Now this is no ordinary sign holder! The story could have easily ended here as we have all seen sign holders on a common occurrence. In fact we see them so often that we almost train our eye’s to ignore them. Yet this sign holder was more extraordinary. The woman has shorter blond hair and is well advanced in her years. She holds a big guitar shaped sign with an even bigger smile on her face. Atop that fluffy blond hair is a set of big headphones, a pair you might see right out of the 90′s, and a long cord plugging into what looks to be an old cassette or CD player.

I can only guess as to what she is listening to, perhaps some Pink Floyd or Jimmy Hendrix, but one thing is for certain…it makes her wanna boogie! She is rockin out with that sign like she is performing on stage. Her dance moves rival that of moves seen in Flash Dance. Watching her for those brief minutes put a smile on both my wife’s and my face.

From time to time when we arrive at the “punishment light” now we look for her. In fact we no longer dread this busy road but look forward to seeing if she will be dancing. Honking as we go by her and seeing her wave back.

A month later my wife was curious about her and actually found that she had her OWN Facebook fan page! I was astonished and to make my surprise even bigger she had over 1,700 Facebook likes! 1,700!? Now my town of Bend’s total population is roughly 70,000 people. So in a few short months she was able to generate 2.5% of the entire city to follow her on Facebook. (Talk about power)

Her Facebook page is quite active as she has taken a cold business front and has made people become friends with her. People stop to get pictures with her so they can upload it to her profile, people have made CD’s for her and my favorite quote on the page is, “My husband and I just tried Little Caesars for the first time because of YOU!”

So if you have ever been skeptical if connecting with your customers on a more personal level can really help your local business please take a lesson in life from the Bend sign lady. She has made 2.5% of the city fall in love with not just her but with the company she promotes.

If you already have a website then I encourage you to immediatley figure out how to connect it to your Facebook profile or Fan Page!
If this sounds hard don’t fear….I have shot a Youtube Video for you on How to Integrate Facebook’s Features into your website.

Keep on rockin on sign lady….keep on rockin on!
Her facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/BendLittleCaesarsLady

I hope you liked the awesome intro! I had a blast making it, but I think I need to take up smoking and drinking whisky so I can perfect the movie intro voice.

What you will need during this video:

1) The WP plugin I installed is called: Digg Digg

2) Facebook developers page

3) Like button code:
(The raw html code didn’t want to display so I uploaded it in a pdf which you can download for free here: http://www.michaelrroberts.com/facebook_code.pdf)

WP ADMIN — Appearance — Editor — Single Post (single.php)

Your not going to blow up your site do don’t panic if your scared by all the code. Just try to scan the code for things that look famaliar, such as; Author, Date, Category or Comments. These things will provide you with refference points on where to place the code. Also avoid sticking the code in the middle of other code. Place it just after a closing statement (

4) Code for fan page like box:
(This code is also on the pdf which you can download for free here: http://www.michaelrroberts.com/facebook_code.pdf)

Be sure to replace my ID with your own fan-page ID. Also you will want to change; connections, width and height to fit your preferences. If you want your fan page box to show your stream of what’s going on in your fan page then place “true” after stream. If you turn the stream on then you need to make the height alot bigger.

I hope that has helped you guys…and I just formed my own Facebook fan page where I post all sorts of awesome FREE SEO information. So please click the like/share button on this article and go over on the right hand side of my website and join my fan page!

Lastly, I am nearly done re-doing my blog. The new layout, graphics, plugins is going to be awesome! So sorry this sore thing is hurting your eyes!

Michael R Roberts

FACEBOOK CHANGES:

Universal “like” button: One of the major new changes that users will see is the “like” button which will be shown on Web sites outside of Facebook. The “like” button on Facebook broadcasts what comments, photos or posts a user likes. These like buttons are already showing up all over the web and it enables users to share items with friends even when they’re not actually on facebook.com.

As an example if you went to IMBD.com and clicked “like” on “The Matrix”, that movie will automatically show up in your movie interests section of your Facebook page. Liking a football player on ESPN.com will put up-to-date information about that player in a user’s news feed.

The “Become a Fan” button has been changed to the “like” button as well.

FaceBook is even expanding their reaches further with a new developer tool bar you can easily add to your site. This “social bar” allows third-party web sites to access some FaceBook features without even leaving your site. With this bar they can even chat to their FaceBook friends right inside your website.

Facebook is also changing users’ profile pages so that the “pages” section will no longer appear in a separate section on the bottom of the “info” page. Those pages will be brought up to the “interests” section.

Users will be asked to convert their interests into fan pages: Is one of your interests “Green Day?” Well, now you can become a fan of Green Day in a single click. By default, users will receive notifications from their fan pages in their news feed.

