Facebook’s unwelcome publicity

Facebook has expanded its ever-seeing eye into both private and professional realms, spurring a love of digital peeping, akin to the popularity of reality TV. Logical next step: create corporate profiles and “socially” network your business, tapping into this open resource of publicity.

You can increase your visibility, nurture relationships with business partners and clients, and build up your brand in a user-friendly and popular environment. But take care. I maintain a small amount of subjective contempt for Facebook due to some unfortunate err… publicity issues. How about that “we dated but are no longer speaking” status? Not so subtle. Not really what you want your prospective clients to be reading about you, either. Ensure that you keep your message board informative and relatively formal. If your company has a blog, paste your posts into the discussion forum.

You wouldn`t create a boring, unclear home page to advertise your blog or your business - so engineer your Facebook site as you would your landing page. Emphasise the good points. Don`t litter your site with useless applications that either send the wrong message or offer false promises. Keep the applications that bring professional connotations, for example, Stumbleupon type links work well. Recently Facebook has morphed into an interactive platform, where users can include simple education tools, keep track of accounts and even buy and sell stuff. As an alternative to other garage sale-type sites, this bridges the gap between social and corporate network (but whether this is a positive change is open to debate). There have been mutterings that Facebook is turning into an online store.

Social networking is popular because it`s about self-determination. Facebook prides itself in having a lot of space for each user to fill. The wider the variety of additives - the more specifically your composition will reflect your personality. Consequently, no business profile can mimic another. I`d recommend that you design a cool profile picture and include visual evidence like photographs of office events. Keep things moving. Soon a portion of your client base will hail from the dubious beast that is Facebook. Just don`t get on his wrong side.