For my contribution to the discussion, I suggested that educators should be focusing less on pushing privacy warnings and more on supporting Gen Y to professionalize their online footprint. Why do I suggest this? Because for the past two years, when I have polled my classes the results show 99% of students have customized their privacy settings on Facebook profiles, and are aware that profile creeping by profs, police, parents, and potential employers means they need to be smart about what they publish for “everyone.” GenY gets it that sharing online has consequences. Surely, generational divides are wide when it comes to what and how much to share. And certainly there has been a cultural “shift in the expectations of privacy” as the digital natives enter workplaces and higher ed campuses.

What millennials could use some help with, is how to do more (not less) with Facebook, in a professional sense.

It’s not difficult to optimize a Facebook profile and publish smart, flattering, relevant information for “everyone”—including those employers who might be seeking the right person to fit an open internship or job vacancy. Especially for those students who are looking for jobs in media and marketing, having an established professional persona online can set you apart. So how exactly do you “professionalize” your Facebook profile if you’re a student? Here’s three ideas:

• Extended Info Facebook app. This app lets you add as much html/fbml customization as you wish, but also provides templates for inserting links, images, and paragraphs of text. Using this app it’s possible to collect and display links to your activities online, from volunteerism to sports to school projects, forming an online e-portfolio right there on Facebook.

• Academia.edu Facebook plugin. Ideal for students heading to grad school, this social network for academics allows uploads of scholarly papers and presentations, slide shows, electronic documents, and best of all, it’s advertising-free. Bonus: the site will notify you each time someone searches for you on Google or other search engines, and shows you the search terms they used. Add the Academic.edu tab to your Facebook profile and instantly display your academic work, any journals you follow, and your (international) network of scholarly affiliations.

• LinkedIn Facebook plugin. For any job-seeking student, if you’ve joined LinkedIn you can import your LI profile to a Facebook tab. On LinkedIn, build a network of professional contacts including alumni and professors, add your Amazon booklists, upload your best Slideshare.net decks, display your LinkedIn Group memberships and professional events calendar. Twitter feeds, WordPress blogs, and any companies you are following—all can be displayed on Facebook via the LinkedIn Tab. Add more value to your LI profile with recommendations and references from profs and supervisors—glowing publicly visible endorsements are door openers. But you knew that—so contact people who know about your skills, and make the ask.

You might also be interested in this post on designing an ePortfolio, or this one about why for professional success, network size and visibility matters.

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Rich color palate. For Gucci Creative Director Frida Giannini, the key to replicating the aesthetic experience of walking into a boutique, in an online store, is attention to detail in site architecture. Gucci’s newly unveiled digital flagship destination is all about carefully consistent branding, using beautiful color and textured backgrounds. Looking for a beautiful palate of your own? I always start with ColorSchemer.com

Social integration. According to Giannini, social shopping extensions are key, because “shopping for fashion is almost always an experience that is shared and enjoyed with friends.” For more on social shopping, luxury brands and Gen Y consumers, see my post here.

Mobile optimization. First on the luxury brand mobile scene since way back in 2008 is Ralph Lauren, experimenting with a mobile magazine and QR codes. Today, both Gucci and Kenneth Cole join Ralph Lauren in iPad and iPhone readiness—with mobility as an expression of their level of customer service. Smartphones are for those in-between times, moments of microboredom, and “the luxury customer deserves and wants and expects that you communicate to them between all the strategies,” said Tom Davis, vice president of ecommerce at Kenneth Cole, New York. When the upscale client is ready to shop, luxury brands are there at hand, accessible on smartphones, ensuring the shopping experience is smooth, pleasant, and above all—efficient.

Personalization. Allowing for customization and personalization options on the website is a way of communicating a luxury brand’s dedication to meeting individual client needs. “Personalization in the fashion/luxury industry is what is relevant today,” Davis said. The goal is to design a digital space and experience that accurately reflects the unique values of a luxury clientele. This can be accomplished with a focus on lifestyle marketing, identifying the passions, drives, and needs of the most affluent consumer segment.

Overall, attention to the most minute of design elements, experimenting with rich media content, fidelity to branding, and putting user experience above all else, seem to be the basic principles of designer ecommerce sites. Following in the footsteps of the most spendy labels, any web marketing and communication experience can be a little more luxe.

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Teens are text-crazy because the format is low cost, offers privacy, and facilitates near real-time connectivity. In the long run, texting helps to normalize expectations of informational instantaneity, always-on contacts, ambient accessibility, and can encourage adoption of abbreviated communication styles (textese).

So what does this trend mean for marketers? If texting is so much a part of everyday communication patterns on the next generation of consumers, does it follow that these users will take mobile text marketing in stride? Not exactly.

