The negative effects of Facebook

So, there you are, on a Saturday morning with your favorite cup of coffee caressing your senses and relaxing your brain, sitting at your desk and browsing on Facebook. You have 34 new notifications since last night that you logged out, 5 group invitations, 1 suggested page, 2 cause invitations and 3 friend requests, one of which is of an unknown person. You are not new in Facebook. You’ve been using it for almost two years now. And what you do this Saturday morning is what you’ve been doing nearly all Saturday mornings since Facebook joined your life. When the weather is nice, you ignore half of the invitations for new apps and you quickly accept the group and the cause invitations so that you go out and enjoy life. Only later, when the weather is bad and you have to stay indoors, you start deleting apps, causes, groups and people. And this goes on and on, relentlessly. Whether you have realized it or not, Facebook is a real part of your life, is a real partner whom you have to see for good morning and kiss for good night. What changes over time is your degree of addiction; as it happens with all love-hate relationships.

So, what’s the deal between you and Facebook? Some days ago, you felt cornered by it, like it was damaging your real relationships, like it was chocking your real life. So you bid your 546 Facebook friends goodbye with one last poke, stating mood unhappy and left the virtual world with a swift click of your mouse. You did it for the sake of your marriage, for the sake of your life in general. The virtual death of your Facebook profile, of a profile you had been creating for so long, systematically and methodically, was peaceful, yet abrupt. But so was its resurrection. Less than two weeks later, you were active and sound again.

You don’t think you are a Facebook addict. Social networking is just a part of your generation that feels more comfortable with text messaging, chatting and online communication. But, hey! Your generation counts nearly forty years already, while Facebook is around the last five. Supposedly, social networking is mostly addressed to younger people. You and your children have probably contacts of similar agein your friends list. The generation gap is bridged when it comes to Facebook. Facebook can be used for personal or for business reasons. However, most of the people use it primarily for personal reasons because Facebook has so many applications, games and tools that anyone can join for free and lead a ‘social’ life perhaps at a cost.

Your account has been hacked into last month. You’ve lost valuable files from your computer and you had to format your disk and upload all your files, programs and applications from scratch. You lost money, time and above all, your nerves. You felt so insecure that the first three, four days, you swore you would never use Facebook again. But, here you are, at your desk, doing the usual stuff.

Some of your students have discovered that you have a Facebook profile and have spread the news at the college. Immediately, your popularity, and mostly your credibility as a professor decreased because students saw you as less professional after viewing your Facebook profile. They considered it is not appropriate for a college professor to have a profile in a social networking website.

The daughter of a colleague has been stalked three months ago. She met someone on Facebook, someone who was a common friend of a friend of hers, they started chatting on msn, at first it was in the morning, then it became at night, until she told him where she lives at and one night, there he is outside her home. He had been watching her for about two months until he attacked her. She was lucky enough not to be raped. When you heard the story, you thought ‘she should never tell him where she lives; this is what I tell to my daughter’.

Your son’s grades have been deteriorating since he joined Facebook. He is spending too much time on it, more than what he used to spend on video games and there is not much you can do because he sees you doing the same on Saturday mornings. While you could be doing more important tasks, you surf and browse on Facebook. You cannot teach your children by example if you do not follow one.

The truth of the matter is that as soon as Facebook came into business, you deliriously engaged into a new way of communicating. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Tasting new things that evolve in the world is a sign of progress. However, with Facebook your behavior has changed dramatically.

Everything that happens in your life, you feel like sharing with your contacts on your status line. You post your thoughts and you expect the comment and when the comment comes, you smile if you like it or you frown if it’s not what you expected. All of a sudden, completely strangers are important to you and their comments leverage your value as a person. And unconsciously you classify people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ without even knowing them. Obviously, as it happens with real friendships, you don’t have the same degree of communication and contact with all online friends, but you cannot really tell who is who since you have never met them. Still, you value them like real.

Every time you go out with your family, friends or colleagues, any time you shoot pictures of a special event of your life, you need to upload them on Facebook so that your contacts see where you’ve been and what you’ve done. And from the 200 pictures you’ve shot, you upload only the 50 that you look really good, beautiful and sexy. Obviously, this is what your contacts do too. So, this is another reason why you cannot tell who is who until you meet a person for real.

Your profile page is full of information about you; who you are, where you work at, what is your favourite music, your favourite movies, books and TV series, what are your religious and political beliefs, your studies and your interests. As a matter of fact, you share too much information with other people, who are totally strangers. Some Facebook users take higher risk than you and put on their home addresses and phone numbers on. This is probably how stalkers find their way home without needing to chat first.

