine. Customize profile information with Lists. If you are using Facebook for business, select Everyone for your Website this makes only your Website on your Public Facebook Profile visible to search engines. Of course your website probably has your contact information so it’s not going to stop someone from contacting your through your website, however, it will make them take the extra step. Bonus: drives traffic to your business website.

PRIVACY: APPLICATIONS AND WEBSITES

Applications can make the FB experience more social. However, if you don’t want third party websites viewing your public information you may want to uncheck everything in the “What Friends Can Share About You.”  Doing that will restrict those playful applications your friends send you such as “What Dog Am I” from getting your status updates and so forth. Right now I don’t know of any useful “business applications” on FB, but there may be some in the future. If you know of any, add them in the comments, please!

PRIVACY: SEARCH

Your business goals and your comfort level should determine a visibility level for both onsite searches and offsite (public search engines like Google). The first toggle in the search settings controls onsite search. To expand your business network within Facebook, select Friends of Friends or to restrict visibility select Only Friends.

The second toggle controls what off site search engines like Google will index. If you want to use Facebook to network for business beyond your Facebook network, then go ahead and open your public profile to Everyone. (They will only see those things you selected in Profile visibility.) Your Public Profile will give your online footprint another positive hit.

STEP FIVE: APPLICATION SETTINGS:

Last step, go back to your Account tab and select Application Settings. This will list Applications YOU are using such as Groups, Notes, Gifts, Photos, Links, etc. For each application select Edit. A pop-up box appears. There are three tabs. The first tab controls what shows up on your PROFILE page. You can add a box or a tab and select visibility.

The second tab, Bookmark, adds that application to the Left Menu on your Facebook layout. A bookmarked application is one that you can easily access at any time.

The third tab is Additional Permissions. So, for example, in the Notes application you can chose to let the application Publish content to your Wall, or notify you when someone tags you in a note, comments on a note you wrote or comments after you in a note. Each application has different Additional Permissions so go through them all. They are all equally important and should be carefully selected.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS:

For those who wish to keep their professional and personal life on Facebook separate, keep in mind that Facebook privacy settings are not as secure or private as we would hope.  A rare example of a security breach occurred in March 2009 when, for a few hours, a bug allowed users to gain access to portions of their friends’ profiles that were otherwise secured. In my opinion these rare occurrences are not enough to deter the benefit I get in being connected to others on Facebook, but that is up to you to decide.

A good rule of thumb is to not post anything on Facebook that you wouldn’t otherwise say or do in any public space. I keep the tone of my posts cordial and friendly. I generally stay away from religion and politics. Some of my Friends on Facebook wear their political heart on their sleeve and that’s okay, but I can’t say that it doesn’t impact my impression of them and in some cases it’s a real turn off.

A few other things to keep in mind:

• Take the time to read Facebook’s Terms and Conditions.
• No matter what visibility settings you have now selected, previously viewed content on Facebook may remain viewable in cached or archived pages if users copy or store the content, a situation you acknowledge in signing off on those terms.
• To remove the tag from a photo that someone else has uploaded and tagged you in, simply view the photo, and then choose “remove tag” at the bottom next to your name. The photo will no longer be linked to your profile. However, only your friends can take the photos down. Best to stay away from friends with cameras at rowdy parties. Make sure your NOTIFICATIONS are set to alert you when you’ve been tagged in posted photos.
• Several courts in the United States and elsewhere have held that private Facebook profiles are discoverable. Be aware if you are involved in civil or criminal legal proceedings that your Facebook profile (as well as any blogs, websites, or other online content) may be fair game for opposing counsel.

If you get stuck, search the HELP tab under ACCOUNT. It explains almost every feature and more. Next post I’ll cover Facebook for business entities and law firms – Fan Pages and Groups.

The VMO also offers custom training programs for organizations, particularly law firms. Contact me for more information….jaynenavarre@gmail.com

“Should I be on Facebook?” That is the first question lawyers often ask me these days. Followed by: “Should I trust Facebook?” and “Is Facebook really worth my time for business development?”

My answer is an enthusiastic YES! but…..

…..only in the hands of a conscientious user who

1. takes the time to understand the population,
2. knows the process of how business relationships develop, and
3. stays on top of the privacy settings.

Facebook can be a place for business and becoming more so all the time as the population of Facebook evolves. Just this month,  Experian Hitwise reported that traffic on Facebook surpassed Google to become the number one website in the U.S.

