I’m a runner and I like to run half marathons.

Two years ago, heck 18 months ago, had you asked me about running, those two thoughts would never in a million years have entered my brain.  I despised running for 33.5 years. And then I ran my first 5k in June of 2010 and got hooked.

Other runners told me I should run a 1/2 marathon and I thought they were crazy.  I started slow and decided to run the relay portion of the Baltimore Running Festival in October of 2010. By the time race day arrived, I was running much farther than the 5 miles required of me for the race, so I decided to run 2 legs which would equal a half marathon.

AND I LOVED IT.

I loved the ache in my legs that I felt for days after, I loved the incredible feeling of accomplishment in running a distance that no everyone wants to run. And I loved the friendships that I made while training for the race.

I knew I had to run an official half and set my sites on the Rehoboth Beach Marathon and Half Marathon. It is a small marathon and it’s held in December so fans and supporters aren’t exactly overflowing on the sidelines. Much of the course is on a trail through fields between Rehoboth Beach and Lewes.  But I still got the same rush from completing it, and doing so in a time that was almost 15 minutes faster than I thought I could run.

My finish time for that allowed me to register for the National Half Marathon in Washington DC in March of 2011. I ran it, and once again, felt proud and sore and happy all at the same time.

But after that race, I didn’t register for another one, and my running kindof faded into the background.

The 2011 Baltimore Half Marathon came and went and I missed it.  I hated missing it so I found another race in which to run, the Inaugural Annapolis Half Marathon and this time I got to run with one of my best friends. Just like my previous races, the feeling from running and finishing is something I can not get from anything else and it reminded me that I do love running and I love running half marathon’s most of all.

What it also taught me is that I need to have races on the calendar so that I have a goal for which to train.

And just as I was beginning my research for Spring races, I found the Zooma Run in Annapolis.  The race is on a course similar to the Annapolis Half, which was GORGEOUS! And it’s just for women, something I find particularly cool.

Plus it’s sponsored by Barefoot Bubbly, so you know the drinks afterwards will be awesome. And I love a good drink after a long run!

The absolute best part for me though, is that they actively embrace social media and the way in which it can help market a business or brand.  They believe in it so much that they actually seek out people who will be vocal in their support of the race and who will use social media outlets to promote it, in exchange for entry to the race.  I LOVE THIS CONCEPT! And it’s like they designed the program with me in mind….a runner who loves social media!

I jumped at the chance and I am excited to be a 2012 Zoom Run Annapolis Connector!

To my running friends, please join me for this race, there’s a 10k too! And to businesses out there…have you ever thought of cultivating brand connectors and rewarding them for their loyalty and efforts? It’s a great way to spread the word about your business and it doesn’t have to cost much!

People have been talking about this for a while now.  And I’ve seen it in action time and again. Yesterday, a Federal Holiday, our washing machine broke. The only appliance repair place that we knew of neither answered their phone nor had a place for us to leave a message.

So I took to Facebook to ask my trusty friends if they had any recommendations.

What better way to find a local resource than to ask your friends?  I’m way more likely to use a service that my friends endorse rather than a random one that pops up on Google.

I quickly got 2 recommendations and a second for one of them. Then I googled them and found their website at RakerAppliance.com.   (would be even easier if they were on Facebook because then Ryan and Adele could have just pointed me to their page with a little tagging).

I called and spoke with Harry’s son Reid, who asked me a few questions to be sure that the machine was in fact broken and not a case of user error, and told me he’d be out in about an hour.

Reid found the problem: I had overloaded the machine and one of my daughters socks had clogged the drainage pipe…..ooops.  He fixed it and asked how we had hear of Raker Appliances.

When I told him that I had put it on Facebook, he informed that that was the 5th time he had heard of someone referring them on the site.

Have you “searched” for recommendations on Facebook before? What were your results?

If you own a business and it’s not on Facebook….what’s stopping you?

Thanks to this awesome app by Static HTML you can now customize the way tags show up in your posts with ease!  AllFacebook.com wrote about the new addition to Facebook tags and then Static HTML went out and made it even simpler with their app.

