A Facebook Fan Page is a simple addition to your company’s online portfolio. Within a few minutes you can have the basic Page which lets you post images, video, or just communicate with your customers via the wall; however, with a little bit more effort, your Page can reflect the online branding that your company has spent time and effort on with your own website.

The easiest way to add your own personal look to your Page is through the Static FBML application. FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is an extension of HTML, so you can quickly bring static sections of your website into your Facebook profile. Though the instructions below may seem daunting, follow closely (or call us) and it will all become clear.

The first step to adding a new Static FBML tab is to simply add the application to your Page. Go to the application page, and click on the “Add to my Page” link.

From here, you’ll be presented with a pop-up asking which Page to add the application. (Note: if you only have 1 Page, you may not be prompted for this.)

The application is now added to your Page, but to actually do anything with it, you’ll need to go back and edit.

Scroll down to your list of applications and look for the FBML app. Click “edit”  one more time, and you’ll be presented with the actual FBML tab code page.

Here’s where we give our tab a name. In my case I’m moving our team page, so I’ll name the tab “Team,” and then paste in the HTML content from our website that I want on our tab. As you can see, I’ve also linked to the stylesheet from our main site. I’ve also made a special copy and added “-fb” to the name just in case I want to make Facebook-specific tweaks to the styling without mucking around in the master.

Once we’re done, we can scroll to the bottom of the page and click the save button. If we wanted to add more tabs we’d click the link below and more copies of the FBML app would show up in our application list. Clicking the “Application Settings” link brings up a pretty simple dialog box. Here we want to make sure that the “tab” is added, and the “box” is removed.

Navigate back to our Fan Page, and now we just have to find our new tab and drag it to where we want it in our navigation. Since our team is what makes Catchfire Media great, we want to bring this tab close to the beginning of our nav strip. Drag and drop it where we want it, and we’re done.

That’s it; now we have a nice part of our website inside our Facebook presence. See the results below, or on the <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/catchfiremedia?v=app_6009294086“>facebook tab itself</a>.

Here are a couple of closing tips that will save you some headaches while building your first few tabs.

1. Facebook caches your offsite CSS and images, so if you makes a change to either you need to force facebook to grab the new copies. You do this with a little trick called “cache busting.” In your src or href parameter, add a version number and increment it when you have a new version. So, <link href=”css/style-fb.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” /> becomes <link href=”css/style-fb.css?v=1″ rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />. The next time you make a change to your stylesheet simply change “v=1” to “v=2” and save your tab. This will force Facebook will fetch your new copy.
2. Facebook has long threatened to change the width of tabs to 520 pixels so that they can add the left sidebar that currently only exists on the wall tab to all the tabs. I personally don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, because many companies have time and money invested in their Facebook presences (this would force them to rewrite a lot of content). It’s probably safest to either code your tabs so that they’re 520 pixels wide, or scale down to that width without trouble.

There you have it, a simple way to bring your brand to your customers within Facebook without expending too much time or effort. If you’d like help with this sort of branding effort, Catchfire Media would be glad to help you out.

Do you maintain a Facebook Fan Page? Are you currently mirroring content from your own website in FBML tabs within Facebook? What do you think of this low-barrier method for jumping into Facebook?

Matthew Pick is Catchfire Media’s summer intern who will be assisting with the firm’s strategic efforts on behalf of our clients.

Yesterday, Facebook reached 500 million users. Having doubled size in the past year alone, Facebook will keep growing, and continue to be the most-used social networking site. While Facebook was first created for college students to stay in touch, it eventually opened its doors to high school students and the rest of the world to stay in touch with people and organizations.

In high school, Facebook has been a way to pass time and IM friends, but I’ve realized how it will soon become something more when I ship off to college. I attended an engineering camp last week and met some new people, and I found myself “friending” them on my phone when I had free time. If I hadn’t, I know I would have forgotten their last names, and who knows, I may run into them in the future.