This post is the first in a series on Facebook for individuals who want to establish a business presence. The next post will cover more privacy settings and ideas for projecting a business image on Facebook, but for now, if you currently have a profile on Facebook and if you have not already visited your SETTINGS this month, I HIGHLY recommend that you go through each and every option under your ACCOUNT tab—settings, privacy, applications and HELP as soon as you’re finished reading this post.

HELP.

Open the HELP link, first, before going through your Settings. There you’ll find explanations of the various features and settings and what they mean.

USE LISTS.

After browsing the Help tab, set up some LISTS.

Privacy settings are very important and in order to use them to the fullest extent use Lists. Privacy settings allow you to customize who sees what according to LISTS as well as individuals.

Establish lists such as Family, Business, Limited View, Alumni, or even something like Casual Acquaintances. You can create your LISTS from your FRIENDS page. There’s a tab in the upper right hand of the center column that says CREATE A LIST. Cick it and it will prompt you through the process.

You can select people from your Friends to add from the Create List tool, or you can create all your LISTS, and then from the sidebar of your page, select the list and click on the edit button. It will allow you add people to the list.

Once your lists are established, go back to the ACCOUNT tab and begin adjusting your settings. Select CUSTOMIZE on any feature or application to lock down certain items according to your LISTS.

THOUGHTFULLY DETERMINE PRIVACY

Commit the time to thoughtfully determine your privacy settings. That is no small task. Just the other day while teaching business development strategies on the social web to a sharp group of attorneys, I presented the privacy settings on Facebook. The overwhelming sentiment was “That’s too complex and too time consuming.” And, I have to agree it can be. At first, the privacy settings are overwhelming, and worse, Facebook adds new setting controls frequently, forcing a contentious user to review their settings at least monthly if not more often. However, if you learn to use LISTS and SETTINGS your Facebook experience can be productive and the initial time you spend on those two things will be a wash.

Bottom Line:

Just because Facebook is perceived by some lawyers as being too casual for business, I don’t think you should discount it. I often argue that Facebook is like the country club, an event at your kid’s school, or the neighborhood barbeque.  Yes, it’s more casual and social than LinkedIn or a peer network like Martindale.com Connected, but I know plenty of lawyers who get their best referrals, and in some cases their best clients, from socializing at the country club, a kid’s sporting event, or a neighborhood barbeque.  (You could even name your LISTS like this! No one sees your lists but you.)

The thing about business development and marketing is that you should do what pleases you. Be somewhere you enjoy being because this communicates a lot to prospects with whom you engage.

Creating lists and checking your settings should give you enough to do for a couple days. Stay tuned to the Virtual Marketing Officer blog for more on FACEBOOK how-to’s for business development. Subscribe! Or, leave your comments below….Thanks.

Just when you thought it was safe to play in the online sandbox – bam! Facebook dumps a load of broken glass into it.

This week Facebook announced that they made “changes to give you more control.” Truth is they actually made changes that give you less control over the content you share with your trusted network, unless you carefully moderate your settings now and be aware that everything you post defaults to EVERYONE!

If you didn’t already know this, now you will. When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting on Facebook, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, have access to that information. That content is open to everyone and will indexed by search engines and appear in the public results.  You do not have control over what anyone who finds it does with it.

But you’re smart, so you care about managing your reputation on the Web. Stay alert.

What’s Up, Facebook?

Anyone who logged in to their account this week got a pop up message informing them to their new terms. PLEASE PAY CLOSE ATTENTION! When you click through the new terms, by default, you agree to share everything with everyone. Yes, EVERYONE.  After you agree to the new terms, Facebook gives you a screen (that suggests) that allows you to retain your current settings or accept the new settings by clicking the radial dials. Although I selected to keep old settings until I could review the new terms, a couple things happened that REALLY surprised me.

Each new posting to your wall requires that you select who you want to share the information with.

It’s in a box on the right hand bottom side of the text box. It defaults to EVERYONE! No matter what your privacy settings are in your master settings, you now need to CHOOSE, for every status update, who you want to share it with. So, don’t forget the extra step.

Why would Facebook do this? Because they want the site content to be searchable by major engines like Google and Yahoo!. Who does that benefit in this case? Well, primarily Facebook. It builds traffic and lures advertisers.

Your Online Footprint. Guard it!