Your defense to all the above is that social networking websites cannot replace your real friendships. You don’t really communicate with people online as you communicate with real people whom you can see, hear and touch. However, if you think back during these two years, there have been times that real people were not available in your times of need, while online people were there and supported you; and you did communicate with them.

So, it’s not everything wrong about Facebook. In many cases, you can catch up with old friends, find valuable information, promote your work and your business, support really important causes and meet people who can be real friends in the process. What is wrong with Facebook is because its relationships are developed at a distance are by default weaker than the real relationships, lacking physical and emotional conduct. This leads to a ritualistic involvement that turns into addiction and belligerently deprives you from your real life by triggering you to log on several times a day.

What to do when your child is addicted to Facebook

In the beginning, when you first saw that big white F on the dark blue background on your child’s laptop you had no clue what this was about. You thought it would probably be another of those school assignments that require spending quite some time on computer and Face-something website was like Google maybe, full of information and a valuable source of knowledge.

It is over a month now that your kid is on Facebook non-stop. Every time you open the room door, the laptop is stuck on this page and your kid is lost in space. You did your research to see what Facebook is about; to understand what the big deal about this big white F on the dark blue background is. You read users’ reviews on the Internet, articles on magazines, and experts’ opinions on newspapers. Finally, you had to join Facebook to see for yourself, to have full control of the situation.

Joining Facebook; making the best out of it; reconnecting with old friends; staying in touch with dear people; using applications; supporting causes; entering forums; joining groups; playing games; chatting; negotiating; sharing knowledge; flirting; getting involved; more and more each day; more and more each minute; realizing the enormous impact of social networking on modern society; realizing your child is addicted to Facebook.

The signs are pretty clear.

-         Obsessive log-ins: Children who are addicted to Facebook check their pages constantly to make sure they do not miss any live activity. Addicted children and Facebook users in general, have the need to update their status at a constant rate, every time something happens to them, every time they experience something in their real life. This is a sign of addiction.

-         Isolation: Facebook addicts are isolated. If your child is constantly in front of a computer screen, interacting with online contacts rather than hanging out with real friends, talking over the phone or going out, then you are probably facing a real addiction problem in the family.

-         Talking about Facebook all the time: If one out of two words are about Facebook, if your child is more excited about the new Facebook application than the school grades, if he/she freaks out if he/she cannot log on due to Internet connection problems, if anything he/she thinks, talks, breathes about is Facebook, then your child is clearly addicted.

There are probably more signs of Facebook addiction as each person is unique and children are too self-centered until they are fully developed to understand the real impact of their cyber addiction. Cyber bullying is mostly encountered at middle school age children and, apparently it continues until children become teenagers.

So, what can you do after you realize that you child is addicted to Facebook?

-         Be involved: Like you did when you joined Facebook to see for yourself what it’s going on, getting involved in your children’s point of reference encourages them to grant you entrance in their magic cyber world. Children are always ahead in technology and most of the times, they feel bored with adults because they think we are ignorant and naïve when it comes to trying new things. So, show them you are ready to conquer the cyber world and become an active part of it. Encourage them to show you what they are doing and be ready to be surprised by their knowledge.

-         Be a parent, not a friend: Most of the times, it’s difficult to keep a balance between sharing with your child and still instituting discipline. As a parent, you should insist on knowing the usernames and passwords of the accounts your child uses, not only on Facebook, but in all social networking websites. As a friend, you should instill trust in your children to convince them that you don’t ask for passwords to spy on them, but to protect them in case they are in any sort of danger.

-         Make clear rules: Set limits in the amount of time that your child is allowed to use the Internet during the day. The rules must be enforced consistently and you should enforce punishment, in case they are broken.

-         Make punishments: Your punishments should not result in severe consequences, but they should rather involve the mind of your child. If your child understands why he/she is punished and you explain your arguments reasonably, then your parent-child relationship is not undermined. In contrast, severe punishments, which most of the times seem unreasonable to a child, may put the quality of a parent-child relationship at stake.

For better or worse, today our children grow up in cyber playgrounds. There is not too much we can do to change this reality, except from trying to make sure that as they grow up, they learn to do more than moving a mouse around a keyboard and chatting with cyber friends.

Tips on using Facebook to publicize your business

Although it has been around only for five years, Facebook has managed to divide the masses as to whether it is a valuable tool of gaining personal or business exposure or simply a waste of time.