Particular kinds of SMS mobile marketing messages are welcome, but for the most part these interruption adverts are viewed as the worst kind of spam. In a nutshell, if the campaign involves saving money or even better, tasty snacks, it’s got a real chance. Some of the most successful mobile text marketing campaigns I’ve reviewed this year targeting teens, tweens and twenty-somethings are offering mobile coupons or short codes for fast food and soda pop. “Ads on my phone? No way! Oh…a coupon at noon for the Subway near my office? Hello!”

Even if you’re not in the food industry, here are three ideas for mobile text marketing with impact:

The opt-in factor is a deal-breaker. Far and wide we hear that the mobile phone is the new loyalty card. “One of the most important elements about using SMS text marketing,” advises Kathy Marlor, ”is that your audience requests to be included by sending a text message to a keyword that you have selected.”

Time and place is everything. Experts encourage advertisers to think about “the mobile path to purchase, which really begins outside the store,” in other words, using geofencing and other LBA services (such as Foursquare) to target the foot traffic of local shoppers in the vicinity. For The North Face brand, georelevant text messaging means, “if they are near a store, customers may receive a message about a new item in the store” or an in-store limited time offer/promotion.

Real value delivers positive buzz. “If the customer gets value out of the text message campaign,” say the experts at OnSMS.com, it is more likely “they will participate again in future promotions and become a good source of positive word-of-mouth.” How to deliver value? Be transparent about costs, for starters, advises the Mobile Marketing Association.

Interested in thinking about other ways that mobile matters to consumers and marketers? Check out my whitepaper.

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This ePaper is also available to read online or download at Scribd.com and Slideshare.net.

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Because My Status is Your Spam

Yesterday I ran across a great roundup of free services to help schedule tweets. Some terrific sites helping tweeters produce and plan updates by date and time, so your streams are consistently fresh. Useful stuff.

Many of those services allow for easily sharing the same status update across multiple platforms with a single click. Time-saving and productivity-enhancing. But would I use that feature? No.

Should you post the same update on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn? Should you auto-multi-share from Twitter to Facebook every Foursquare check-in, FB status change, YouTube like, Digg, Flickr upload, tweet, Delicious bookmark, blog and Blip? And then rebroadcast it all on LinkedIn? Or does just reading about all this redundancy make your eyes gloss over?

“If you share contacts on both FB and Twitter (and you will),” cautions business blogger Rebecca Coleman,”they might get sick of seeing exactly the same thing on both updates.” Agreed.

A very thought-provoking post recently from the Chris Brogan on the topic. He warns his connections that crossposting one too many meaningless overshares on your LinkedIn profile will result in his opting to “permanently hide” your updates from his stream. And, “if I “hide” you,” he writes,”you’ll never get back in front of my eye.” When “overshare” makes Webster Dictionary’s word of the year (2008), chances are Brogan’s not the only one of us who unfans/unfriends/unfollows/and hides people who are irrelevant, redundant, or too loud.

To avoid this invisibility fate, Brogan gently reminds his network to think before overlapping updates on Twitter to LinkedIn. The platforms are different, as are the communications protocols. It’s less likely that tweeting the minutiae of everyday life will cause you to lose followers (if that’s what you’ve always done), but certainly we all know that LinkedIn is for business networking and more professional communication—despite what cross-platform social media functionality the site affords.

Nix the cross-posted status updates. Try repurposing your content instead.

To keep your social media streams and statuses fresh, why not take the content you have on-hand and give it a freshening-up?

Repurposing, redesigning and retrofitting your content takes time and creativity—ideally you’ll plan a few cross-platform strategies and craft some time-saving templates. SEO specialist Angie Nikoleychuk advises bloggers to refresh the title for each status update: “Come at the topic from a different angle. So, if you’ve got ‘five ways to scratch your back’ try ‘how to avoid back itch’.” A quick and effective fix for repetitive updates.

“Repurposing content is actually about spreading your thoughts, ideas and content over multiple formats, to expand your reach without going crazy in content creation,” writes Greg Rollett. His 5-step system for designing agile and flexible content for cross-platform social media publishing is definitely worth a read.

To drive traffic, reach a larger audience, and get more mileage out of your blog content, Denise Wakeman (on Social Media Examiner) suggests reworking it into submissions for article databases, document-sharing sites, and creating audio posts. By turning to visual (slides/infographics) or audio (podcast) redelivery, you can add value because “people have different learning styles [visual/kinesthetic/auditory/tactile], and absorb information differently,” observes senior editor Beth Hrusch (in an article packed with ideas for repurposing).

We know social media channels need regularly updated quality content. But auto-cross-posting is not the only solution to content flow needs—and it can backfire, as Brogan warns.

The trick is to repurpose, rephrase, redesign as you republish, redistribute and reshare—so as to not bore and burden your cross-platform network regulars with repetitive status updates. Then it’s less likely your friends will hide when they hear from you.

Hide YOU, that is.

Feeling really stuck for a witty status update? Check out Generatus, the Facebook status auto generator!

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