All you do is go to http://fbtagging.thunderpenny.com/ and enter in the info you want.  The app does the rest for you!

And here’s what it looks like on Facebook:

This is great for a variety of purposes, not the least of which is tagging people who go by a name other than what their Facebook name is listed.  Shortening Rebecca to Becky and so on….

Also as AllFacebook pointed out, you can make the name of a page change to something more descriptive:

Facebook has altered their insights page once again and now show page owners even more information about who their fans are and how they engage with the page.

Once you click on the insights tab you now have: Likes, Reach, Talking About This and Check-ins.  The check-ins tab and talking about this tab only work when 30 people have talked about your business or checked in to your business in the last 30 days.

First up the general insights page which looks like this

These general insights let you see how many fans you have and how many friends those fans have, it also shows you how many people are talking about your page and what your reach is based on that.

The arrows show you how these numbers have changed since last week.

One thing to note is the purple dots, the bigger the dot, the more posting that took place over that period of time.  Consequently, the bigger the dot, generally speaking, the higher the blue line.  More posts mean more eyeballs, most of the time.  Of course, part of evaluating your analytics is finding the right amount of posting for your page.

Under this graph is a list of all of your posts with some information about their reach, virality, and the conversations they encouraged.

The part that’s new here is the virality number and this is the one that can help you refine your posting strategy. Interesting to note here, that just because a post has a large reach, does not mean that it is more likely to gain traction and get people talking.

The Likes and Reach tabs have not changed since they were rolled out a couple months ago.

What has changed are the last two tabs: People Talking About This and Check-Ins.

Page owners could always see this data about EVERYONE who liked their page, but what about the people who are doing the engaging and talking and sharing with and about the page?

And what about the people a page reaches but aren’t fans of the page? Now you can see who those people are too! What kind of potential customers and fans are out there? To whom could you target some Facebook ads in order to encourage them to like your page? Now you know!

And when those stories about your page are created by liking your content or page, commenting on your posts, sharing your content, and mentioning your page in a post of their own, what kind of response is the most popular and to what does it correspond in your content stream?

For example, I can see in my data set that people mentioned my page 3 times on November 2nd, which was a highpoint on the graph.  If I go back to the general insights page, I can see that on November 2nd I post 3 times, 2 of which were requests to vote for me for the Mobbies.  Those posts were then reshared by fans requesting that their friends vote for me too.  So now I know (as if I didn’t already) that my fans are awesome and respond well when I ask for help!

Finally, the Check-In’s data page. This will allow you to see demographic info about those that have checked into your business as well as info on how and when they checked in.

This is great for brick and mortar businesses.  You can now see which days are most popular to check-in and create marketing campaigns based on that timeline.

Overall, these insights have improved upon what was already a much improved product.

Take a look at yours and let me know what you learn about your fans that you didn’t know before.

Has anyone else noticed these subtle changes?

Photo Uploader

The other day I was uploading an album for a client and this new photo uploading interface popped up.

It makes the description area more prominent and seems overall easier to use.  After this, you are no longer asked to approve the photos, but they didn’t go into the newsfeed.  Instead, I had to use Facebook as the page, and share the album in order to get  it into the newsfeed.

Post Insights

This morning while looking over client pages, I noticed this next subtle change.

Instead of showing impressions and percentages, it now spells out exactly what the numbers mean in layman’s terms. I like this change too, mostly because it’s helpful to the average Joe running his own business page.

This seems to coincide with the rollout of Facebook’s Timeline for everyone.  I’ve already noticed a couple friends who have received Timeline.  I’m curious what you all think of the changes and if you’ve gotten timeline yet.  Let me know in the comments!

I’ve been bitten by the Pinterest bug and have crafted up a storm, and eaten my weight in chocolately peanut buttery confections because of it. I’ve had a lot of people ask me about how to get started and am now even helping some clients get a page set up. Here’s my stab at a “How to set up Pinterest”

First you have to request an invite on Pinterest.com.  Once you get one in your inbox (it takes a couple of days), click on the link and create your login information; you can link your Facebook and or Twitter accounts here too.

