It seems fitting to close out Christmas with this video. You’ve probably seen it a hundred times. One thing you may have never noticed is that Linus drops his security blanket at a specific point during the monologue. It’s one of the few times you’ll ever see him without the blanket in his hand. I think it’s a good reminder for all of us to consider where we should find our security, comfort, and peace.

I’ve always thought ice fishing would be fun to do. If, however, it involves the method these guys show, I’m definitely going to pass.

Facebook fan pages are increasingly being used by businesses, but just because a business or other organization has a Facebook fan page doesn’t mean it’s being used well. In fact, I think I see more that are missing it than those getting it right.

So how do you know if your fan page is being used well? It’s pretty easy actually: is anyone talking to you? If your “fans” are talking to you, you have a great fan page like the ladies over at E-Mealz. They’re doing a great job with their fan page. If nobody is talking to you, then your fan page isn’t living up to all the Facebook hype, is it?

How To Spot A Good One (And A Bad One)
Facebook makes it easy to spot a good fan page over one that’s not so good. All you have to do is look at the images. If all you see is the company’s own logo down their fan page wall, they’re probably not doing a good job with their page. What that means is that nobody is voluntarily talking to the company.

Facebook is a conversation tool, but so many people miss this. If you’re not talking with people, and they’re not talking to you, you have a problem…and Facebook isn’t your problem, it’s your use of Facebook.

The 3 Levels of Facebook Engagement
There are three levels of engagement on Facebook with your fans. One is the best. One is very good. One stinks. They are:

1. Proactive Engagement: This is the best form of engagement. The E-Mealz fan page shows a vibrant, active group of customers talking to the company. They’re asking questions, making suggestions, getting problems resolved, and telling them how much they love the service. It’s proactive engagement and very few organizations seem to be achieving this level right now.
2. Reactive Engagement: This isn’t bad a bad form of engagement at all, it’s just not the best. Consider it an A-. If you only get reactive engagement, that means people are responding to your updates in the comments or are giving you lots of “likes” on your updates. The good news people are paying attention, and that’s really what you’re going for. Sure, they’re reacting to whatever you say or do, but at least they’re engaging you. Moving them toward proactivity is all that’s left for you.
3. Inactive (and possibly uninterested): This is where your “fans” are revealing that they are, perhaps, not really fans at all. In my observation, many businesses on Facebook fall into this category. The problem may be that the company assumes people care more about them than they really do. Or maybe the company isn’t very conversational and therefore doesn’t warrant conversing with. Whatever the case, the fans are not engaged.
   The question then is this: are your “fans” really your fans? Why would they fan your page and not connect? There are lots of possibilities for this, but it requires some research into how the page has been used. Start with these questions: Are most of the fans company employees and vendors? Were the fans enticed to become fans in order to win a prize several months ago? Are you talking about things that have no value to them or just telling them things they may not care about?

The bottom line is this. Social media is a two-sided coin. Conversation is on one side of the coin and content is on the other. In social networking sites like Facebook, you must lead with conversation. That means you need to get people talking to you. You’re probably going give a lot more than you’re going to get for a while. You need to spark conversation. Show them something about your business they might actually find interesting. Give them something valuable and memorable. Add value to their day. After all, until someone starts talking to you, you’re just talking to yourself…and that’s not what you signed up to do on Facebook. Be a rabid conversationalist and then you’ll see Facebook start to work for you the way it can.

I had the opportunity to talk to Nashville-based lawyer Kevin Thompson about some common questions I am asked about social media and the law. Kevin is bit different from what most people think of when they consider lawyers and social media. He not only sees the benefits of social media for his own practice, but he understands that the world of business is changing and that today’s laws don’t take into account a world in which everyone is a publisher, critic, and pundit.

In this video interview with Kevin, he addressed three key questions that many people ask regarding social media and the law:

1. What could I say or do in social media that would get me in legal trouble?
2. How careful should I be in sharing my own opinions about people or businesses?
3. What do I need to know about using other people’s content?

Kevin’s also doing some interesting things with social media for his own practice and a recent class-action suit he filed. You can see more about that at the Class v Efusjon website.

Here’s the interview with Kevin:

Bravo. That’s all I have to say to these high school kids.

It’s an unusually windy day in Nashville today. I can tell because the huge trees in the woods behind my house are blowing around like crazy. It’s interesting to observe them, though, in light of their size and flexibility. After all, these trees are huge. They tower over my house yet when it’s really windy like today, they bend and flex and don’t break. They’ve been doing that for several decades now.

When we think about flexibility in business it’s easy to think that small companies are more likely to be flexible but I wonder if flexibility has less to do with size and more to do with how you grow. These trees behind my house didn’t stay small and flexible. They grew huge. That’s what trees do. They grow. They don’t stay small just to remain flexible. Isn’t that what we hope for our businesses too?