Facebook is still young. My older sister created an account her freshman year in college and soon connected with her high school friends that had spread across the country. How will this be different for those who have “grown up” using Facebook like me?

My parents still don’t know what Facebook really is, but that’s okay. If I can show my mom pictures from my sister’s account, that’s good enough for her! While my parents won’t be signing up for a Facebook account anytime soon, high school students will continue to seed the growing population of users on a global level.

What does this mean for the future? People will stay connected. Whether it be someone you met at camp, at school, or at work, Facebook will continue to keep us close with family and even people you just met.

My parents don’t use any form of online networking, which is becoming an exception to the rapidly spreading demographics. Facebook is no longer for students alone; parents of younger generations are using Facebook to keep in touch with their children and friends.

Before I started my internship with Catchfire Media, I honestly hadn’t used Facebook very much. I didn’t fully understand why people spent so much time on Facebook until I realized its power. A casual user may not pay attention or realize how much more is actually on Facebook than your friends. You can find anything from your favorite games, sports teams, or restaurants.  With a half billion users on Facebook, it makes sense to have a company page.

From my prospective, Facebook’s presence has set the standard for social networking. The number of users will continue to grow, as will the number of business and group Pages. Every organization can benefit from a Facebook Page, and will continue to provide unique access to over 500 million consumers.

[Photo from oversocialized on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

Unless you have been lying on a beach for the last month or comatose on your couch watching the World Cup, you’ve at least heard rumblings of Foursquare’s phenomenal success.  Foursquare is a geolocation game screaming across the U.S., which most access on their smartphones.

At Catchfire Media, we prefer to look at Foursquare through the lens of a business application. What may have started off as a game only has legs if it is able to convert its fan base into revenue. Venture capital firms understand this social media platform’s pull, or they would not be dumping 20M bucks into the company.

We have been taking a hard look at how to extend Foursquare as a business application to our clients’ customer base. The potential beyond the current basic coupon offerings to location “mayors” is incredible (although, believe me I love those coupons; I am still desperately trying to become the mayor of my local Starbucks!)

One idea the Catchfire Media team dreamed up is a marketing campaign tied directly to Foursquare and Iowa’s 2010 gubernatorial race. What? That’s right, we have come up with a concept suited for our retail clients that integrates Foursquare into a state-wide competition for “mayor,” or in our case “governor.”

How it works

From the 10,000 foot view, our concept is a Foursquare competition based on the number of check-ins at retail chain locations. Implementing this campaign on behalf of clients with a large number of stores is key, as we want to ensure the state is represented as much as possible to ensure a “fair” election. Our idea includes a primary season during early fall, followed by the final race ending on election day. The primaries weed down the field by county, region, or city based on our clients’ geographic footprint and individual marketing plan. From the primaries we take the top mayors and pit them against each other for the governor’s race.

With the help of Clint Harvey, our lead developer, Catchfire is already working on customized mobile and web applications to manage the entire campaign for clients. We are encouraging  clients to combine this social media plan with their traditional marketing efforts to highlight and profile their mayors during the campaign. One of the best things about this campaign? There is no reason this it cannot be expanded to other states. In this economy, you can still count on elections happening every two to four years, and each has their own cycle.

As you can imagine, this idea has already created some serious interest by major regional retailers. If we’ve also captured your attention with the ideas behind this campaign and you think it is something that might drive value for your business or clients, give us a call. We are happy to help.

Your website should be the cornerstone of your online presence; however, the whole life cycle of a website can be frustrating and expensive. The life cycle of a site typically goes something like: design -> implementation -> launch -> content maintenance. A good content management system (CMS) can simplify these steps. Now that WordPress 3 has gone to release candidate status, it is getting very close to being an option for that CMS.

Design

WordPress sites are built around themes. These themes give your designer a sandbox to play in and create the unique look of your site from near scratch (or even from scratch if your designer knows how to build them). If your business is just getting started and you don’t have the means to hire a designer, you can simply roll with a a full-featured theme. If you prefer to have your designer deliver mock-ups to someone else that creates the website, then WordPress can help you too; it reinforces best practices of separating various page sections.