Since 2004 that it was initially launched, Facebook has been criticized for many things, but mostly for being a source of destruction that can turn Facebook users into real social networking addicts. Stalking people, hacking into accounts, getting too much involved with unknown people and being deprived from real life are some of the broadly recognized negative effects of Facebook. On the other hand though, Facebook offers quite a variety of opportunities including catching up with old friends, meeting new people, supporting important causes, finding valuable information and promoting own work and business.

As a matter of fact, Facebook is a great tool for marketing your business and driving more inbound traffic and leads. Considering that at the time this is written, Facebook is a huge online community with over 200 million active users out of whom 100 million log on at least once each day, it comes as no surprise that Facebook can meet your business goals.

If you are a business owner looking to promote your products and services, if you want to connect and engage with current and prospect customers, if you want to create a community around your business or if you simply want to promote other types of content such as webinars, blogs and so on, Facebook is the place for you. For many users before you, Facebook has been a true gold mine if you are really interested in advertising your business and creating brand awareness.

Although Facebook has been mainly designed as a personal social network, it has evolved into a B2B (business-to-business) networking and marketing platform that can support the marketing and promotional efforts of contemporary businesses and entrepreneurs. With the same philosophy that own networks of Facebook users grow contact by contact, the B2B community grows, offering the opportunity of personal branding and advertising targeted to business sectors.

Whether operating on B2B or B2C (business-to-consumer), Facebook tends to be simpler, transactional, and product-oriented. To take advantage of Facebook’s enormous potential and be able to publicize and promote your business, you need to take some major steps.

The first step to take is to create an engaging business Page. Remember: Profiles are for people; Pages are for businesses. The main advantage of Pages over Profiles is that Pages are, by default, public and they will start ranking in public search results offering your business immediate exposure. Besides, Pages can be classified into distinct categories enabling your business to be listed in relevant search results. Also, Pages allow you to designate multiple administrators so that you have multiple people to manage your account. Even if one person leaves the company, you can still have control over the Page. After you have created your page, you can use as many applications as possible so that you give users a reason to become fans of your Page.

A good alternative to a Facebook Page is creating or joining a Facebook Group. Groups allow you to discuss topics of your interest and to exchange opinions with other users that share similar views. In effect, Facebook Groups function like mini forums, where all people can be invited to join. However, Groups are not indexed, and they do not appear in public searches, so users cannot join if they do not know they exist. Automatically, this narrows down your chances to be tracked down and found by prospect customers. Besides, Facebook Groups support only basic applications such as Events, Discussions, Wall, Links, Photos and Videos, whereas Facebook Pages support almost all applications.

The added value of creating an engaging Page is that any sort of activity in the page is posted in the fans’ news fees, which is visible by all of their Facebook contacts. This gives super exposure to your Page considering that every time a Facebook user logs into their account, they see their contacts’ recent activity, so your Page’s activity is visible by a great part of Facebook’s network, especially if you have many contacts.

As soon as you create your page, it will be publicly searchable, by default. Do not change this feature because this allows your Page to be indexed by search engines. This will drive more inbound traffic and leads to your Page.

Finally, using Facebook ads is a great way to give your Page an extra boost. Facebook ads allow you to advertise a website or content by using a broad range of management tools that are easy to implement on an interface that is similar to the Google Adwords interface. Cost per click (CPC) and Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) advertising can increase your business exposure enormously. Make sure to add social actions as well because they demonstrate related connections to the viewer of your ad. For instance, if you are viewing an ad for company X and your friend John is a fan of company X on Facebook, that ad could show on John’s photo saying he is a fan of company X. By being related to John, you can improve the click through rate of your ad.

The truth of the matter is that, if you are not strategically marketing your business on Facebook, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Your friends and their friends and the friends of their friends are the core of your business and Facebook tools and applications are the means that can market your efforts to the top. All you need to do is start working on Facebook promotions before someone else takes you over.

Tips for getting rid of friends on Facebook without making them mad

Life can be very weird some times; especially virtual life.

The last time you removed someone from your Facebook contacts, you got mad emails in your inbox. The person valued your friendship so much and you never got the message.

It was someone you became friends with some time ago. You didn’t know that person. It was a friend of a friend of yours whom you trust a lot and you thought it would be OK to add in your contacts. She looked like a nice, neat person, with a cute profile picture, a descent bio and proper comments from her friends. So you clicked on the ‘confirm friend request’ button with a huge smile on your face because you were instantly increasing your cluster of friends. What you didn’t know then though, was that, several months later, you would be eager to get rid of this person.

