“Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world. it’s about sharing where you are with your friends.”

Michael Sharron, Facebook

Facebook today launched a new dimension to their already mammoth presence on the web. This will have huge implications for your privacy on Facebook, but also presents new opportunities for your organization or business.

First: DON’T PANIC. I’ll walk you through this!

It’s called “Places” and they call it a “product.” It will automatically be available to you as a Facebook user (no charge, of course), just like Groups, Pages, Apps, Games, etc. currently are.

If you’re familiar with mobile apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, then you already “get” what Places is about. If you’ve never heard of these apps, don’t worry.

Places, says Facebook, has three purposes:

• Get a notification when you are someplace and a friend of yours is nearby
• Discover new places wherever you are (restaurants, stores, businesses, etc.)
• Connect with your online friends in a face-to-face way in “serendipitous moments”

So in a nutshell, you’re eating dinner at a restaurant. You’ll be able to “check in” there, via your phone, on Facebook. Your friends might be eating at the same restaurant, or across the street. They see your checkin (or you see theirs), and realize you’re nearby. You can get together and maybe share a meal or a drink afterwards. This is the “serendipitous moment” Facebook refers to.

You can see how this might incite panic in people who are already concerned about privacy on Facebook! This enables real-time stalking! Everyone will know when you’re away from home and can break into your house! PANIC!

Of course, Facebook anticipated this, and made sure to give you very flexible privacy settings to control who sees your checkins, IF you even choose to participate in Places, which you certainly do not have to.

Your default setting for Places is to be opted out. So you won’t have to check anything or change your settings to make sure you’re not included.

So, don’t worry. Nobody knows where you are right now. (well, they probably do, actually…but that’s a different article). The truth is, if you’re on Facebook at all, a lot of your information is available if someone knows how to find it. The bottom line for privacy online is to not put information out there unless you feel okay about strangers seeing it.

Anyway, let’s look at a few of the features of Places and see how it can be a GOOD thing for your organization!

Most Places will be created by users. So if you’re using Places on your iPhone, you’d want to create a Place for your shelter or adoption center. At first, any Place you create will only be visible to you and your friends. If enough people check in at this same Place over time, though, it will become public and then anyone can see it and check in.

This is good news, because it means that if someone creates a Place at, say, my apartment, chances are it won’t become public because not a lot of people check in there. And if it does, for some reason (like if I have a lot of parties), then I can flag it to be removed. So obviously, if you’re concerned about privacy or safety, don’t check in at your home address or any other private location.

This will only immediately be available for iPhone users in mobile form. They are going to release it for Android and Blackberry, but haven’t given a timetable for that.

However, this doesn’t keep you from participating if you don’t have an iPhone.

Let’s say I’m out to dinner with five friends and I’m the only one who has an iPhone. I can take a picture of my friends and check in at the restaurant, and then I can “tag” those five friends in my check in. All my Facebook friends will see on my wall that I checked in at such and such restaurant. Now, once I’ve tagged those friends, the ball is in their court. When they log in to Facebook next (maybe when they get home, or from their phone), they will get a notification–just like you do now when someone tags you in a photo. They get to choose whether to accept that tag. They can remove it or they can accept it. If they accept it, then it appears on their wall that they checked in at such and such restaurant.

This is going to work in very much the same way as tagging photos. Except instead of tagging you in a photo, friends can tag you at a location.

So if you’re my friend, and you are there with me at that restaurant, and you decide that you’d rather not have all your Facebook friends know you were there, you don’t have to allow the checkin. It’s that simple.

If you know already that you don’t want to accept ANY checkins, then you can categorically reject the Places product from your privacy settings page. OR you can say that you only want to allow checkin information to be shared with select users (and you can choose exactly who those individuals are). Or you can get notifications individually, as they happen, and choose on a case-by-case basis.

So I have 250 or so Facebook friends. Obviously I am not close friends with ALL of those people, nor do I need them to see where I am throughout the day (and they probably don’t care, either!). So I might have only ten friends who I want to allow to see my Places checkins. I can specify those ten people in my privacy settings.

