Here’s how your Facebook status updates can be seen by the public, and how to restrict them so the public cannot search for them.

Details:

You may know that your public status updates can be seen by anyone in the world, but do you know how people find them?  I’ll show you both sides here:

How to post Facebook statuses to the public

When you post a status update, just to the left of the “Post” button, there is a drop down menu that allows you to post to the whole world or just to a “custom” group, like your friends, or even a more restricted group, like your friends except for work friends.  In my shameless self promotion, here I am on Fox news talking about this at 1:23.  Note that at the time (Feb 2011), the “Post” button was the “Share” button.

How to see public Facebook status posts

Let’s say you wanted to see what people are saying about Comcast.  If you put Comcast in the search box at the top of your Facebook page, it will show you

• The Comcast business page
• A bunch of “Comcast sucks” and “I hate Comcast” pages

However, at the bottom, click where it says “see more results for comcast”.

Now, on the left, click “Public Posts” and you can see posts from anyone that set up their status updates so that they can be seen by the public.

Implications – why you care

Here’s how this information can be helpful to you:

• Careful what you say – your bosses, ex-girlfriends, enemies, and competition can see it
• My conclusion is shown at 2:59 in the video above – don’t post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want to be seen on the nightly news
• If you are getting cable, you’ll see why you don’t want to get Comcast.  The public is constantly talking about their bad experiences with them, and I’m one of them.  This works for any product you are considering.
• If you have a brand, you may want to monitor what people are saying about you.

Be careful out there.

***************************************************************************************
Patrick O’Malley, aka (617)-PATRICK, is a professional speaker on social media and Google ranking.

Summary:

My interview on Fox TV News about how I used social media during the tsunami in Japan.

Details:

This is one of my two recent interviews last week on Fox TV News after the tsunami talking about

• how I helped a friend of mine who was in a hotel in Tokyo during the tsunami by communicating with her using Facebook (her only working option)
• how I used Twitter to try to warn people about the tsunami continuing to move to other areas, like Guam
• how Microsoft Bing made a huge mistake by trying to use the tsunami to market the search engine

In addition, I got to talk about one of my passions, which is that I think cell phone companies ought to warn you if an emergency is happening in your area.  They know where you are, so why can’t they warn you?

My sound bite:

“If the cell phone company can tell you that there is s Starbucks 5 minutes away,

why can’t they tell you that there is a tsunami 5 minutes away?”

This is a 90 second “rap” that I did in a social media keynote speech at the LOMA Insurance Conference in Las Vegas last October.  And it ain’t worth 50 cent.

Details:

The audience was full of insurance professionals who had just passed a test, like FMLI or FSSI, and were awarded with a trip to Las Vegas to go to this conference (and to see me).

Here are the words to the rap:

If you meet someone cool, and you like how they think
or you go to the pool, and they buy you a drink

if you meet someone smart, and they just can’t disguise
that they just passed the tests, for the FMLIs

or if somebody studied, until they got dizzy,
and passed all the tests for the designation FSSI

and there are people here who proved they’re the best
at customer service so they have the ACS

and then they came here although they are still in a tizzy
and they’re starting to look like the old band …. Thin Lizzy

and I know there are others that some of you had…
and if I had more time I’d make up a rhyme just as bad

I guess my designation, if I thought this was clever
from your cool generation, would be “Worst Rapper Ever”

but when all of you are playing in the “City of Sin”,
don’t just party and drink. Also – get LinkedIn!

Audience applauds wildly, starts throwing panties and motel keys like they used to do for Elvis…

Summary:

How do you back up your Facebook status updates, pictures, wall, etc, in case you delete something, or Facebook accidentally does.

Details:

How do you back up your Facebook status updates, pictures, wall, etc, in case

• you want to see your old status updates
• you accidentally delete something
• Facebook accidentally deletes something

Either view the 3 minute video above, or follow these instructions:

• Go to your Facebook Home page
• In the upper right hand corner, click Account
• Click Account Settings
• Near the bottom, it says Download Your Information.  Click “learn more”
• Verify your password
• Download

It will download your information as a ZIP file, so you have to have a ZIP program to uncompress it.  Your Wall will be in the HTML directory in a file called wall.html, and your pictures and videos will be in directories that have those names.

You will now be able to sleep at night knowing that your Facebook data is preserved on your own computer.

If you want to become a fan of my Facebook business page, please click “Like” at http://www.facebook.com/pages/617-PATRICK-Social-Media-Training/299670470854

Good luck out there.

Summary:

Making someone an admin for a Facebook event is tougher than you thought, huh?  Here are the steps.