I totally understand the value of building an online footprint via posting content and returning early in search results. It is effective exposure. In fact it is often the strategy that trumps any online participation. Content associated with your name that returns high in results essentially gives you greater exposure and it becomes your resume. And, that’s fine, but I don’t want my Facebook content indexed! If I were using Facebook only for business then maybe, but right now I use it as a private network of close friends and business colleagues that I know and trust. I do not want my vacation pictures showing up in the public time line on Google. Of course that may not be your choice, but if it is, be aware that the new Facebook settings have made ALL YOUR FORMERLY POSTED PHOTOS available to EVERYONE by default now.

Yesterday when I posted a group of vacation photos, weirdly it defaulted to Everyone. I’ve never shared my photos with everyone. No, indeed. Then I noticed that all my photos were defaulted to EVERYONE!  I had to go back in and manually change every album I had previously set to “Friends of Friends, Only Friends or Custom.

Furthermore, I was really freaked out when I went to Custom on a few, and it showed the override default as EVERYONE Even though my old default of Friends of Friends still showed. I was steamed!

I suggest that you go into Facebook right now and review ALL your settings and even your older content. Make sure if you go into custom settings on your photo albums you un-click the Everyone if you don’t want them visible to search engines. It doesn’t unclick just because you set it to friends of friends~!

Just to be safe, I went back into all my settings.  I made sure to untoggle the Allow Indexing for the Public Search Results settings.

I’m still digging into all of this. I will add more tips as I uncover them, but wanted to get this up right now. It’s that big of a deal to me.

There’s more chatter on the Web about the new settings. Let us know here at the VMO what you find and what you think.

Personally, I think this is a big mistake for Facebook – one of many they’ve made over the years. Positioning these changes as giving us more control over our content is dubious. These changes were made, in my opinion, to give Facebook more search results and increase the appeal to the advertisers they are courting.

At any rate, if you don’t want the world to know what you were doing Sunday afternoon, make sure you make the appropriate selection with the share button for every post update you make.

There may be a few USER benefits to the new settings, but over all, they make it harder to use – in my opinion. What’s yours?

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Instead of just cutting off workplace access to Facebook —the poster child for questionable business networking activity— I suggest you take a step back and get a better plan. Why?

Let’s say you’re a lawyer, an accountant, or a sales person and someone in your organization decides that you are no longer allowed to be a member of your country club, nor talk to anyone at your kid’s sporting events.  And, by the way, no more family barbecues or neighborhood holiday parties. Incredible, right? You’d probably react pretty strongly, and you should. These are some of the best venues for getting in touch with people who need your services or can refer you to someone they know.

Facebook mirrors the types of social “business” networking I mentioned above. Nearly everyone today, including the CEO’s of the world, has an online profile on at least one social networking site. They like the idea that they can keep in touch with more people, better, quicker and more often.

Restricting options for developing new business, is just bad business.  STILL,  SOCIAL NETWORKING CONCERNS ARE LEGITIMATE. The key is to find balance.

Three Options.

Basically speaking, management has three options for dealing with online social networking in the workplace.

1. Ban access to social networking sites (and access to the Internet as well: see below).
2. Set limits and restrictions on their use.
3. Allow unmonitored access.

Break it down.

Understand that social networking applications are not the problem; it is the user that can cause the most trouble. Note that for each problem related to social sites, there are often equal and greater problems related to ALL INTERNET USAGE. But you already know that, right?

The two primary objections you need to solve are: security and productivity.

Productivity.

Usage. A workforce of 200 spending 30 minutes a day on social networking sites for non-business development purposes (in a law firm that would be support staff who are not responsible for business generation directly) would be 100 hours a day in lost productivity. In addition, employees who are not accessing social sites during the work day may resent the fact that they are working harder to make up for their coworker’s neglect of duties. Of course this also happens when workers spend time on personal phone calls, emails, surfing Internet shopping sites, and smoke breaks.

Bandwidth. Although basic activities on social sites, such as posting updates, photos and chat are not a huge drain on bandwidth, but linking to video and downloading games or music is. Still there is a cost to all Internet browsing when users are linking to video and audio files whether it be a news site (CNN), sports site (ESPN), or streaming music from a site such as Pandora.

Security.

Again, basically speaking you have three options but this time you need them all.

1. Always have up-to-date anti-virus software
2. Have a firewall
3. Have the ability to monitor Internet usage generally and social networking sites particularly.