Implementation

Once you’ve defined a basic theme, WordPress helps you add the functionality that a modern, socially-aware, site needs. Want to pull in your recent tweets? Want to show fans of your Facebook Page? Want to show info about who’s checked in to your physical store on Foursquare? WordPress and its plugin architecture make it simple to do all of these things in just a few clicks. The development community around WordPress and its plug-ins is extremely active, so even the most niche community or brand new social tool probably has a WordPress plug-in that makes integration a simple process.

Launch

This can be done one of two ways: developing your site at its permanent location and blocking access, or running a separate instance of WordPress and its back end. WordPress is portable, so it’s easy to move from the development to production stage with each site revision. If you’re just wanting to play with some style sheets to tweak your site once it’s live, there are plug-ins that allow a logged-in user see a theme different than the general public.

Content Maintenance

The real benefits to using a CMS is the ease with which you can update site content without having to know how the rest of the site works. Your designer and developer can truly hand over the keys, and your site won’t just become a static page on the web. Adding new information is as simple as composing an email. The best part about WordPress is the ease of use for non-technical users.

Highlights of 3.0

WordPress turned seven years old last week—years during which its community has been making suggestions and developing plug-ins. As it has matured, many features that were once offered in plug-ins, or at least the general idea of them, have been absorbed into the main product.

Custom post types is one feature that’s improved in 3.0,which allows you to set up different content streams within the blog functionality and easily segregate each post type to its respective section. For example, say you have dynamic product content on its own page, but you don’t want new product posts to leak into your front page. Setting up a “product” post type addresses is now made simple; whereas, before you were limited to category-based filtering.

With 3.0 and WordPress MU merged, it’s quite simple to set up multiple sites within your single WordPress install. If sales.mysite.com wants a completely different site than service.mysite.com, you just add in a line of code and walk through the setup process. After that you can manage both sites from one dashboard. In addition you can set up users from each department, and let them manage their own content without being able to touch the main site’s, or each other’s, content.

There’s no reason not to use a CMS anymore. Choosing the right one can really make creating and maintaining a living, breathing, website that draws traffic and grows with your business painlessly. There are many options out there for good CMSes, but WordPress is one of the best in many cases, and with 3.0, the list of cases where it’s not the best is getting smaller.

Are you a WordPress user or developer? What are your thoughts on 3.0 or WordPress as a CMS in general?

I had the pleasure of attending Big Omaha last weekend, a creative, technology, and entrepreneurial-themed conference devised by the bright minds at Silicon Prairie News in Omaha, Nebraska. It was an incredibly thought-provoking and motivational event, bolstered by presentations from the likes of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare. Over the next few posts, Mike Templeton and I will share our conference experiences and takeaways with you. Enjoy.

Scott Harrison, charity: water
Wow. Scott’s presentation about his personal journey and how it shaped the journey of his charity, charity: water, was unforgettable. The lights came down, Scott took the stage, and the audience became engrossed in the story of Scott’s unusual childhood. About an hour later, after choking back tears several times, the audience swelled into a standing ovation. As we adjourned for lunch, it was clear that Scott’s presentation had resonated deeply with attendees. I won’t try to reiterate Scott’s story here, but I will tell you that it’s full of glorious highs and lows, with an ending you’ll commit to memory. I highly recommend you visit charitywater.org and see it for yourself.

Although Scott’s cause is much larger than the messaging and media created to raise awareness, it’s clear that there were a few business decisions charity: water made early on that would work to drive and shape their success.

Design
Charity: water has a simple yet hard-hitting message. Scott wanted to ensure this was conveyed when building the charity’s brand, developing the website, and creating any advertisements, merchandise, etc. Good design matters. For most charities, the “brand” is often an afterthought; for charity: water, it was the essential building block in establishing a strong, unmistakable identity for the organization.

