Believe it or not, you know more than enough to be dangerous on Facebook and Twitter.

Why do I say this?

• Well, I’m going to make a few grand assumptions about you for a moment:
• You already know how to make friends offline – you’ve been doing it since nursery school.
• You already know how to say thank you – and mean it.
• You know how to identify who needs help.
• You know how to admit when you’re wrong.
• You know how to have fun.

The only thing that social media adds to what you already know is a big fat volume knob.

Over the past few weeks I’ve received a number of questions about the various ways admins can update their Facebook Page. This topic also comes up a lot during the Facebook Foundations webinars I do with Charityhowto.

So I thought it might be useful to outline the various ways users can update Facebook Pages.

1. On Page as Page
   The most obvious way to post to your Facebook Page is as the Page. This requires simply being logged into Facebook and, assuming you’re an admin of the Page, posting to the Page. Admins can share videos, links or photos and make comments on that shared content in the status window
2. On Page as Profile
   In some cases, particularly during events, you might want to post to your Page as you. If you are not an admin of the Page, this simply requires posting a status update as you would on any other Page or Profile. If you are an admin of the Page, you’ll need to be removed as an admin in order to post (make sure you have multiple admins on your Page so someone can add you back!).
3. On Profile as Page
   
   Now let’s say you want to post an update about your Page, but share it with all your friends. The best way to do this is to tag the Page in a status update on your Profile. This will create a link to your Page within the update.
4. On your profile to a subset of your friends
   
   You can also target an update to a specific subset of your friends by customizing the settings (as shown above).
5. On another Page as Page
   
   You can promote your Page on another Page simply by tagging that Page (assuming you’ve liked the Page) in a status update on your Page. However, this approach comes under the heading “proceed with caution” because your post can come across as spam. And by spam, I mean unwelcome by that Page’s community. The best way to proceed is to either 1) be trusted by that community or 2) selflessly praise that community (In the example above I’ve given props to the Social Media Examinar Page by tagging it on the Inbound Zombie Page).

   A note on tagging Pages or Profiles through social plugins: It seems that, for now, Facebook users can’t tag Pages or Profiles on websites using various social plugins unless they allow their friends list to be public. And if you’re like me, it will be a very long time before you decide to share your friend list with the world.

What did I miss?

Image by GHOSTSWORD

Today is the first day of a well-earned vacation on Nantucket.

I’ll be back on Monday, refreshed and ready to rip it up on Facebook, Twitter and this blog.

Gone fishing signs

You need a break too every now and then – right?

But if you’re like me, you find it hard to shut down the laptop and leave your iPhone on the kitchen counter. You and I are desperately (but needlessly) tethered to our (de)vices – but we need to take a break. After all, we’re only animals.

So how do you just up and leave Twitter, Facebook and WordPress?

The way I’ll be doing it is with a “gone fishing” sign:

On vacation – Won’t be on Facebook, Twitter or responding to blog comments. If there’s an emergency, you have my cell. Take care!

I’ll miss you guys!

After the recent barrage of changes to Facebook Pages, you’re probably about the rip the final strands of hair out of your head.

The good news is that you never ever worry about things like this. Plus bald is beautiful.

The bad news is the next big change is a pretty big change.

What the heck is FBML?

FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is the Facebook equivalent to HTML. It allows you to create Facebook applications, including the custom tab on your Facebook Page.

But soon, Facebook will be ditching FBML and moving towards iFrames for both canvas applications and Page tabs.

What the heck is an iframe?

Simply put, an iframe is a way for one website to pull in small pieces of code from another website (see more on Wikipedia).

What does this change mean for my Facebook Page?

Facebook will continue to support existing custom tabs on your Facebook Page. This means that you’ll only have to worry about iFrames for new custom tabs. And by “worry”, I mean you’ll have to do one of the following:

1. Learn how to work with HTML iframes. Facebook no doubt will have a reference manual to help you.
2. Let a premium Facebook Page template company worry about the iframes issue. The guys at FanPageEngine are already on it.
3. Let a Facebook strategy consultant, like InboundZombie, worry about it.

Go ahead… you can say it:

What, me worry?

If you haven’t heard already, Facebook has launched a location-based “check in” app similar to FourSquare.

It’s called “Places” and as you’ll see in the video below, Facebook seeks to encourage serendipitous meetings between Facebook friends at the places they hang out.

How can my nonprofit use Places?

Places is a location-based check-in app for mobile devices. Think FourSquare but with deeper and more developed friendship networks. With that, you should start your Facebook Places marketing strategy by reading four posts by Joe Waters:

• 5 Reasons Not to Give Up on Location-Based [Cause] Marketing
• Foursquare for Charities: Live Discussion
• How Nonprofit Groups Can Benefit From Foursquare
• Foursquare ‘Checkin for Charity’ Hits 135k Checkins, Raises $15k

Also, see this slick demo on how Facebook Places works on the iPhone.

How will your nonprofit use Facebook Places?

If you’re reading this post, you probably just started blogging on WordPress. Either that or you’re re-evaluating your current theme choice.