Details:

January, 2012

This has changed recently.  To make someone an admin,

• go to the event page
• in the upper right hand corner, click Edit
• one of the choices at the bottom is Admins
• type the beginning of the person’s name and their full name should appear
• for their name to appear, they
• have to be an existing friend
• will not actually become Admin until they say they are “Going” to the event

Previous technique:

I’ve gotten this question from 3 friends in the last month, so I figured I’d write it up, since it’s non-intuitive.  You’ve created an event, but you want others to be able to administer the event (and be a Facebook admin for the event), so someone else can

• change the description about the event
• allow/disallow people to comment on the wall
• delete comments on the Facebook event wall (if inappropriate)
• do the annoying work
• make more people admins so that they can share in the nasty work

It’s tough to figure out how to do it, so here are the steps:

• Go to the Facebook event page for the event
• In the upper right hand corner, under the photo, 3rd line down, it says “Edit Guest List”
• Notice that for each person, on the right, you have the option to click “Make Admin”

Here’s the tough part.   Not everyone is listed there. Notice in the top heading, “Attending” is highlighted.  Facebook is only showing you people that have confirmed that they will be attending the event!  Look at the other headings, which include:

• Attending
• Maybe
• Declined
• Not Yet Responded
• Blocked

To make someone an admin if they are in one of the other lists, click that heading.  If you just invited them, click “Not Yet Responded”.

However, it’s still not easy.  Facebook makes it difficult for a bunch of reasons:

• They may not show up yet if you’ve just invited them!! It sometimes takes a few minutes.
• You can’t easily and quickly figure out which list someone is in if you have a big list
• The list isn’t sorted, so you must click slowly through the list
• You can’t set up the size of the list on your screen, so you can only see 6 at a time

This is all understandable since no one at Facebook has more than 6 friends in the world.

It’s all a pain in the ass, but someday Facebook will make it better.  If this helped, please email me at patweb@patrickomalley.com and let me know

Summary:

Yesterday, Twitter may have helped to save a 1 year old girl who was kidnapped and in serious danger. Here’s the best Twitter story ever, (short version).

Details:

The long version is available at Twitter helps solve Amber Alert (long, but worth it).

Yesterday was the best day in Twitter’s life because yesterday was the day when Twitter may have helped to find a kidnapped one year old baby girl named Jaylin Boudria. We won’t know for a while if Twitter and cell phones helped, but the girl is safe, and that’s the important thing.

The Amber Alert spread like wildfire through Twitter. People from all over the world ReTweeted it in the hope that somebody might be able to find the car containing this kidnapped girl.

Here’s the chronology from my point of view:

11:30 AM

Baby girl kidnapped in Swansea, MA. It would be hours before it’s investigated, confirmed, et cetera, and it hits the radio.

2:30 PM

As I was listening to the radio, the state police broke in into the broadcast and said that there was an Amber Alert, and a one-year-old baby girl was in serious danger. I looked at my computer to find the story from my friend, news reporter Ted Daniel (http://twitter.com/TedDanielFOX25), and sure enough he had Tweeted the information. He had a pointer to a Fox news webpage with more detail. I re-tweeted it immediately with the hope that some of my 20,000 followers would ReTweet it, and it would be passed on to many others.

I then kept ReTweeting the same information periodically and saw that tons of my followers were ReTweeting it also.  Their names are listed in the long version the story Twitter helps solve Amber Alert (long, but worth it).

Hundreds of their followers tweeted it also.  Other original tweets were ReTweeted as word of mouth spread to thousands in seconds.

Sara Underwood (http://twitter.com/sara_underwood), anchor for Fox news, tweeted about it. It was picked up and ReTweeted by the actress Alyssa Milano, who passed it to 600,000 followers in a moment.

The Twitter community was in a frenzy sending it to people on the highways.

5:00 PM – The best Tweet ever

The little girl was found in a rest stop in Connecticut, and she’s safe. Absolutely awesome.

The “world village” saved one of its children, and Twitter users may have helped.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

• Amber alert ended.
• Baby girl saved.
• Total time – 5.5 hours
• Not having to see her picture on a billboard for 10 years? Priceless.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed about it on Fox TV news last night with Sarah Underwood. The video is posted above.

Future generations will find a better way to do this. When I say future generations, I mean myself and others in the next few months. Some day, when I run the world, cell phone companies will be required to figure out a way to broadcast critical information in certain geographical regions to people on their cell phones.

However, for now, a three year old named Twitter may have helped us find a one year old named Jaylin.  It will be a long time before she realizes that if she was born a few years earlier, there may have been no way to save her.

Thanks to all of the people who ReTweeted, posted on Facebook, called people, or did anything else to help save her. You are all heroes in my book.

Summary:

Yesterday, Twitter may have helped to solve an Amber Alert, and saved a 1 year old girl who was kidnapped and in serious danger.  Here’s the best Twitter story ever.

Details:

The short version of Twitter solves Amber Alert is here if you don’t have time for this.