Transparency
Scott wanted to be completely transparent on how donation dollars are used for charity: water. To do this, he split the charity right down the middle—any donations would be used, 100 percent, for direct water project costs. The organization would raise money separately to handle all administrative and operating costs. This donor transparency is meticulous; the charity is currently working to break down the giving by “quarter, country, and partner.”

Storytelling
The organization currently utilizes a network of photographers to document the projects that donors support. They also use GPS and video to capture additional content, sharing how individual lives are affected by the work they do. I’ve talked about how important storytelling is and can be to any organization before—charity: water’s storytelling is rich, personal, and honest. Along with very cohesive and frank messaging and design, there is no mistaking the work at hand and the change effected by the organization (and accordingly, by the donators themselves).

Empower Advocates
In 2008, after more and more people began to champion the charity’s cause in personal ways (giving up a birthday, running a marathon), the organization developed “mycharity: water,” a site for advocates to build their own fundraising pages.  The progress of this site alone is momentous: 26,587 people have joined the site, raising a total of just under $2 million. Building the site has given advocates simple but robust tools to fundraise, resulting in a deepened sense of ownership for advocates, and, more donations.

How can the initiatives (design, transparency, storytelling, and empowering advocates) demonstrated by charity: water be applied to your organization?

The most exciting opportunities social media creates for businesses are chances to engage customers in a more direct and open fashion than available before. This type of enhanced customer interaction is exciting, because it offers companies new opportunities to grow their business.

However, growing sales is not the only thing businesses need to be thinking about in regard to social media. For all the exciting opportunities social media creates, it also presents companies with unforeseen challenges—especially from a human resources perspective.

Does your firm or organization have a social media section in its handbook? It should. Do you know what your company’s policies regarding dissemination of information through social networks are? Do those policies exist?

It isn’t as easy as simply blocking Facebook on everyone’s computers. Your company must not only ensure that it is in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and that trade secrets are not being divulged, but also that policies are practical and enforceable (are you really going to fire every person who says they don’t like their boss?).

Of course, these issues are important for your company to address regardless of social media. However, the viral nature of this technology makes policies all the more important. Before, a small mistake would lead to a couple people being given confidential information, from which your organization could quickly react to and deal with. With social media, that same mistake could lead to a couple thousand people gaining access to confidential information. It is the speed of information transfer coupled with huge personal networks that is probably keeping your HR and legal teams up at night.

Unfortunately, this sort of investment in social media is not one that pays for itself in new business. However, as any of you know who work in human resources knows, the ROI on avoiding a lawsuit is pretty compelling.

Our team of professionals can not only help you grow your business, we can also help protect it. Give us a call, and we can ensure the social media section of your handbook is prepared before you get in trouble because it’s nonexistent.

[Photo from rafaelmarquez on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

Imagine sitting in the stands at a baseball game holding a device that allows you to predict the next play. Will the batter hit a home run? Will he ground into a 6-4-3 double play? You can earn points based on your accuracy and can compare your stats with others in the stadium playing along.

Before smart phones and their associated apps, this idea would have sounded pretty far-fetched. Rewind 17 years or so and there was such a device—rentable at the Oakland Coliseum during A’s games for $20 plus a deposit (if my memory serves me right). Unfortunately I can’t recall the name of this device, nor could I find anything on Google. If you remember anything about the device, let us know in the comments section, or even just your thoughts about this concept.

Is this social media? Well, not quite. Scores were the only information being shared. I’m sure someone could develop an iPhone app similar to the original, with the added bonus of social features, and make a killing off this today. If you are so inspired, please give me a cut of the proceeds. In both cases, we are dealing with back channel communications.

On the final day of South by Southwest Interactive, Abby and I attended a panel discussion called Sports Media Distribution: Beyond the TV, where the discussion about back channel communications caught my attention. Current examples of back channel communications in sports include: conversations on Twitter, chat rooms or hashtags affiliated with a specific game, and apps with mid-game instant replay capabilities and live stats.

