Facebook – Can I Have A Do Over Please?!

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 01:47:27 +0000

We all have Facebook accounts, right? If not, I am surprised you are even on the Catapult blog reading this post. All kidding aside, with 500 million active users worldwide and with those individuals spending more than 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook it has become a regular part of our daily lives. We check in daily from our mobile devices telling our friends where we are having breakfast, what we did over the weekend and of course posting photos of nearly every aspect of our lives.

However, I have one question - can I have a Facebook Do Over?

Seriously, I started an account several years ago and rarely if ever checked it. People would send friend requests and I would accept. Some names I knew and others sounded familiar. However, with the goal of not offending anyone or worrying about remembering someone's married name I accepted the requests without considering the impact.

Recently, with close to 1,200 supposed "friends" I made a decision to take a step back and follow the advice I provide clients. Increasingly there is no longer a line between our professional and personal lives. As such, I have some very close clients who I consider friends and former students who I like to hear from about their successes and challenges in the PR field. I would recommend asking the following questions:

What is the objective of your Facebook page? It is for personal/business or both?
How much information do I want to share with those I have decided to be friends with?
What photo should I use as my profile pic?

These are just some of the questions to consider. Just to be clear, I am not suggesting you defriend everyone or anyone; but I do recommend thinking a bit more about your Facebook page and how you intend to incorporate it into your life.

What additional suggestions do you have for items users of Facebook should consider? Feel free to share!

Social Media Tools and PR

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:56:05 +0000

Social media tools are crucial for PR firms to provide a fast, cost effective form of promotion. How to get started building online strategies? We've previously talked about listening, but worth repeating, to start there:

Listening - Twitter, Filtrbox, LinkedIn, Google Reader (for blogs) help monitor the conversations circling their industry and the agency itself. Setting up search terms and reviewing them frequently can keep you informed and manage communications crisis quickly. Set up accounts and start listening.
Contributing - to blogs, and responding to LinkedIn Q&A's and news articles promote thought leadership.
Publication - Tell your story. Create great content; publish releases, case studies and stories to the web via the wire and RSS feeds. One of our releases had 2900 hits on the feeds (as reported by Post Zinger). Online presence increases by tagging articles on Digg, Delicous and other sites.

Social media tools used to promote consistent, quality messaging are supplements to traditional PR methods. Excellent branding, positioning, writing and most important actual relationships with key influencers are still critical to brands growth.

Catapult Public Relations

Facebook – Can I Have A Do Over Please?!

Social Media Tools and PR