Next, Pinterest will ask you what your interests are to get you started.  Select a few.

Then Pinterest will show you that they have set up several people for you to follow that they think will be of interest to you.

See the grey “following” boxes under each person, if you click it, you can unfollow that person.  It’s super easy.

Now Pinterest will ask you to create the boards to which you will pin the items that interest you.

They give you a few, but you can create your own too.  And don’t worry, this isn’t the only place you can add or delete boards.

Once you click the create button the next page will show you how to add the “Pin It” button to your toolbar.  And Pinterest is so smart, it automatically gives you the button that works best with your browser.  Just click and drag it into your toolbar!

That’s it! You are set up, and if you added your Facebook and Twitter accounts, Pinterest has autofollowed your contact list from both.  To view who you are following, click on your name in the upper right hand corner of the main screen.

Select “Boards” from your profile.

You can also chose to view all of your pins, not categorized by boards, see the pins you have liked, and see who has mentioned you in a pin.  This is also where you access your settings.

By clicking on boards, you’ll see all of your boards.

Just above your profile photo, you’ll notice that there is a follower/following count.

If you click on the following text, you’ll be taken to your list of people that you are following. And if you click on the followers, you will see that list too.

Once again, just click the grey following box and it will unfollow the person.

The other menu items in the upper right corner are Add+ and About. The Pin It button among other things is listed under About.  We’ll cover the Add+ item later.

Viewing Pins Within Pinterest

You can view the pins of those you follow, or branch out and view the pins of everyone on Pinterest.  The default landing page of Pinterest is to view the pins of those you follow.

The menu items in the upper middle part of the screen allow you to view other pins.

You can select Everything and see it all, or you can drill down to a particular interest.  You can also view videos separately, pins that have spurred discussions, and gifts.  Gifts are simply pins that have price tags included in them.  See below for info on how to add a price tag to a pin.

Now you’re all set up and ready to pin!

Start easy, and peruse the pins of the people you are following.  That page is the default landing page now that you are on Pinterest.  If you see something of interest, hover your mouse over the image.  Three buttons appear:

If you like an item, that does not show up on other people’s boards, however, the person who’s item you have liked, will receive a notification that you liked their pin.

Repinning an item is what you want to do if it’s something that you’d like to remember or revisit down the road.  Or if you’d like to share something with other people.  Once you click the repin button this box appears:

Fill out the description you’d like to add to your pin, or chose to leave it as is.  If you pin a product, you can add a price tag by just typing in a dollar sign and the price.  If you’d like to mention someone in your description, to call their attention to it, type @ and then their name, it will create pull down of names of people you follow.

If you check off the Facebook Button (and twitter if you’ve added that to your profile), you can share the Pin on those social networks as well.  When you click on the black arrow, a drop down menu of your boards will apear.

Here, you have the option of creating a new board or selecting one that already exists.  Then click create and your pin will be added to the selected board and shared with those following you.

If you’d like to pin something from another location, click the Add+ menu item in the upper right corner of the main page.  When you do this box will appear:

Here you can create a new board, pin a file that’s on your computer, or add a pin from an external URL.

If you have the Pin It button installed on your tool bar and have found something on the interwebs that you’d like to pin, click the pin it button.  This pop up will appear, allowing you to select an image:

Once you have selected an image, the board selection box appears

And once you have clicked Pin It, the success box appears, letting you know that the pin worked (because sometimes it doesn’t).

If ever you make an error and pin things to the wrong board, simply go to the menu in the upper right corner, select the pins or boards menu item under your name and select the pin you wish to edit.

Click the edit button and a whole host of options come up

From here you can move a pin from one board to another, change the URL to which the image links and edit the description of the pin.

One of my biggest pet peeves on Pinterest is when you click on an image that interests you only to find that the link doesn’t take you to proper URL.  Hence the need to edit the URL.  A courtesy rule in Pinterest, is to link to the Permalink of the item of interest.

