The recent Beta launch of Facebook’s new Graph Search has renewed the ongoing discussion of internet privacy. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Facebook’s Graph Search will allow anyone to search Facebook for topics as specific as “Pictures of friends I went to high school with” or “Women in Minneapolis who like soccer”.

While this feature is new to the individual Facebook user, personal information such as your location, age, profession, interests, relationship status and sexual orientation have long been available to private companies who want to target you with Facebook advertisements. This information is gathered through your Facebook likes, Google searches, status updates and more.

Allowing companies access to so much personal information might seem a little creepy, but in the future it could benefit consumers by making the products we use better, cheaper, and more sustainable.

Allowing companies access to so much personal information might seem a little creepy, but in the future it could benefit consumers by making the products we use better, cheaper, and more sustainable. In the old days, marketers relied on so called “target marketing” to get products in the hands of consumers, which relied mostly on generalizations, assumptions and stereotypes. This poor understanding of a market’s needs often leads to over/underproduction.

The more information a company has about you, such as who you are, how to get a hold of you, and what you like and need, the easier it is for them to tailor fit their products to exactly what you want. This could eventually lead to almost all manufactured goods being custom made to order and ultimately eliminating over/underproduction for good. Eliminating overproduction saves companies money on things like materials, energy, storage space and shipping costs, allowing them to pass the savings down to customers. Less waste also means a cleaner environment. Eliminating underproduction means the products you need are available when you need them.

This 3D printed necklace, made of glassfiber-filled dyed nylon, has rotating linkages that were produced in the same manufacturing step as the other parts.

Imagine having affordable clothes made specifically for your body, or shoes made just for your feet. With 3D printing technology, this may soon be possible. With 3D printing, manufactures can make any three-dimensional shape from a 3D model using an additive process, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes. Printed objects can be made from nearly any substance, including plastic, glass, human tissue, metal, sand and wood. They can build products faster and cheaper with less waste. 3D printers are already producing shoes, furniture, houses and soon even human organs!

So next time you see an ad on Facebook for a hot pink SPIbelt after doing a Google search for ‘hot pink SPIbelt’, remember that clueing-in companies on your needs and wants might actually make future products cheaper, higher quality, easier to obtain, more sustainable, and made just for you!

Of all the topics covered at last month’s Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference in Duluth, MN, aimClear CEO Marty Weintraub’s emphasis on the importance of Facebook advertising stuck out in my mind the most. In several sessions that day, Weintraub noted that over the last year, Facebook has made it nearly impossible for businesses to spread content to an audience beyond the page’s current fan base without the use of paid Facebook advertising.

“It used to be that when your fans engaged with your page, their friends would see it. Now you are building a closed loop subscription list. Unless you pay money, friends of your fans won’t see your posts.” said Weintraub during the conference’s ‘Facebook Marketing! What Is Facebook Good For Anyway?’ session. “Pay for sponsored stories of fans engaging with your content or you’re wasting your time.” he added, mentioning that earlier this year Facebook announced that the average post from a brand page only reaches 16% of fans.

Marty Weintraub speaking in the aimClear office during the Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference in Duluth, MN on May 23, 2012. Weintraub is the author of "Killer Facebook Ads".

I have long understood the need for Facebook advertising in a successful Facebook marketing strategy. I have always included it as an integral part of my client’s campaigns, but I wondered what Facebook’s recent decreases in free, organic audience reach meant for small businesses who do not advertising on Facebook.

Is updating a Facebook business page a waste of time if you’re not promoting it with Facebook advertising?

I decided to test this theory by pausing my client’s Facebook advertising campaigns for two weeks, while still updating their page statuses about ever other day.

According to Facebook Insights, over the two week span my clients were able to reach a unique weekly audience of approximately two to four times the size of their current fanbase without using Facebook advertising. With Facebook advertising, my clients typically reach 10 to 100 times their fanbase each week.

So while Facebook says only 16% of your fanbase will see each individual post, posting a few times each week will still reach an audience far beyond your current fans. Posting two to three times throughout the day can help increase your audience even size even more. Facebook pages cannot yet be considered a true “closed loop subscription list”.

However, investing in Facebook advertising does greatly increase the amount of people you are able to reach and thankfully as Weintraub put it, “On the local level, it is cheap.”

At least for now, anyway.

The Verdict from CloudBerry Social Media: Managing your Facebook page is still of great value and importance regardless of whether you advertise on Facebook, but investing – even minimally – in Facebook advertising can drastically increase your chances of Facebook marketing success.

Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference - Keynote Panel Address

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a world class social media marketing conference right here in Duluth, Minnesota. The Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference was held on May 23rd at the Holiday Inn in downtown Duluth. The conference was sponsored by the Duluth Chamber of Commerce, AimClear, Swim Creative and a number of other local sponsors.

The social media marketing conference featured several big name speakers, including Rand Fishkin, CEO of search engine optimization software company SEOmoz, Lisa Grimm, Digital Brand Manager for the Mall of America, and Brian Kenny, Senior Digital and Technology Executive at the Luther Automotive group.