Facebook friendships can be a really complicated issue, regardless if you consider removing someone you don’t even know or a real friend. It is a matter of how much you value a friend; literally. Some time ago, you got pissed off on the ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ campaign that offered you a free Angry Whopper for every ten friends you deleted on Facebook. The campaign literally valued each friend at $0.37. In the beginning, you thought it was unfair to sacrifice your friends over a Whopper. But, then you found it as a good excuse to get rid of people you didn’t really have any contact with and who were pretty much meaningless to you. Let alone, you would save money on a Whopper. So, in effect, the cost – benefit relationship of your Facebook friends was valued at the price of a Burger King Whopper.

Removing someone you don’t even know from your contact list shouldn’t be much of a problem. You don’t know the person; you have never met; so you cannot really tell who this person is. You know all that is reflected on a profile page of a social networking website, on a profile picture you know it is carefully chosen and maybe re-touched, and on personal information that is thoroughly disclosed to attract. Trying to be attractive is not necessarily a bad thing. All of us need to be liked and if we have qualities that make us attractive, we use them in the most prominent way. But, if in the process, some people annoy you, harass you, and give you hard time, a simple click on ‘remove friend’ button will do the job. Chances are they won’t even notice they have been removed because they do that with almost all their contacts. It’s a way of living. But, if you are afraid they will get mad, then, you can just alter your privacy settings so that they cannot find you on Facebook anymore. Go to Settings, Privacy Settings, and put the person’s name in the Block List. Alternatively, go to Settings, Privacy Settings, Search and in Search Visibility choose Friends of Friends. Instead of thinking you deleted them they will think you left Facebook.

Things are quite more complicated when it comes to removing someone you are personally involved with. Although a real friendship is far more valued in real life than on Facebook interface, still people get offended if you remove them from your Facebook account. Even if you meet someone for a coffee once a week, still it is almost required that you have this person in your Facebook friends. The impact of social networking on our brain and how Facebook affects our behavior is often unexplainable, especially when it comes to value people and friendships.

Before deleting friends, you can send warnings. Facebook has a bunch of built-in applications that work for better or worse. If you love someone you can send flowers, teddy bears, hearts, drinks, whatever comes in mind. If you hate someone, you can send from devil’s eyes to e-cards asking your keys back or showing the sign of a dead-end relationship. Facebook can pass the message in many ways, and there is no doubt that you have used Facebook apps for teasing people or expressing your warm feelings and concern before. So, even if some friends are really tiring you up with constant status updates and stupid applications, you don’t necessarily have to delete them. You can hide their status updates; you can send them an email asking them to stop including you in these apps; you can even argue with them because you are close enough with them to do so. Ultimately, you can click on the ‘remove friend’ button. But, from that point onwards, you won’t care that much anymore because the feel of your relationship would have probably changed.

Like it happens in real life, choosing who you will be friends with entails a risk. There have been cases of real friendships that ended up in real mess and cases of cyber friendships that turned into life-time relationships. We cannot really know who we shoot for, but we should know by whom we’ve been shot. Sometimes, an innocent cyber friend request from an unknown person can be the beginning of a real nightmare.

How to use Facebook as a dating tool

Facebook is a huge online community with more than 200 million active users out of whom 100 million log on at least once each day. No surprise then, why Facebook can be a great meeting point for potential dating.

The truth of the matter is that, Facebook is phenomenal in bringing people closer. When it was first launched, maybe it wasn’t meant to incorporate so many dating applications, but in the process, there hasn’t been so much difference between browsing for finding new friends and meeting new people. Facebook, maybe more than other social networking websites, has introduced new ways of chatting with people online, joining groups of singles, and meeting hot, sexy individuals, ready to devote some of their valuable time to online dating or even to real dating. There are cases that people who meet online take their chances and meet in real as well. Some even engage into long distance relationships making the power of online communication and its impact on modern society really unimaginable.

What puts Facebook ahead of the game is that, unlike any typical online dating website, it allows you to maintain your anonymity. When you join any of the groups or built-in applications for dating, you don’t have to disclose your personal information, upload your picture or share your email. This allows you to keep your privacy settings really private from your contacts and date without the fear of being recognized by your friends. Besides, you have the option to check your compatibility with another user by looking at your mutual interests, while you don’t have to add this person as a friend. Also, you can instantly see if a person you are interested in is in a relationship, single, straight or bisexual, gay or lesbian, married and so on, so that you decide on your chances.