What is a WordPress theme?

Simply stated, a theme dictates the design and functionality of your website without changing the basic WordPress software.

A WordPress theme is your superhero clothing. Your WordPress Pages, Posts, Permalinks and other basic structural elements are the arms, torso and legs of your superhero. The theme is the cape, lariat, boots and gloves.

Depending upon your theme, your site could look like this (yikes):

Or like this:

How should you choose a theme?

Changing themes is not as easy as pressing a button, so you should really start with a few basic questions about the goals of your WordPress blog:

• Are you using WordPress for only blogging or an entire website? The more complicated your site design and functionality, the more robust and flexible you’ll need the theme to be.
• How does the theme reflect your brand or personality? Some themes have a very fixed look and feel which can only be tweaked with code. Other themes, like Headway (affiliate link) are extremely flexible in both style and functionality.
• Can the theme enable your site to change and grow along with you and your goals? Again, you’ll want something flexible enough for future growth.

You also want to be asking a few questions related to the theme itself:

• What kind of support does the theme developer offer? This is one of the main differences between free and premium WordPress themes.
• How flexible is the Page layout? Does it allow you to have 2 columns on single posts and one column on your about Page? This will be more important if your designing a website and not just a blog that’s added to an existing site.
• Does the theme have a developer community that shares creative ways of using the theme?
• Who else is using the theme? How are they using it? What industries do they represent? If you’re launching a website to talk about legalizing marijuana and most of the users are lawyers, pick another theme.

Tips for new sites

• In order to get a better idea of how your site will look with a specific theme, create a Page, a Post and install a few sidebar widgets. This will provide some content to see the theme wrapped around.
• If you’re a complete beginner, look at a 5-6 previews of free themes to get an idea what elements of your site will change with a theme (watch this video on previewing themes). This way, even if you end up buying a premium theme, you’ll be better educated about what you like and what you don’t like.
• Colors can be changed, so don’t focus on that. Instead, focus on the overall layout – where elements are placed on each Page.
• Once you install a theme, look at archives, multi-post pages, single-post pages too see how the layout changes.
• If you’re not sure if blogging is for you, start with a serviceable free theme. Focus on writing posts instead of getting bogged down with theme choices.
• If you’re on Twitter, join the #SBT10 chat – every Tuesday night at 9:00PM (EST) for a variety of topics around blogging.
• Be aware that most a-list bloggers have paid developers to tweak their theme.
• Read Lorelle’s post called “Choosing a WordPress theme”.

How did you choose your theme?

This post is part of Jewels of Elul, which celebrates the Jewish tradition to dedicate the 29 days of the month of Elul to growth and discovery in preparation for the coming high holy days. This year the program is benefiting Beit T’shuvah, a residential addiction treatment center in Los Angeles.

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Over the past couple of weeks I started playing bass in a band with a few friends. All of us are at an age where we’ve traded our rock star dreams for being superheroes in real life – with our families, our friends, and our children.

I went to Berklee College of Music so that I could become a better songwriter. After Berklee, I played bass in a rock trio that gigged as far as Trinity College in CT. After, I started my own bands and published a few CDs. There was John Haydon and Ten Worlds, and the Hayseed Prophets, and then just John Haydon. I played music for my mom when she was near the end of her life. I wrote a song for the movie “10 Yards”, and I even wrote a song to celebrate the day he went poopie in the toilet.

All along the way, well-intentioned friends would say “You’re music is great! Someday, you’ll hit it big…”.

It’s only now that I realize that I was hitting it big all along. The home I created for myself with music – the self-discovery and clarity – has served (and saved) me all along.

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You don’t have to be on the blog tour to write a blog post on “The Art of Beginning… Again”. We invite everyone to post this month (August 11th – September 8th) with Jewels of Elul to grow and learn.

If you’re still freaking out about the changes Facebook is making to their custom tab width, watch this video. In it, I resize an image in a client site pretty quickly – simply by updated the HTML code (inserting width=”520px” between <img and src=).

Over the past day or so Facebook Page admins have been freaking about the impending changes to their Facebook Pages. People aren’t sure how to deal with the removal of the Boxes tab, and more importantly, how to even know if they have an issue with their custom tab widths.

Note: Sidebars created with Static FBML will also be removed. Page admins will have to be creative with how they use their info tab, and existing custom tabs (Read Bryan Person’s blog post with tips on how to adapt with no custom sidebars).

This video will show you how to deal with the Boxes tab and how to see if you need to resize your custom tab. As I mention at the end of the video, Inbound Zombie is happy to help resize custom tabs widths.

How Inbound Zombie can help

If you do need help, please email me at john@inboundzombie.com and put “FBML needs to be resized” in your subject line and a link to your Facebook Page in the message. We’ll reply with a quote.

The kind folks over at SocialFish invite me each month to write a post on their blog. Today I published an article called “YouTube now gives you superhuman power”, which goes into detail about the new features you’ll find in your YouTube channel.

Below is a short video-intro to the post

Read the full post over at SocialFish…