My birthday is the 23rd of December.  It’s always been a very hectic time, just before Christmas (not to mention my Mother’s birthday is Christmas Eve!) and my birthday has sort of been lumped into the Christmas holiday.

Presents were wrapped in Christmas paper and I even had a Christmas Cake one year! (What’s up with that!)   

But since social media has blasted into my life, my birthday’s are made so special by the hundreds of people who wish me Happy Birthday on my different sites.  I had more than 225 birthday wishes this year on Facebook alone!  Boy, does that make a girl feel special.

If you are not taking advantage of the birthday feature on Facebook, I highly recommend that you do.  And if you are not wishing others a Happy Birthday on their special day, make that a goal for 2012.  You might be pleasantly surprised with the friendships that can come out of a simple birthday wish.

I know it sure made mine special!  Thanks everyone. 

As I sat in my office watching the Live Feed from Facebook’s F8 Conference last week, I quickly saw the new Timeline being much like an online scrapbook.  I love to scrapbook and have gotten together with friends to share stamps, templates and other embellishments for by books.  But the one thing I don’t do with my scrap-booking is to…Keep It Up To Date!  I’m terrible about this.  I have really good intentions, but I put it off and put it off until my children are grown and all the wonderful events of their life are outdated, so why put that book together now?

Well, with the new Facebook Timeline,  (and everyone should remember this, you don’t HAVE to put your life out there, it’s your choice) I can can go all the way back to my birth and start building my life online.  I’m not so sure that I want everything out there or if I even want to go back that far.  But I have that option now.

And there are Apps that will make the Facebook experience more like a community.  We can share music, movies, books and videos with each other and even watch them together and chat about them, all from within Facebook.  Be careful, not to make yourself a hermit with this feature and never go out to a real theater or bookstore.  You still need human touchy-feely relationships.

Here is a run down (as I noted it) of the new Timeline and it’s accompanying features:

• The heart of the Facebook experience is your Profile
• The Story of your Life will be represented in Timeline
• Timeline will be a lot more visual
• On the right of the Timeline will be the years and you can click it to see what you posted for that year
• A large area for a Cover Photo at the top of your Timeline.  Can be changed daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
• Visual Tiles for the Apps you use
• Works on Mobile Devices
• You can go to the beginning of your life and build your Timeline, or just start where you are
• Apps express who you are by highlighting and curating all your stories and giving you complete control over everything and everyone that sees it
• A new Report feature to allow you to see quickly a summary of your Apps, like what you ate, what movies you watched, where you have been, etc.
• Ticker (which a lot of people find annoying) is a lightweight stream of information.  It moves quickly and shares posts from your friends so you can jump into a conversation with them
• Open Graph – a new class of Apps will cover four areas, Communication, Games, Media and Lifestyle
• Through Open Graph you will discover new things from your friends  – Frictionless experiences and Realtime Serendipity (this is the music, movie sharing feature I mentioned above)
• Open Graph is the biggest change on Facebook since the 1st F8 conference

The beta period for Timeline began last week for developers.  But many people have declared themselves developers so they can begin building their Timeline.  Myself…I’ll just wait until all the bugs and kinks are worked out and build mine.  Which will only be a couple of weeks.

After everyone has gotten to learn and use  Timeline, the Open Graph will be rolled out.

So you have lots of decisions and choices to make.  Do you want to have your entire life online for everyone to read? Do you want to share just the highlights of your life? Do you want to build relationships with your friends over a song, book or movie?  You can (or cannot) do it all with the new Facebook Timeline and Open Graph.

How do you feel about these features?  Will you use them?  I’d love to know your thoughts.

Just when you think it’s safe to read your news feed on Facebook…they have changed it again.  But it has strange similarities to the original news feed of long, long ago. 

Basically, they have done away with the Most Recent tab and have combined those updates with the Top Stories.  But, so we don’t miss anything while we are away from our beloved Facebook, the  Top Stories are being highlighted that Facebook believes might be important to us.  These appear at the top of your page and are marked with a Blue corner in the upper left.

The criteria for pulling Top Stories is based on the relationship you have to the person, how many people are commenting on the post, how many “likes” it received and what kind of story it is.  If you find stories that you really don’t care to read as Top Stories, you can hover over the right side of the post and click the down arrow to remove it from your Top Stories.

So basically you might see Recent Stories, then Top Stories and more Recent Stories while viewing your News Feed.  But when you log in after being away for a while, the Top Stories should pop to the top of the News Feed.

Also, you can once again view updates based on your Friends List.  To do this, from your Home page, click “More” on the left side bar at LISTS, and select which friends list you would like to view. 

I’m happy about the news feed changes, because it makes it easier to keep up with those friends and pages that are most important to me and my business. 

What about you?  Do you like the changes?

This year’s Summer Skill Camp 2011 has a great lineup of eight 90-minute clinics including:

• Success Strategies for Creating a Social Media Monitoring System
• Creating and Promoting a Compelling Facebook Contest
• Tips and Tactics for Building an Effective Social Media Measurement System
• Discovering the Fine Art of Setting Rates and Building Packages for Your Services
• Creating an Effective Mobile Marketing Campaign for Local Businesses
• Setting up an Ecommerce Platform with 1ShoppingCart
• Mastering New Tactics for Increasing Your Search Engine Listings
• Maximizing Productivity and Enhancing Communications using Google Tools.