Panelists included John Zehr, general manager of ESPN Mobile, who prophesied that the 2010 World Cup will be a watershed event in distributing mobile content, especially live mobile content.

“We’re going to use the World Cup to really educate people and let them know they can view online,” said Zehr.

I’m not sure how I feel about the World Cup being a watershed event—this is reminiscent of the predictions that soccer would become America’s pastime after the 1994 World Cup. Sharing mobile content seems to be happening on its own, and if any major sporting event had the opportunity to be the “watershed event,” it would have been the Vancouver Games. Do you think we are about to enter into the era of mobile video sharing for sports?

Zehr also brought up the recent contract Verizon signed to be the NFL’s exclusive mobile content provider. I consider myself to be an average NFL fan, so I don’t see myself switching contracts from AT&T just to have access. A few people tweeted during the panel discussion to the same effect. Do you think super fans on other networks will switch just for this access, or is there enough other data out there on other networks to support their needs?

ESPN’s Zehr made an outstanding point regarding which sports stand to gain the most from mobile—those that tend to be highlight-driven. Baseball fits this mold perfectly, and I could definitely see myself pulling up a customized reel of last night’s video highlights while chowing down on my lunch. To make this really cool, and to give it a social edge, I want the opportunity to share the best clips with participants in my fantasy baseball league. How would you implement social media with sports and video content?

We obviously live in a world inundated with technology—phones, video, chat, text messaging, net books, and more. My takeaway from the sports distribution panel is that we are just starting to figure out what useful things we can do when you integrate consumer electronics, mobile technology, social platforms, and people. Just like the early adopters renting the stat predictor game at the Oakland Coliseum, you have the opportunity to share information in new ways. What will you do with it?

In addition to experiencing the nation-wide beard trend, our two days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference allowed us to see the latest in social web innovation and gave us the opportunity to hear from some major thought leaders in the space. We sat through presentations from such luminaries as Twitter CEO Evan Williams and social media wine celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk. More importantly, we met potential future stars developing exciting social platforms and technologies. What follows is a list of key takeaways, many of which we, Senior Analyst Jarad Bernstein and Analyst Abby Harvey, will be expanding upon in future posts.

Every guy is growing a beard these days
From interesting mustaches to completely-covered faces, there was no shortage of facial hair at SXSW Interactive. What does this say about the direction we are heading? We’ll leave that to a later post, but regardless we think you should be aware of this trend.

Customer service rules the world
Gary Vaynerchuk couldn’t talk enough about the importance of caring for and about your customer. Customer service’s importance should be obvious to end users (which we all are), but why doesn’t every company get this? Simply put, everyone wants to be treated like a human being. In Gary’s words, “You can’t scale caring . . . you can’t scale authenticity.” Gary told the crowd that you need to start caring about your customers, or you will lose. Of course, he made this point more passionately—it wouldn’t be a true Gary Vaynerchuk show without a few hundred expletives sprinkled in. In Gary’s world caring is swearing, and Gary cares more than most.

Another main takeaway from Gary’s performance: utilizing social media and the web is a must, and do it now! “This platform [the internet] is a BABY!” he proclaimed. “You [SXSW Interactive attendees] have no idea how ahead of the rest of the world you are; there’s a massive amount of low-hanging fruit, and people are starting to eat the grapes.” Effectively incorporating a web presence hinges on every part of today’s business model—marketing, advertising, sales, and customer service.

Being CEO of Twitter doesn’t mean you are a good public speaker
The hype for Monday’s keynote presentation was palpable. Overflow rooms with giant projection screens filled up equally as fast as the cavernous main hall. We were all anticipating an announcement on the scale of Steve Jobs letting the world in on the next big thing; instead, we bore witness to a dull conversation with Twitter CEO Evan Williams about one of the most exciting technologies Twitter has developed to date—At Anywhere (@anywhere).