Yesterday was the best day in Twitter’s life because yesterday was the day when Twitter may have helped to find a kidnapped one year old baby girl named Jaylin Boudria.  We won’t know for a while if Twitter and cell phones helped, but the girl is safe, and that’s the important thing.

The Amber Alert spread like wildfire through Twitter.  People from all over the world ReTweeted it in the hope that somebody might be able to find the car containing this kidnapped girl.

Here’s the chronology from my point of view:

11:30 AM

Baby girl kidnapped in Swansea, MA.  It would be hours before it’s investigated, confirmed, et cetera, and it hits the radio.

2:30 PM

As I was listening to the radio, the state police broke in into the broadcast and said that there was an Amber Alert, and a one-year-old baby girl was in serious danger.  I looked at my computer to find the story from my friend, news reporter Ted Daniel (http://twitter.com/TedDanielFOX25), and sure enough he had Tweeted the information.  He had a pointer to a Fox news webpage with more detail.  I re-tweeted it immediately with the hope that some of my 20,000 followers would ReTweet it, and it would be passed on to many others.

My vision was that we would try to develop a huge “human chain” of people using Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones who could all be looking for the Silver Ford Focus that contained little girl.  If just one person could find the car with the distinctive Minnesota license plates, they could quietly follow the car and call the state police.

I realized, though, that most people with cell phones on the road wouldn’t have time to read the full webpage that most TV stations had dedicated to the cause.  I called Ted Daniel at Fox news and said that they should post a specific type of webpage that was just convenient for cell phone users with iPhones, Blackberries, Droids, et cetera.

There was no easy way to do it, but Kyle Bishop at Fox was willing to bend some corporate rules and create a “quick hack” page that would contain just the most critical information so that it can be read easily (in one or two screens) by people with Smartphones on the road. The info included:

• The time and place where she was kidnapped
• License plate number
• Pictures of the kidnapper, the child and the car (brilliant ideas, Kyle and Fox)

I then kept ReTweeting the same information periodically and saw that tons of my followers were ReTweeting it to, including:

@NEMultimedia, @ZinoClassic, @socialcap, @NEMultimedia, @TimMCahill, @JessicaHanson, @pretty_peace, @PoshMom, @RussBenoit, @yolandafacio, @DJDeja, @eXapath, @CaronElectric, @JonMichaeli, @cielyn, @MichaelFina, @LisaRFrank, @The420Fairy, @deb_lavoy, @MojoCaster, @Lynnelle, @WellnessWebGirl, @KristinEDziadul, @embracegracie, @stevedragoo, @ConstantContact, @JackInChicago, @snhparents, @BillyMacDonald, @capegirlindc, @Manage_Kelley, @RedHeadMeag, @reviewingcigars, @smoketherev, @FlyTheSky, @billshander, @DrSES, @PeytonACraig, @joeckmrc, @kizerandbender, @ldg1109, @AllergyProne, @chupieandjsmama, @chupieandjsmama, @gothamli, @DavidAtNavigate, @stales, @airjan23, @PeytonACraig, @codeYogi, @TimDineen, @AlMcGourlay, @meghanwelborn, @Bloodslave78, @JudeNewcomb, @naked_beauty, @taojoannes, @sammeem, @BrightEndeavors, @helphandrewards, @hinda_incentiv

Hundreds of their followers tweeted it also.

I also had the idea that if I tweeted people with huge followings (like the celebrities that had three or 4 million followers) that if they re-tweeted it even once, the viral effect could help spread the word to millions of people.  Therefore, I sent tweets to Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, Shaquille O’Neal and others who had over 3 million followers.

I also monitored  the story on Tweetdeck  to see how many people were ReTweeting the story.  As you would hope and expect, people began to help by ReTweeting the story to their own followers. I also broke one of Twitters unspoken rules by ReTweeting the same information multiple times.  Throw me in Twitter jail if you want.  I’ll sleep well on that metal bed tonight.

The story changed, as the state police found out new information like

• the fact that the car was actually a Silver Kia Wagon
• the license plate might not have been accurate, but was a Minnesota license plate

and as they did, I updated my tweets.  The Twitter army ReTweeted the most current info to others.

I also used Twellow to find the people in the Boston area that had the most followers, and I sent tweets to them, hoping they would ReTweet it to their Boston following.

Sara Underwood (http://twitter.com/sara_underwood),  anchor for Fox news, tweeted about it.  It was picked up and ReTweeted by the actress Alyssa Milano, who passed it to 600,000 followers in a moment.

Every news station was running a text banner at the bottom of the page giving info about the little girl, and the Twitter community was in a frenzy sending it to people on the highways.

5:00 PM – The best Tweet ever

The little girl was found in a rest stop in Connecticut, and she’s safe.   Absolutely awesome.