Facebook also added new privacy settings that allow a user to control who sees all of these connections.

Community pages: So what about interests like “Martial Arts,” “SEO” or “Cooking,” which don’t have Facebook pages? Now they do.

Facebook unveiled about 6.5 million new “community pages” this week, which take the “fan page” concept and apply them to ideas, locations or interests.

Currently, community pages are pretty lame. A user can see posts from friends related to that topic as well as what the overall public is saying about it. There is also a link to a Wikipedia article on the subject. Users can’t yet add any content to these pages, but that ability is believed to be on the way.

Real-time search: Also among the biggest announcements is real-time search on third-party search sites, similar to Twitter’s service. Facebook announced that users’ public posts will be available for search on sites like Google and Bing.

FACEBOOK AND THE BAD:

Many of the changes take advantage of big revisions that Facebook made to its privacy settings in March. Those changes opened the door to allow select third-party Web sites the ability to access and store some users’ personal information.

Those sites can use that information to show what a user’s Facebook friends have been doing on their sites. CNN, IMDB.com and ESPN.com are just a few of the sties who have already signed up with this feature. So if you’re a Facebook user reading CNN.com, you’ll be able to see what all your Facebook friends are looking at, view recommended stories and see which friends liked which stories.

But even before the announcement, critics expressed concern about the privacy implications of such a service. A similar program called Beacon, unveiled in 2007, caused such a stir among users that the company removed it last year. FaceBook is moving forward strongly with these new updates and are acting quite confident learning from their mistakes with Beacon.

From a user standpoint this is a bit annoying in my opinion. You really can’t even make a joke in your interest section anymore without having a “Community Page” dedicated to it. All FaceBook is doing is lumping users into marketable bins, so advertisers and app developers can poke and prod you to buy something with more efficiency.

Also with the live search feature you will need to be more careful what you post to your FaceBook account more than ever. I have already heard of one story where a person was turned down for a job because the company looked them up on FaceBook and found some pictures they didn’t’ believe to be appropriate or aligned with their business. So if you are in the job market or if there is a slight chance you will be returning to the job market in the future watch what you post and adjust your settings in your profile.

However, If you think everything you do on the internet is “private” to begin with, you’re in for a big surprise. If you truly don’t want your information to be out there, stop using the net all together. You just need to be smart, educate yourself on how to navigate the settings you desire and use common sense before freaking out. Because ultimately these changes could mean a lot more money to be made for you and I!

FACEBOOK AND THE GOOD:

FaceBook Advertising just leapt to a whole new level! FaceBook overnight is offering the best targeted marketing you can buy. It’s not just targeted marketing but UP TO DATE targeted marketing!

As human beings our interests often can change quickly. Six months ago I was interested in snow boarding but now my hobby and passion is Martial Arts. So as my hobby has changed so has my web surfing. I will be visiting more martial arts sites and of those sites that have like buttons to FaceBook on them…there is a good chance I will be clicking those like buttons and my profile will be updated automatically. Now a savvy Martial Arts supply advertiser could easily reach me on exactly what I am looking for with ads right in my FaceBook profile.

So as from an advertiser standpoint using FaceBook has just become very powerful!
If you have never looked into FaceBook for advertising in the past NOW is the time to start looking into it!

Even if you are not interested in advertising with FaceBook that doesn’t mean you should ignore these changes. I am sure you all have seen those share buttons on every blog post all over the internet. These share strategies are great for a blog, but now they are all being creamed! If you could have only one share option it should be a FaceBook Share button! Go look for your self! I just looked up one video and captured the results which are displayed below.

Nearly anywhere you go now you will see FaceBook share beating out all the other types of share buttons. Obviously more people are using and want to share on Facebook than any other social media plat form. There are over 400 million active users on FaceBook currently and that number is still growing. If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd most populous country in the World!

The good news is with FaceBooks new changes it is easier than ever for us marketers to get people to follow us on FaceBook. With a single line of code you can now add a like button to your website. Trust me this is going to make your sites more viral than twitter, buzz or digg ever could!

I will be shooting a video and uploading it soon on some of the techniques to help protect your information and how to add these lines of code to your website!

As Mark said in FaceBooks F8 conference….Google knows about phrases but FaceBook knows about people and what they like!

Michael R Roberts

This is the last video in this series and the next set of videos will cover new aspects of SEO and IM.

Hope you enjoyed the series!

;)

The video below is the next installment of my 3 video series.  Stay tuned for the third video which will a brief video which talks about you relationship with your customers and how much time you should be devoting to social media marketing.

Listen to this first video in a series of 3 and learn how to DOMINATE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING!

I will be releasing the rest of this series over the week.