That’s the basics of getting started.  If I left something out or you have questions, just leave a comment here and I’ll answer you!  Good luck and Happy Pinning!

* A special thank you to my mother, Sally Spilman, for letting me use her account set up to grab screen shots of the set up process.

I have heard complaint after complaint from friends in my newsfeed about the *New* Facebook. People don’t know how to work it or navigate through it. My sister lamented that the page of her employer, the page whose posts she most frequently shared, had disappeared from her newsfeed. And a long lost high school classmate with an infant daughter, posted for the first time in forever, with a simple plea for help.

I, on the other hand, think this new Facebook is beautiful and I was elated to see the changes coming soon: Timeline, deep music and tv integration, and the ability to share content without “liking” it!

And so I’m going to do my best to give my friends a walk through of the features currently available to us and to explain to everyone how to set it up to make it easy peasy lemon squeezy!  Hopefully you’ll love Facebook again after this!

First up, the left side of the page, there’s some new stuff over here and there’s a lot you can do to play with the order in which these items are listed.

I’ve got my important pages listed, as well as my new lists.  There are smart lists, which Facebook has created, and then there are lists that I made.  I made the *Friends* list, Facebook generated the rest.  See the little numbers in blue to the right of the list and page names?  Those indicate that the list or page has an update.

Updates can include, new posts, as well as comments and likes on posts on the list or page. I’ll show you how to control this further down.

On a side note, Facebook has recently diminished the amount of email you receive from them, choosing only to notify you via email of things they deem important.  For me this is great, I’m on Facebook all day so I prefer not getting email, but for many of my friends, this makes it difficult to interact and respond in a timely fashion.  To change this, go the Notifications section of your profile and tell Facebook what you want to be emailed about.

Back to the right column, you control what appears here and in what order it appears.  Simply hover your mouse to the left of the little icon and a blue pencil will appear:

Once you click on the pencil, you’ll see two options:

Rearrange lets you reorder the lists and pages in the column and the remove from favorites will remove the list from the top of this column.  Consequently, the pencil for the the groups, lists, pages, and apps sections further down the left side, will reveal an add to favorites button.

If you click on a list, the newsfeed for that list appears, as does a photo collage of those on the list, as well as suggestions of people for you to add to the list.  You can also add people to the list by typing the person’s name in the box below the collage or by clicking on the manage list button above the collage.

The manage list button will reveal the following choices:

Here you can control the updates for which you will be notified, merge one list with another, change this list name, delete it and control who is or is not on the list.

If you chose to add or remove friends from here, this box pops up:

You have several choices here, and can select people to whom you subscribe (in short, subscribing is a one way friendship, you see the persons PUBLIC updates, they see nothing from you), pages that you follow or your friends.  It’s quite simple once you start creating them.

For me, I’ve got my high school friends, my college friends, my family, my close friends, my friends, the subscriptions, friends and pages I have for work, and then the pages I follow for personal reasons.  It is SOOOO nice to be able to split everyone up.  AND if I’m on a list page and chose to post a status update, the default is to only share to that list.  It’s so nice to drill down and be able to check in on each group, or read work content on the quick!

And then we have the TICKER! I love the ticker, it indulges my short attention span and shares with me more info than I EVER saw on my newsfeed.  I even figured out who some of the people are that have unfriended me because they showed up on my ticker via some of my current Facebook friends interactions!

The ticker is the minutia of Facebook, and your newsfeed is now the important stuff.  And have you noticed how great the photos are in there now!

On your main newsfeed, you’ve got your ticker flowing away, and then the important stuff from all of your Facebook friends, pages, and subscriptions.  Click on that little arrow at the top right of each update and you’ve got a slew of options.

Do the same thing on a list and you can remove them from that list, as seen below.

As for you and your updates, to the left of the post button is the button that delegates to whom your update is shared.  There are tons of options from which to chose and it can change as often as you post.

While all of these changes seem big and scary and hard to navigate, in the end they actually make Facebook that much more personal and give you that much more control over what you’re sharing.