We still don’t know exactly how the girl was found, and that probably won’t be known for days, so we don’t know if Twitter nation helped.  However, the fact is that a combination of Twitter, cell phones, radio, TV and the good nature of millions of people may have helped to find this girl in a way that was unimaginable a few years ago.  The “world village” saved one of its children.  I still get choked up thinking about it.

• Amber alert ended.
• Baby girl saved.
• Total time – 5.5 hours
• Not having to see her picture on a billboard for 10 years?  Priceless.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed about it on Fox TV news last night with Sarah Underwood.  The video is posted above.

Future generations will find a better way to do this.  When I say future generations, I mean myself and others in the next few months.  Some day, when I run the world, cell phone companies will be required to figure out a way to broadcast critical information in certain geographical regions to people on their cell phones.

However, for now, a three year old named Twitter may have helped us find a one year old named Jaylin.  It will be a long time before she realizes that if she was born a few years earlier, there may have been no way to save her.

Thanks to all of the people who ReTweeted, posted on Facebook, called people, or did anything else to help save her.  You are all heroes in my book.

Want to see only status updates on Facebook so that you don’t have to see every time one of your friends buys pizza for someone else in Mafia Wars?  Here’s how…

Details:

Facebook tip – see only status updates

In February of 2010, they changed Facebook again, and it was designed by people who assume

• you have all day to look at Facebook
• you have to know when one of your friends makes a new friend
• you have to know someone pokes another person
• you know what a poke is

You can do Facebook much faster if you just see Status Updates, and they made it harder to do it.

Here’s the new Facebook trick

On the left hand side of your new page, if you click on Friends, you’ll see your friend lists, and just below it, it should say Status Updates.  Click on that.

The URL at the top should say

http://www.facebook.com/?sk=app_2915120374

but may have some other stuff in the middle.  The fact is that if you use the string above, and bookmark it, it should show you status updates (until the Facebook nerds do another one of their redesign/scavenger hunts).

Video demonstration

The problem

The big problem with this is that if you only see Status Updates, you won’t see when every one of your friends picks up a piece of cow shit in Farmville.

To see only status updates on Facebook:

• In the upper left menu, under the Facebook logo, at the bottom, click More (in blue)
• Drag “Status Updates” to the top of the list.
• Click on it.

Aaaaaaaahhhhh.

Quick video actually shows you….

NOTE – I just discovered that this feature only allow you to see someone’s LAST status update (discovered 10/29/09).  Wow, Facebook makes this difficult.

If you have Facebook friends who post their status 20 times a day, you can make them disappear, and they will never know about it.  Ironically, Facebook hides the Hide feature.

Details:

Everyone has at least one friend that posts every insignificant move of their day onto Facebook, like

• … is making coffee
• … is adding more sugar
• … is adding cream
• … is stirring

and on and on.  It gets worse if they are having a full breakfast.

Want to make all of their statuses disappear?  It’s easy to do using the Facebook Hide feature, but ironically, and idiotically, Facebook hides the Hide button.  Learn the solution by text (below) or by 60 second video here:

or if that video didn’t work, click Youtube Video – hide annoying Facebook status updates and applications 2011

If you are looking at a status update from one these self-absorbed, narcissistic, ego-centric people, do the following:

• Move your mouse to the upper right hand corner of the “box” that contains the status update
• NEW in 2010 – an X will appear
• Click the X, and it will give you some options
• One of the choices (near the bottom) is to say Unsubscribe from <annoying_friends_name>
• this used to be the “Hide” button, but the Hide button at the top just hides that one story
• Click it, and you will feel so much better
• You then get a second option to Unfriend them

All of their statuses on your page will disappear now and forever, and they will never know.  That is, until you see them in person and they say, “Hey, did you hear that I added sugar to my coffee this morning?”

It’s a shame you can’t click the button when you see them and make them disappear in person.

If you ever decide that you do want to see their posts again, so the following

• Click the Facebook icon in the upper left corner
• go to the bottom of your Home page
• if it auto-scrolls, you may have to do this multiple times
• click “Edit options” on the right
• choose to add them back into your news feed

You can also use the same feature to remove all of those annoying quizzes like

• What Flintstones character are you?
• How well do you remember 90210?

However, you have to remove them one by one.  You can’t click a button that says “Remove all stupid quizzes”.

Someday, I promise you, Facebook will give in to the angry masses and have a button that that allows you to

• Remove all quizzes
• Remove all mafia wars updates
• Remove all the other things other than status updates

I just hope they don’t hide it.

If you “Like” my page on Facebook, you’ll see pointers to blogs like this every few weeks or so.  Go to  http://www.facebook.com/pages/617-PATRICK-Social-Media-Training/299670470854

If you want to join my newsletter, fill in your email below.  Be careful out there…