Compliments of @BenParr from Mashable, we get an internal perspective on the Facebook redesign. They launched this update to 60 million users and Facebook recently celebrated their 400 million user milestone. Facebook has made a lot of news this week celebrating, their 6th birthday and launching a new browser based photo plugin.

This is the most wonderful time of the year for us those of us that are consumed with Robert Scoble, Lolcatz, and all things Meme– it’s Southby Southwest season!

So let’s get together as the San Diego team representing at Southby. The experienced vets will show you how to Rawk, the newbies can take notes, and the onlookers can live vicariously through us.

If you aren’t going, or aren’t sure, come join us for a beer any way.I can’t guarantee much more than laughs and good people. Oh yea, Pitchers are $8.

You can RSVP for the Meet Up here.

We hope you can join us. If it’s nice out we’ll be outside, if not we’ll be inside near the bar.

:: disclaimer :: this is a no frills meet up. Don’t expect entertainment, seminars, speeches, or anything but good company.

I wrote a status update that I think some of you read last month. I talked about the new Facebook privacy settings and how they are down right evil.

The privacy updates are so slimy, they’ve prompted me to reflect on how I use the service.

In fact, Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook’s CEO) is touting how privacy isn’t a social norm anymore.

Well Sorry Mark, I don’t agree! I never gave my friends permission to control my privacy. And by no means do I buy into your corporate convenient vision that your users are throwing their privacy out the door.

To take back your privacy on Facebook, I’ve put together some simple steps to follow to put your profile in your hands, not your friends.

Following these steps will prevent your ‘friends’ from sharing your data.

Before you think I am an alarmist, consider this:
Apps are the biggest privacy culprit on Facebook. You may not install apps like Farmville, but your friends do. When you share your personal data with friends, you are also sharing it with your friend’s apps, AKA Farmville. So, Farmville or MafiaWars now has all of your personal information, if your friends are playing them.

If you limit what your friends can share, you are taking steps to control your own privacy. Facebook made it difficult to change these settings on purpose. The more open they are, the better it is for their budding startup. Unfortunately, these new privacy settings break the initial (unspoken) agreement Facebook had with it’s members, which led to people trusting them in the first place.

I afraid Facebook is probably too big to have the same melt down MySpace did, but if they keep this up, they might test that theory.

[image from Harry Halpin's Beyond Walled Gardens]

For 72 hours only, they are waiving their Joiner fees. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week (12/8 – 12/10) you can sign up for the ‘Y’ for about $30- your first month’s fee. That’s a saving of anywhere from $100-$250 depending on what package you choose to enroll in.

If you haven’t considered joining the Y, it’s a ‘no brainer.’ It’s such an amazing asset to our community, and I am excited to support it.

For those that don’t know, this why I am uber-stoked to be joining the local Y.
* Access to multiple locations that all have unique qualities (Hazard, Toby Weels, Friars)
* They have Nike+ iPod for all their equipment
* They offer affordable group training, 1-1 personal training and even bootcamps (for nominal costs)
* They have amazing programs for kids, great play area, play dates
* They have Yoga, Swimming, and Basketball – ’nuff said
* A wide demographic of people that work at the gym, which is always nice
Read about each facility and determine which has the best programs for you.

[Our local YMCA stepped up their web site in May of this year. They're boasting a feature rich site equipped with a lot of latest social and sharing features we've come to know and love (like Facebook, RSS, Youtube, etc).]

One way to get over your Turkey coma this weekend is by going to support a local theater production.

Mimicry–written, directed, and performed by Annalyn Lehnig and James Luster–will open this Friday November 27th and run for 2 weeks at 10th Avenue Theater downtown.

Mimicry is a Film noir style production consisting of 6 monologues in the vain of The Maltese Falcon where the mimic octopus is the central image of the show.

The 8 characters explore mimicry as a concept–in humanity and theater as an art form.

I plan to attend the show on Saturday, so I will post a follow up review shortly thereafter.

Tickets for Friday’s show are available for $10 at http://bit.ly/Mimicry or through http://ticketderby.com

Here is a brief message from the co-creator Annalyn about putting together Mimicry:

Annalyn Lehnig & James Luster Present Mimicry in San Diego.

I find it rather ironic, that the biggest social network (speaking in offline terms) within any enterprise, is comprised of the people that work for the company. Social bonds, cliques, and circles form to create relationships and a unique company culture. Yet, that culture is rarely reflected within the social sphere. And I’d like to ask why?

I think I know the answer you are going to give. “I spent 8-10+ hours a day with these people, why would I want to connect with them on Facebook?”

I’d like to answer your question with a question. What are you really afraid of? Someone seeing a picture of your family–or worse–maybe you with a beer in your hand? I’ve got some advice for you; get over it!

Within the enterprise, there is no bigger asset in social media than involving employees. Tony Hsieh has built a culture of happiness at Zappos.com, and that is very evident on Twitter and other social sites. This is a rare example of a company culture manifesting itself in the social sphere.

When you first start any social media initiative, your first thought might be, “who will be my audience and share my content.” Answer, the people getting a paycheck, and the people that care about those getting a paycheck, will be some of your strongest advocates initially.