Joining a Facebook network is a good way to meet new people. Whether it is based on location, school attended, employment or social group, if you join a network you get full access to any user’s profile that is on the same network. This allows you to search on the personal bio, see the photos uploaded, read the comments of friends, see the apps installed and get the full feel of what type of person is the Facebook user you are interested in.

Zoosk is probably the most commonly used online dating application on Facebook with more than 20 million members using it. The Zooskers can meet new people from their area, but also from other social networks including MySpace, Hi5, Bebo and others.

Other popular Facebook apps for dating are Are YOU Interested?, Most Eligible Single, Meet New People and VerbDate. Especially VerbDate is integrated with Skype, Flickr and Google Maps, which gives you greater exposure, and probably greater chances to find your significant other.

Bottom line is, if you are using Facebook for quite some time and still you haven’t had a date, even a virtual one, you probably haven’t discovered the viral power of Facebook as a dating tool. Facebook can bring sexy back and can offer you anything from normal to extravagant provided you do your search and you define your criteria. Anything else is a matter of time and of profile picture, so make sure you choose a really attractive one. Who can resist to an intriguing and promising  profile picture?

The best Twitter applications

Barack Obama, Lance Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey, BBC, Hilary Clinton, John Edwards, Serena Williams, Ron Paul, Kelly Rowland, Demi Moore, ABC News, People Magazine, you, me, and millions of other people, all are Twittering. If you google ‘Twitter’ you will get back 644 million search results. Since 2006, Twitter has turned into a fad that has massively influenced the way people communicate using social networking websites. No surprise then why, every now and then, new applications need to be built to meet the needs and expectations of the increasingly growing number of Twitter users. Twitter applications can be referred to as ‘twitter tools’ or ‘twitter add-ons’, but they are actually websites with built-in scripts integrated in Twitter. If you google ‘Twitter Applications’ you will get a load of information regarding different Twitter apps. However, in order to be able to keep your Twitter account organized and really useful, you can use some of the following apps. One of the coolest Twitter apps is TWEETDECK. TweetDeck allows you to segment your followers into distinct groups and manage your conversations with family members, friends, colleagues, random people you share similar interests with and so on. It has a pretty simple interface that is easy to use. TweetDeck allows you to follow topics in real-time, tweet and re-tweet messages, share photos and web links and manage multiple Twitter accounts. Even better, TweetDeck developers do an excellent job by keeping the application updated on a fairly regular basis, while offering multiple URL shorteners. TWITTBOT is a web-based application that allows you to publish on multiple Twitter accounts, while multiple users can post on your Twitter account. The great advantage of Twittbot is that as a single Twitter user you can follow as many people as you like, but you can control who posts on your bot. Basically, Twittbot collects tweets from a variety of sources and aggregates them in a straightforward interface. DIGSBY is a desktop application that integrates e-mail, instant messaging and social networking accounts in one program. Its multi-protocol instant messaging allows you to chat with your MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM and Jabber contacts. Besides, Digsby provides email notifications with alerts about new emails and spam messages, but also about events and newsfeed that notify you what your contacts are doing. If you love to share your pictures from your phone, a really cool and easy to use application is TWITPIC. You can use Twitpic separately from Twitter, although some of its characteristics are directly related to it. For instance, you can use your Twitter username and password for Twitpic and you can comment on your pictures like you are sending a tweet reply. One of the greatest advantages of Twitpic is that its URL services are already short, so you don’t have to use URL shortening. Twitpic is also broadly used from journalists who upload and distribute their picture in real-time so that they immediately notify people about the latest news. If you are a professional who is looking for a tool of customer service or brand management, HOOTSUITE is the perfect solution. HOOTSUITE allows you to manage multiple accounts and to give access to other Twitter users, whenever you see it appropriate. Besides, it has a straightforward, neat platform that allows you to tweet and re-tweet your messages and it offers visibility of your link stats when your use the URL shorteners. Without any doubt, Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with your friends or to promote your business, but also to obtain streamlined information about any new idea. By following the right people you keep yourself updated with the latest topics and you manage your account in the most efficient way. However, at the end of day, the applications you choose from the plethora of Twitter apps reflect your personal preferences. Whether it comes to personal reasons or to gain business exposure, Twitter apps are built with the latest technology and can offer you a great Tweeting experience.