Watch this video for a more in-depth view of what to expect.

Sneak Preview of VAClassroom Summer Skill Camp 2011

To gain more information about the Summer Skill Camp visit:

Summer Skill Camp

Most of us are familiar with tagging on Facebook.  You can tag someone by using the “@” symbol and then typing their name or page name, which will create a link back to them.  You can also tag photos of people and the photo will appear on their page.  They can then share it with all their friends.

You can also use the tagging feature on your Fan Page.  It works the same way, but there’s a setting that you should be aware of to make the photo tagging feature active.  From your Fan Page, go to Edit Page/Apps/Photos/Go to App.  Once you get here, you need to check the setting to “Allow all fans to tag photos.”

This is the screenshot.

So start tagging and allow others to tag on your page for that “viral” effect!

I was speaking with a friend today about our businesses.  We chatted for a while about groups we belonged to and acquaintances and how we loved to help others succeed in life and in business.  Toward the end of our conversation, we moved more toward what drives business to us.  And I wanted to share her story.

She admittedly is not a social media butterfly.  She use to get on Facebook, maybe once a month to just check in and see what was going on.  During one of those once-a-month visits she saw a post from someone she had met at a conference earlier in the year.  They had gotten to know each other and “friended” one another on Facebook.  And that was the end of the story.

However, on this day my friend noticed a comment from one of her Facebook friends and it really resonated with her.  She felt a strong connection to the post and the person.  So she began to communicate with her and learned more about her business and the services she offered.  Which eventually turned into a working relationship between the two of them.

My friend now has a support person that she get’s along great with and can bounce ideas off of, but also someone that will help her to grow her business in the way she visions.

This little story is just a great example of how social media should work. You post things on your Fan Page or your personal Wall and people read them and hopefully share them with their friends.  You just never know what post might bring you the next big customer or client.  So post great information, thoughtful comments and encouraging words, it will boost your business!

Well, are you?  I have to confess, I wasn’t.  And I didn’t even realize it!  I was checking my Facebook messages, but failed to look further down to see that I had a ton of Facebook Updates in my Inbox.

An update is a message that is sent by a Fan Page Administrator to communicate what’s going on with the page.  This is sent to all the Fans and is distributed through the updates feature.

Since I totally missed it I thought I would do a short little video to show you where to find your updates on Facebook.

You might want to check your updates now and clean out if you are like me and hadn’t checked them…ever!  Yikes!

If you liked, “Are you Checking your Facebook Updates?” please share it by clicking the social media icons below.  I’d really appreciate it.

I was doing some research yesterday and stumbled across this question that people were asking.  What does it mean to be poked on Facebook?  I laughed out loud…a long time!  There were more than 1,000 people asking this question!

Well, it really is no mystery as to what “poking” on Facebook means.  It just means you poke them.  Just like if you walked up to someone at the grocery store and took your finger and poked them.  It’s a way of saying hello to your friends on Facebook.

Once you poke someone, they have the option of poking you back or ignoring your poke.  When I was growing up the guys would “swap licks” which meant they would take turns hitting each other in the arm with their fist until someone finally said “uncle!”  Poking can work in a similar fashion.  You poke someone, they poke you back, you poke them again, they poke you back….gets a little monotonous doesn’t it.

You can only poke a confirmed friend, so you can’t go around poking just anyone.  And can only poke you if your account is confirmed.  Someone poked me several weeks ago, but I didn’t respond, so it’s still on my home page that I have been poked.  I can choose to ignore it, which I have obviously done, or I can remove it, which I will probably do.

And just to clarify conformed means that you have to confirm the email address that you set your Facebook account up with and that will enable you to send messages, write on your friends’ Walls, post in discussions, poke, tag your friends, comment, join groups, and fan pages, and basically use your account to it’s fullest.

I guess it could be fun to poke someone, but I really don’t know why.  If I want to say Hi, I’ll just go to their Wall or send them a private message and say Hi!  But for the thousands of people who have been anxious to get the real story on poking…you have it now.    And please don’t poke me, I have tender arms!

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Your identify and whereabouts are becoming more and more an open book online with social media sites like Foursquare, Twitter and now Facebook Places.  But just how much do you want others to see about you and where you might be hanging out?  Do you want your friends to have the ability to share your location with their online friends?

The new Places feature from Facebook allows you to “check in” similar to Foursquare when you are at a business, restaurant or other establishment.   Also, your friends can “tag” you at a specific location which will alert your friends as to where you are.  If this is just a little more than you would like to share, here’s a quick video detailing how to change your Privacy Settings in Facebook so that others can’t tag your location.

If you enjoyed, “Quickly Protect Your Online Privacy” please share it with your online friends by clicking the social media icons below.

Facebook is always making changes to the look and functionality of our pages.  The most recent changes have affected the way custom tabs look.  They deceased the width of the page to 520 px, so that the sidebar could be prominent on each tab.  Which I think is a good change. Your personalized information on the sidebar will now show on every tab on your fan page, so visitors won’t have to look for your links or phone numbers.

Another change that is in the process is the removal of any application that you might have added through Applications and placed them in the Boxes Tab.  They could still be located in your boxes tab or you might have moved them to your sidebar, on your personal profile page.  This video will show you how to bookmark them, based on Facebook’s instructions,  for located them in the future.

Hope this little video helps you better understand some of the Facebook changes.