Malicious Code: Sites such as Facebook [but also LinkedIn] have thousands of applications available for users to download. These applications, usually quizzes, games, or business related apps such as Trip-it and Amazon Reading Lists, access user information in order to work. And, while the social sites do everything in their power to limit fraud, spam and malicious attacks, hackers are quite good at what they do and social sites represent a gold mine. Viruses, malware, worms, Trojans, spyware and adware are a real concern but guess what, they are not limited to social networking sites. Remember the Love worm? If you were on a Microsoft network a few years back, how could you forget? How many times has someone in your firm opened an email or an attachment, suspicious or not, or uploaded a file from a floppy disc (pre-1900) or a thumb drive and infect the whole network?

A believe it or not story:

An Internet based research project revealed cases where people willingly pressed a particular button to download a virus. Security analyst Didier Stevens ran a half-year advertising campaign on Google AdWords which said “Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!” The result was 409 click-throughs.

Data mining. Social networks are, in a perfect world, built on trust. News flash: we don’t live in a perfect world. It’s surprising how much information people are willing to disclose on social sites that they wouldn’t dream of disclosing to a real person standing in front of them. In the right hands, that information can be hacked, stored, fraudulently used or even sold by cyber criminals. Still, it’s not just happening on social networks; the Internet generally is a Petri dish for identity theft and data mining. The only solution here is to educate your workforce and your partners.

Legal Risks. Commenting publicly about a conversation meant to be private happens [accidentally?] all the time at cocktail parties, business luncheons, church socials, and the Internet. Trade secrets, patentable information, financial disclosures or issues that bear attorney/client privilege can unintentionally leak all over the Net. Rumors and gossip spread like wild fire.  Even talking bad about your employer in public, which many a young misguided person has done on a social network, has risk for the employee AND the employer. Libel, once relegated only to the “media,” now has potential impact whenever an individual publishes something on their social network pages; after all, they don’t call it social “media” for kicks.

Take Action.

Before you decide to cut off a viable business development channel, think first about how you can strike a balance. Education, guided usage, and limitations are all important to the mix. A social media policy or guidelines is a start, but it isn’t enough. I always ask my clients for permission to train their people in best practices for usage to compliment the guidelines they establish for responsible online interaction; it’s better for everyone in the long run. The Web is only going to get more complex and require more attention and savvy from it’s users. It’s good to start right at the beginning.

Have any best practices to share? How are you dealing with Facebook at your firm? Use it or no?

A lot of my friends like TweetDeck for managing Twitter on their desktop. I like it too and recommend it over other 3rd party services I’ve tried. However, when it comes to flexibility AND simplicity, the best Twitter dashboard is the one I created using iGoogle.

Here it is in a nutshell.  First open your iGoogle page. Hover to the right of  HOME, drop down arrow appears, select Add a Tab.

Name it Twitter. Uncheck the automatically add gadgets.

From the blank page, select add gadgets. Search for and add TwitterGadget.

After you add it you’re prompted through your user name and password for Twitter and then this is what you’ll see on your page:

[TwitterGadget is a fully functioning Twitter tool that enables search, saved hashtag searches, DM, @Replies, Groups, etc. (more on that later)]

Next add a news services. I like Google News it aggregates from various sources. Having news right next to my Twitter tool allows me to contribute stuff that might be meaningful to my community. (Settings can be found in upper right side drop down of the gadget.)

Add GoogleReader. It is another great source to draw from when seeking stuff to contribute to your Twitter stream.

Tip: When you add RSS feeds to GoogleReader it’s easy to organize them by categories.

Now, arrange the gadgets on your page with the TwitterGadget on the right, GoogleNews and Google Reader on your left. So your page might look something like this.

From your regular Twitter Web Page  you can create an RSS feed for a hashtag # search and add it to your Twitter iGoogle Tab. I do this when I’m following live event feeds and I want to have the feed prominently displayed.

Otherwise, TwitterGadget has a robust search feature that also allows saved searches and doesn’t clutter the page but gives me easy access. The whole idea is to have as little noise on the page as possible with the greatest amount of information at my fingertips.

I also added Friendfeed Gadget and Facebook Gadget at the bottom of my Twitter page, just for fun. But most of the time I use Yoono to post to my services when I’m cross posting.

Again, my primary goal  here is to keep a clean, organized work space that I can quickly access news, RSS feeds, Tweets, Friendfeed and Facebook. If you blog using Blogger there’s a gadget for that too.

There are tons of other ways to make this work for the way you work, these are just a few of my ideas. Tell me what you think.

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