So Places are really for you as an individual–to interact with your Profile on Facebook. What about your business or organization page?

From the mobile app (currently just on iPhone), there will be a little button when you check in at a place that says “Is this your business?” you can then click on that button and link it to your Facebook fan page, if you’re an admininstrator on that page.

It should be noted that Gowalla, Yelp, Booyah and Foursquare ALL are onboard as launch partners with Facebook on this project. So rather than choosing to fight the 800-lb gorilla that is Facebook, they are joining hands. Look for those apps to change over the next few weeks as they integrate with Places.

So what should you DO now?!

Facebook is rolling out the Places feature to users in stages. Not everyone will have it at once. Probably over the next few days, everyone will have it.

Nothing will change right at first, unless your friends are the type who jump onboard and are early adopters. But once Places is available to you (Facebook will notify you when you login), you can go and change your privacy settings if you wish.

I would recommend you not do this just yet, though. At least create a Place for your organization first and tie it to your fan page. Places provides a great opportunity for nonprofits and small businesses to get more local exposure. For these types of places, I’d say this is the best thing since Google Local!

What questions can we answer for you about Facebook Places? We offer social media consulting and can come to your location and explain all this to you in person. Let us know if you need help! We have reasonable rates and we cut them in half for nonprofit organizations.

Here’s the most important distinction that you need to understand. Facebook profiles are for people. Individuals, using the site personally, like you or me (or some people set up profiles for their pets!). If you do business as a person or individual, for example, if you’re a realtor, then it would be appropriate for you to use your Facebook profile for business. But generally, Facebook profiles are for personal use. Facebook profiles ALWAYS have to represent a real person.

Facebook Pages (they refer to them as “fan pages” too) are for organizations, companies and businesses. Facebook’s official definition is:

Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner. Like profiles, they can be enhanced with applications that help the entity communicate with and engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fans’ recommendations to their friends.

So any organization–a football team, animal shelter, restaurant, dry cleaner’s, etc.–should always have a Facebook PAGE. (You can create a Facebook page here)

But you’ve all seen profiles that represent businesses and organizations! Well, these are in violation of Facebook’s policies. If Facebook identifies these profiles, they can and will remove them from the site.

Facebook makes it a little more difficult to set up a profile if you’re a business or company, because it requires you to have something that it recognizes as a “name,” and it requires you to select a gender.  For example, if my business is called “Emily’s Oklahoma City Lakeside Cafe” it would not recognize this as a “name” and it would not let me create a profile. So I’d have to modify my name a bit…for example, here’s one of my favorite restaurants on Facebook. It refers to the restaurant as “she” because the person setting up the site chose “female” as a gender, and had to have something that Facebook recognized as a “name,” meaning a first and last name, so she had to condense it to “MamaRoja Mexicankitchen.” So if I were still trying to set up a profile for my restaurant, I’d have to be “EmilysOklahomaCity LakesideCafe” or something clumsy like that.

These should be flags or deterrents to setting up a profile instead of a page, but people still do it.

Don’t do it. Play by the rules. It’s not worth getting your profile deleted!

The main differences between pages and profiles:

• On a profile, someone is your “friend.” On a page, someone is your “fan.”
• With a profile, you can send messages to one or more friends, that go directly to their inbox on Facebook. As a page, you can’t do this–you can only send updates (which not as many people see).
• Pages and Profiles can both post status updates, links, photos, etc. that appear in their fans’/friends’ news feeds.
• Pages cannot “add” people as friends. However, your fans can suggest your page to their own friends to become a fan.

So, where do Groups fit into all this? Groups allow for more interaction between members, sort of like a forum or message board (BBS) system. Here’s what Facebook has to say about Groups:

Groups and Pages serve different purposes on Facebook. Groups are meant to foster group discussion around a particular topic area while Pages allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans. Only the authorized representative of the entity can run a Page.

So one of your employees might set up a “group” for your organization, and that would be fine. But only an official representative of an organization can set up the official Page for that organization (or at least someone who is willing to say that they are an official rep!).