The wind, then, is like changes in the market or technology. One of the big reasons companies are having a hard time right now with social media isn’t their size, but their lack of flexibility. They may be strong companies with what they’ve always done, but they’re far too rigid to flex when the winds of business change blow. For all the importance placed on business growth, it seems there’s far too little discussion about business flexibility, and on this windy day in Nashville, I’m reminded not to lose site of the need and importance of flexibility.

If there’s anything we can learn from the trees it is this: Grow strong and grow flexible. The winds will come from every direction. Sometimes they’ll be stronger than others, but when you’re both strong and flexible, you’re going to be able to keep on growing long after the winds have passed.

This may not need to be said to you, but I’ll say it just in case: social media isn’t a mystical pixie dust you throw on your products or services and sit back to watch the magic happen. It doesn’t work like that, yet sometimes I get the sense that more than a few people think it does.

Social Media Is Like A Spice Rack
Social media for business is like the spice rack in your kitchen. There are all kinds of good flavors (like the Facebook spice or the blog spice) you can add to your meal to enhance and interact with the existing flavors, but there must be flavor to begin with. Too many spices leave you tasting only the spices, and nobody just eats spices. Too few spices leave you tasting the original flavors, which as good as they may be, are probably lacking the mind-blowing, tell-everyone-you-know kind of meal you’d like to have.

That’s how it is with social media for business. When done well, social media enhances a good business. It shows all the great things about who you are and what you do. If there are aspects to you business that are bad, however, it will reveal those too. That’s why social media won’t change certain fundamentals about good business. You can’t neglect some of the most important things about business and hope it will all be fine if you do more in social media. That’s like adding a bunch of spices to burned food. It’s still burned and therefore not worth eating.

5 Things Social Media Won’t Change About Business
Below are five things social media won’t change about your business. If you have issues with these, social media is not going to work as well for you as you like, and it’s not a social media problem. It’s a business problem. Your business problem.

1. Social media won’t fix crappy products. If your product stinks, social media will be the place where people will talk about how terrible it is. If you’re serious about creating good products, you can use the feedback to make your products better. People will talk about that too. If you aren’t willing to hear bad news, learn from it, and change as needed, you’re not going to like what you find and your social media interactions will always be sub-par.
2. Social media won’t fix poor customer service. One of the great benefits of social media is that current and future customers can ask you (or someone from your company) questions. The great thing about this is that it’s all done in public for everyone to see. So if your company does this well, you’re communicating a lot about yourself by engaging in customer service via social media tools. If your customer service is really bad or absent in the social media space, you’re communicating something there too. You’re telling people that you don’t care or don’t know that there are people ready to interact with you someplace where the company doesn’t control the interactions. If you’re not sure whether or not you’re missing anything about your company, products, services, etc. in social media try this: do a quick search in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Technorati (for blogs), to see if anyone is talking about you. If they are, the next question is: What are you going to do about it?
3. Social media won’t fix stubborn leadership. One of the biggest barriers involved in getting a company to begin considering social media is that their leaders are opposed to it in some way. Sometimes it’s a misconception of what social media is and other times it’s a concern over losing control over the corporate message. Despite the grassroots nature that works so well in the world of social media, it’s still really important for a company’s leadership to understand and support it. I’ve worked with organizations that have been able to take social media part of the way through the company only to get stuck with a leader who was never really on board to begin with. Regardless of where you find yourself in your own company, it’s important to have internal social media champions. Someday, you’ll be called on. In the meantime, stay positive and look for opportunities to show the leaders the small wins so they can begin to dream about the big wins.
4. Social media won’t resolve dumb policies and procedures. If your company had some downright dumb policies or procedures, plan on hearing about it through social media. Just like the product comments above, you can learn from these and make changes, or you can hunker down with the “that’s just what our policy is” kind of approach. The funny thing about hunkering down is that you always do that when there are shots being fired at you. With social media you can choose to preempt some of the shots because you’ll deal with them head on. This is yet another opportunity for you. It doesn’t even mean that you give people what they’re asking for all the time. It does mean that you take the time to explain why you do what you do. If they can’t be satisfied, at least help them understand your situation. There’s a great balancing opportunity there which is, again, available for everyone to see. You’ll be saying a lot about who you are as a company and your view of customers by how you deal with these kinds of things.
5. Social media won’t make people like you if they don’t already. Social media is social only because it allows you to interact at a more personal level with many people. The good news is, if you have good people skills and are generally a likable person, social media will allow everyone else to discover that also. If, however, people generally don’t like you, don’t think it’s going to be any different on Twitter or Facebook. This is an important point for businesses in social media because you need to place likable, engaging people on the social media front lines for your business. The crabby, defensive, annoying, or don’t-cross-me kind of attitude generally doesn’t fly too well. We know it doesn’t in real life so we shouldn’t expect that it to be the same in social media space.

Creativity and talent are wonderful things. Enjoy the balloon bass and drum box video.