You may want to consider running a training for all your employees on Facebook. Show them how they can segment their family content from professional interests, and let the team know you want them to share your message. In fact, I’ve seen some enterprises directly prohibit the proactive of sharing and commenting of company messages within the social sphere. This is just backwards. Employees should be first. Then influencers, significant others, and the greater community.

If you start your social media efforts internally, by framing how you’d like employees to utilize these new tools professionally, you will be building value for the enterprise while simultaneously increasing personal development and education for your team. [win-win]

I find it rather odd that we spend the better portion of our days working for a company, but are scared to share photos of the people that show up at the Holiday parties. We are afraid to show our real selves to the people we spend the most time with. The largest social networks often exist within your enterprise. It is incumbent upon us as marketers to learn how to leverage social connections for productivity, and increasing the value each team member brings to the table.

You might start by writing a social media policy for your company. Then proceed with outlining realistic ways you plan to interact with the community. After that, have a regular trainings with employees who want to participate and guide them to professional productivity on the social web.

If you’ve had success getting larger businesses adopt social media into their enterprise, I’d love to hear your commentary.

Attributions: Photo by Little Pengiun

Clay Shirky delivers a stellar presentation on the ‘how/why’ social media will change our lives. For anyone in marketing, this is a must watch!

Last week was an exciting week in tech. The 3 bigs, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made some very relevant announcements that will have an affect on us all.

The first major announcement was Twitter Lists, which went live to all users on Friday. I agree with Scoble, Twitter Lists are the most significant upgrade to the Twitter platform since inception. Fresh on the heels of this announcement, Listorious created the first Twitter list directory site.

Twitter had a hot week. But they weren’t stopping there. Tweets from the Web 2.0 Summit were steadily quoting @Ev about the future of Twitter. My favorite quote from the show, “Twitter is an information network, not a social network.”

Another big move for Twitter last week was when they struck a deal with Bing and Google to populate relevant Tweets in search result pages. This was a clear warning shot across the bow of real time search startups like OneRiot.com.

In other big news last week, Google had their share of announcements.

Google Social Search is one of the more interesting developments from my perspective. Utilizing your Gmail contacts, Social Search finds results from your friend’s blogs, Twitter, and other social sites, and lets you filter out any results you don’t want included.

Google continued their string of announcements with the launch of Google Comparison engine which was released Thursday on the Adwords blog. This move, coupled with the Google maps redesign for Real Estate, is evidence Google is making a serious play in the Real Estate space.

And finally, Facebook:

Facebook made news with their homepage redesign last week. The move was prompted to give Facebook applications more exposure and relevancy moving forward. Users, as usual, reacted by forming groups that protested the new design.

Facebook also revamped it’s privacy policy, another move that sends shivers down the spine of their community.

Twitter made the most strides last week. Google was not far behind. And Facebook appeared to be mired by the diplomacy of their recent changes. It was a good week in tech news, with many substantial updates coming to fruition that will affect on the way we utilize these services.

How do you measure the ROI for social media? Can you put a price on averting a PR disaster? Can you find an equation to measure the cumulative effect on social media? This is last post in a 5 part series documenting my takeaways from Blogworld 2009.

These were the questions the panel at the ROI smack down attempted to answer.

There was a spirited debate over quantitate metrics versus qualitative metric measurement between Muhammad Saleem (marektingmaven.com) and Beth Harte (community manager of MarketingProfs.com). The consensus among the group was that companies need proof positive evidence of the quantitative growth in sales and revenue, if we as social media evangelists are seeking long term employment. No one disagrees that there isn’t an intangible benefit to social media, however, we must find creative ways to document and track these benefits or they will be lost on upper management.

If we talk in terms of followers and retweets, the traditional business community does not yet realize how to translate that to value in P&L environment. So Deborah Micek, of Quansite revolution, demonstrated how authors are driving more people to their book signing through social media, than almost any other avenue. I wanted to see more examples like this from the panel.

Another interesting point that the moderator Stephanie Agresta addressed was how do you measure the ROI of a PR disaster avoided. If you stop a tweet from turning into a blog, from turning into a movement, what is that worth to you company? What would Taco Bell pay to have that BellHedz crisis avoided?

I felt that this was a topic that could have been explored in devoted track. I would have love to seen cases studies, formulas, spreadsheets, and real life examples of ROI working to drive social media.

The cumulative affect of social media is such that, each month you continue a campaign it gets easier and easier to grow it. What that means is that social media campaigns will never cost as much to the organization as they do the first quarter or first year.

As you amass followers, build relationships, and reach out the community; you will experience rising retweets, shares, and exposure over time. Each month you continue with social media should become more profitable, and if documented appropriately, you can really impress the CFO of your organization.

Don Lemon, anchor of CNN, led the social media charge to Beat Cancer last weekend at Blogworld Expo. This is part 4, in a 5 part series documenting my takeaways from Blogworld 2009.

Twitter and Facebook has enabled charities and causes to do some amazing work at healing and building spirits for those suffering. The folks and Alex’s Lemonade stand, and Spirit Jump really touched me with what they do.

Because the only investment necessary to grow a community on Twitter and Facebook is time, non profits are flocking to these free social tools to spread their message and build relationships.

Between Don Lemon and Blogworld, the hashtag #beatcancer was repeated more than 700,000 times and raised over $70,000 for charity thanks to matching donations from eBay and Paypal. For more information visit: Beatcancereverywhere.com