So for example, for our client the Central Oklahoma Humane Society, we have set up a Page that is their official presence on Facebook. We post events, updates and other news. But we also have groups for specific volunteers within the organization, like Trap/Neuter/Return volunteers, clinic volunteers, foster parents, etc. That way those people can talk about subjects that are specific to their areas of interest.

Ready to create a page? Click here to get started.

So what the heck is a Community Page?

This is something Facebook has just rolled out. If you’ve spent much time on Facebook, you have seen lots of “unofficial” pages. These can be for celebrities, like unofficial fan pages for the Twilight movies, or for beers or sodas or sneakers or whatever. There are also funny groups like Tim Tebow Crying (sorry, Florida fans..this is just one of my favorites) or “Can this dung beetle get more fans than Glenn Beck?“(also a favorite).

These pages are becoming really popular, some having hundreds of thousands of fans. So now you have the option to choose to be a “community page” if you are creating a new page on Facebook. Now, if you’re making a page for your organization or business or brand, there is no reason to select a community page. Your page still definitely qualifies as a regular Facebook page.

What is kind of cool about the Community Page idea, though, is that Facebook says “If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.” What that means is that it will become basically the same thing as a Wiki. A Wiki is a web site or page that allows anyone to contribute content, much like Wikipedia. So if you create a community page that goes extremely viral, then it could evolve into something completely new on Facebook!

Again, for your purposes with your company or organization, you don’t really need to worry about Community Pages. Hopefully this has helped you understand the differences among the different ways you can represent yourself on Facebook. What other questions do you have about Facebook that we can answer? We can help you craft a social media strategy that will bring you business!

1. Chris Brogan’s Social Media Starter Pack - Chris Brogan is an authority on social media, a great writer and just a genuine nice guy that you’d really like to hang out with. He has great advice. Some of it is more designed for people trying to sell products, but really everything is, in one way or another, “selling”. I recommend subscribing to his newsletter as well.
2. From DoshDosh: Social Media Marketing Campaigns: How to Set Goals and Define Your Target Market – Before you can do anything with social media, you need to think about it and develop a plan. Trust me: it’s SO much easier to do if you have a plan and have established goals. This will help you do that.
3. 35 Tips for Getting Started in Social Media – This has some great strategy tips for things to do to lay really solid groundwork for your social media campaign.
4. How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic – This is great information and how-to (with screen shots) on how to find what other people are doing in social media in your field. It is very useful to see what other people are blogging, Tweeting, etc. so that you can learn what they’re doing. It’s kind of long and the steps are intensive, but the payoff is great; the information you gain will help you infinitely as you go forward.
5. Problogger’s Blogging Tips for Beginners – Problogger is a wonderful site with a wealth of resources for bloggers of all experience levels. Here’s their guide for beginners.
6. 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners – A great, simple, easy to understand overview of Twitter and how to use it.
7. IIG’s Social Media Beginner’s Guide – An easy to understand primer on social media: what it is, how to get started, how to use it. Really good primer.
8. Beth Kanter’s guide to non-profits that tweet – Beth Kanter is the US authority on blogging and social media for nonprofits. I would suggest you follow her on Twitter and subscribe to her blog. (she’s got lots of great tips for for-profit companies as well)
9. Superlist of what NOT to do in social media – This is a very informative list, with some videos, about major mistakes and what not to do. It’s always interesting to chuckle and say, “Oh, I’d NEVER do that!” (or at least, you THINK you wouldn’t…)
10. Here are a few books as well, if you’re interested in reading more in depth: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. This is a fascinating study in why social networks are so powerful. Well written and easy to read.  This study is based on comprehensive research.  Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business. This book covers extensive case studies and is very useful in understanding the big picture of social marketing.   Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion. Robert Cialdini is the master of understanding how to market to people. His book is illuminating on a personal and professional level. These are just a few books out there; much is being written and published every day on this topic. If you’re interested in reading more about the the theory and practice of social media, these are my favorites.

Do you have other web sites that you’ve found helpful? If so, please post comments here so we can all check them out!