I set up my lists the other day, based mostly on what Facebook had already created for me and it took me about an hour to get it all how I wanted it.  I’m tweaking them as I use them too.  They even have a restricted list that lets you prevent people from seeing anything but the posts you make public.  This is handy for those friend requests you receive that you don’t want to decline because you don’t want to offend the person but whom you really don’t want to share all aspects of your life.  It’s also handy if you are using Facebook for work and personal use.  You can keep the two separate and enjoy both!

I hope this has been helpful for you, and if you have more questions please ask away!  I’m sure I’ve left something out!

I woke up this morning to a brand new Facebook!  Even my iPhone app has updated to reflect some of these changes.

1) Last week Facebook rolled out smart lists. These lists include, acquaintances, close friends, your places of work, and schools, people in proximity to your location, and restricted people.

• You can merge these lists with your current lists, and add or remove people to them at will.  This is vastly improved from old lists which were rather tedious to update and maintain.
• the Restricted lists is like the limited profiles of old.  People on this list will only see what you post PUBLICLY and they are not aware they are on this lists.
• If you click the left of the list names, a pencil icon appears and this will let you add or remove these lists from your favorites and rearrange the order in which they appear on the left side of your page
• Just below my lists are my pages, a feature that was rolled out several weeks ago.

2) Next up is the instant ticker, this shows what people are doing on Facebook in real time, a little snapshot of activity to paruse while you are reading other updates.  I like this because I can now see if a friend comments on something while I’m reading work related content or vice versa.  Excellent news for my short attention span and as yet undiagnosed adult onset ADD

Just noticed this little gem on the newsfeed ticker: when you expand upon the places check-in you get a Bing map, this doesn’t happen in the regular newsfeed.

3) I just noticed this little change, but the upper right hand corner that used to look like this: 

Now looks like this: 

• The settings that were once housed under account now live under the little arrow

In the newsfeed itself, a screen shot that I failed to capture, your news is now divided into top news, and recent news, both showing up concurrently.  This change appears in my iphone app as well, as shown here:

Notice, that in the Earlier today stories, there’s a little blue triangle behind the profile photo, that’s because Facebook has marked them as stories I might find particularly interesting.

In addition to these changes, the body of the newsfeed and the entire blue bar have changed.

The blue bar now travels with you as you scroll down the page, making search easier.

And photos are much bigger in the newsfeed.  Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed this change on friend’s photos only, not business pages.  These pictures are much more attention grabbing which is nice.  Looking at friends photos might be my favorite part of Facebook!

There are lots of other new changes coming tomorrow at Facebook’s Developer Conference, F8.  Word on the street is that Facebook will get heavy music, movie, tv, book, and magazine integration. In addition, the 500 character limit is said to be rising to 5,000!  I am so excited to see the changes coming!

So far I love all the changes. I check my lists compulsively, can see friends photos with more ease, and am always in the know thanks to the smart ticker.

What do you think?

13 Mind-Bending Social Media Marketing Statistics

reprinted from Hubspot

1. 20 percent of searches on Google each day have NEVER been searched for before. (Source)

2. There are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook. (Source)

3. 43 percent of all online consumers are social media fans or followers (Source)

4. 53 percent of people on Twitter recommend companies or their products in their tweets. (Source)

5. The average American internet user watches 30 minutes of video online per day. (Source)

6. 35 hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute. (Source)

7. 56 percent of LinkedIn’s 100 million users are outside of the United States. (Source)

8. Every day, 2,300 new Wikipedia articles are created, adding to its 17 million articles, with contributions from 91,000 active contributors. (Source)

9. 1.4 million new blog posts are created every day. (Source)

10. 200 million Facebook users access the service from a mobile device. (Source)

11. There are more than 5 billion photos on Flickr. (Source)

12. 45 million people view SlideShare presentations each month. (Source)

13. $3.08 billion will be spent to advertise on social networking sites in 2011, a 55 percent increase over 2010. (Source)