Geolocation is more than just Foursquare and similar services
We’ve come a long way from the original Magellan in-car navigation device—a topic expanded upon in two sessions we attended. Geolocation and Location-Based Services (LBS) are growing rapidly; in fact, we learned that global LBS-spending is forecasted to exceed $7 billion by 2013 (yes, that’s less than three years away!). In one session, speaker Jason Finkelstein of WaveMarket, Inc. talked about mobile geolocation developments and shared one of his favorite quotes from Google: “The future of mobile is local.” One interesting stat he shared with us, which we are still thinking about: 55 percent of all text messages ask some form of the question “where r u?” That’s 650 billion location-based texts in the U.S. last year alone. Look at your text message log in your cell phone and we think you’ll realize the truth in these numbers. What are WaveMarket and its competitors planning to do about this? Nothing earth-shattering was shared, but we certainly look forward to their innovations.

While in some cases geolocation rears its head as creepy, clearly causing negative sentiment, it’s hard to deny its importance. Geolocation takes the guesswork out of all those inquisitive, location-based text messages. The company that creates a solution that is both secure and useful will likely profit quite well.

Coming soon
Want to learn more about our takeaways? Our next few posts will focus on the future of open APIs, music sharing, digital magazines, social media in health care, and more. Every session had a hash tag assigned to it, and we have linked to the search results for those hashtags so you can learn from other attendees, as well. One final statistic for this post: registration was up substantially at SXSW Interactive compared to 2009. One rumor even has it that the interactive festival outdrew the music festival for the first time ever. With social media playing a central role in the festival and its growth, we know that social media is not done growing and changing the way we view communications.

In November of 2009, Catchfire Media officially launched with a soiree at Jasper Winery. During the event we projected a presentation built on the Prezi platform and received several positive comments on the look and feel of the presentation. Since November, Prezi has gained much acclaim; several presenters at the World Economic Forum in Davos used the platform, and it recently won the European Seal of E-Excellence Award at CeBIT.

So much has changed in social media in the past five months—platforms continue to grow exponentially and social media use is skyrocketing—that we wanted to share a new, updated Prezi with you.

Some of my favorite statistics from the new presentation:

• When a tsunami threatened Hawaii’s coast, followers of #HItsunami on Twitter received updates faster than cable news channels could provide them.
• Since its founding in 2006, more than 75 million accounts have been created on Twitter (though a majority of these aren’t creating content).
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect, and more than 60 million Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
• LinkedIn has more than 60 million users and is adding one new user every second.
• Facebook garners more unique visitors than any site online other than Google.
• 100 million Facebook users check updates on their mobile phones every day. These users are 50% more active than people who only access Facebook on a computer.

Following is the new Prezi. Let us know what you think of it!

(RSS subscribers, please view this post on the blog to see the embedded presentation)

Do you know who you should be talking to through your blog, Facebook Page, Twitter account, or any other social media platform? As with any form of communications, your social media strategy relies on knowing your audience.

“Shut up and listen”

Author and journalist Bob Garfield told attendees of last year’s PRSA International Conference to “shut up and listen.” With tools available as rudimentary as Google Alerts, it is possible to discover conversations already taking place about your organization. That is certainly a start. In many situations it’s critical to address conversations already taking place about your business; however, this is not where the search for your audience should end. You are not using social media to its full potential if you view it solely as a reactionary device.

Where you should be looking

So where do you find your audience? Well, that depends on who they are. Audiences could include customers of a specific demographic, shareholders, board members, employees, voters, etc. Once you have some targets in mind, zero in on where they hang out. Shareholders might be discussing your company on a forum, while passionate brand advocates may be discussing you in a Facebook group. You either need to make a serious commitment to discovering these “hang outs” or hire someone to do it for you.

Put your strategy to good use

Now that you have found and targeted your audience, implement your strategy. Though let’s be honest here, there are a few important parts I am leaving out—like what that strategy entails—but we’ve covered that before. The point of this post is that you need to know your audience in order to have any hope of connecting to them.

Who are your most important audiences? How do they prefer to receive information? Are they excited to hear from you? If so, how do they show it?

[Photo from tore_urnes on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]