Many topics were covered at the conference, with several tracks for each experience level.  I attended tracks regarding content marketing, social media and PR,  and measuring social media success, among others. I felt most of the content covered at the conference was better suited for an individual business owner or in-house social media manager. However, there were certainly some things I have never heard before, such as a very sneaky way to grab the attention of the press using social media advertising techniques and some interesting insights about the future of semantic search. I will write more on some of the specific things I learned at the Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference in upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

“How do I turn my Facebook profile into a Facebook Timeline fan page?” is one of the most common questions I receive from business owners. Before Facebook had pages specifically designed for brands, many businesses created a personal profile for their company, which is now a violation of Facebook’s Terms and will result in the profile being disable. Scary, right?! 

Luckily, there is now a way to migrate the old company profile into a company page. Keep in mind that the only things you will be able to migrate from the old profile to the new page are the profile pictures and friends, which will now become likes. It is a bit of a bummer that you will lose all the history on your profile, however this is still much better than the alternative of losing the entire profile completely. I highly advise that you download your Facebook information before migrating the profile to a page, so you maintain an archive of things like comments, messages and photos.

So how do you turn a Facebook profile into a Facebook page? Simply follow these steps:

1. Log into the company profile.

2. Go to this link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate

3. Follow the Facebook prompts.

I’m excited to announce CloudBerry Social Media was recently featured in Duluth Superior Magazine’s March 2012  ’9 to 5 Profile’ full page feature story, titled “Social Media and Your Business.” I was interviewed back in January and have been waiting to see how to article turned out. I have to say, I am quite pleased. Reporter Tony Bennett did an excellent job of getting across the points I made regarding what social media is, why local Duluth-Superior businesses should be using it, what CloudBerry Social Media does and how CloudBerry can help businesses in the Twin Ports and around Northern Minnesota. The article is on news stands right now and I encourage everyone to check it out. Also, I would like to thank reporter Tony Bennett, editor Marti Buscaglia and everyone over at Duluth Superior Magazine for including CloudBerry Social Media in the March issue. -Liz

UPDATE: The article is now online on the Duluth Superior Magazine website. Read it here: Social Media and Your Business.

Read the full page article "Social Media and Your Business" on page 57 of Duluth Superior Magazine's March 2012 Issue.

Construction is under way at the new office of CloudBerry Social Media! It might not look like much from this photo – in fact from this pic it looks downright terrible- but our wonderful contractor John has been busy tearing up the walls, plastering, patching, painting and will soon be putting in a new floor. He’s had to do some heavy repair work on our Glensheen Mansion-era building but it will all be worth it when it’s done.

This was the worst of the little 'surprises' we discovered while tearing this office apart. The crumbling brick will be patched and soon covered with paneling.

Happy New Year everyone! Twenty-Eleven has been an amazing year for CloudBerry Social Media. I want to thank everyone who has supported me along my journey into uncharted territories.

It’s been a busy year and we have worked on some great projects. Since I launched CloudBerry Social Media six months ago, we have taken on our first clients and here are some of the things we have accomplished for them so far:

• Grown their Facebook fan followings
• Designed graphics and wrote copy for successful Facebook ad campaigns
• Created new and interesting Facebook content
• Ran successful Facebook contests with our own custom designed Facebook apps
• Launched a TV Ad campaign to promote our Facebook contests
• Designed new dynamic websites with social media integration
• Wrote blogs for company websites
• Designed print posters to promote Facebook pages
• Launched YouTube channels
• Designed a new logo
• Launched Google+ Brand Pages

It’s been a great year and we look forward to more exciting social media projects in 2012. Thanks for your support.

-Liz

WordPress.org, the platform in which I build CloudBerrySocial.com on, has just released the new version 3.3. WordPress 3.3 is a more user friendly version of WordPress with new drag-and-drop features for adding media, along with a few other neat updates. If your not familiar with WordPress, it was originally developed as  a blogging platform but is now used to create millions of business websites.

Here are the main reasons I like to use WordPress to build client pages:

1. Great Search Engine Optimization
WordPress sites can be easily found in Google or other searches because if it’s high-tech SEO tools.

2. Highly Customizable
Wordpress can be used to create nearly any time of website imaginable, from a simple blog to a high-tech e-commerce site.

3. Awesome Social Media Integration
Since it was originally created as a blog platform and therefore social by nature, WordPress allows for thousands of different ways to integrate social media into your website. You can have everything from Google +1 buttons to the ability to let people log into your site using Facebook.

4. User Friendly
WordPress isn’t exactly as easy to use as say, Facebook, for a first time user. Once the site is built however, it is relatively simple for my clients to learn how to update their own blog or to add a simple webpage with photos or videos. WordPress 3.3 is making this even easier.

Check out the new features of WordPress 3.3 for yourself in this video:

It’s that time again! No, not Bentleyville. The Social Media Breakfast Twin Ports is meeting again this month and this time we learn strategies and techniques for how to become a Facebook ads ninja! Manny Rivas of AimClear, will be speaking to us about Facebook advertising this Friday,  December 9 from 7:30am-9am at the Canal Park Lodge.

If you are not familiar with AimClear, they are a local Duluth, MN company that is internationally known for their experience and ideas regarding Facebook advertising. AimClear CEO Marty Weintraub’s recent book titled ‘Killer Facebook Ads: Master Cutting-Edge Facebook Advertising Techniques’ is currently the number one book about Facebook ads on Amazon, and holds a five star rating. I haven’t yet read the book, but I’m buying it on Amazon tonight along with a few Christmas presents and plan to read it soon. In a later post I’ll let you know what I think of it along with a few sections that I think are especially worth checking it out. Stay tuned.

See you all this Friday at 7:30am at the Canal Park Lodge!