Up to now Groupon has offered deals for local retailers and it’s been a boon to the niche businesses to get access to a bigger market. Even a tiny business can get a lot of bang for their buck out of a Groupon offer. With today’s offer from the Gap though, the game has shifted. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for Groupon and it’s users, and I might even buy this one for my niece, but does it spell doom and gloom for the niche businesses it has served so well in the past?

It’s interesting that Groupon started to offer two coupons at once recently(see above) and we can hope that even if the main offer is a big brand that the little businesses will still be able to opt in to the service. Unlike their regular deals, the Gap deal is offered in a number of cities at the same time,

Rumors have it that Groupon is backed up with offers and that could be the big bottleneck to their growth since they only post one (now two) per day per city. If big brands start sucking up that premium space will there be room left for small business?

As companies like the Gap try on different social promotions like check ins on Foursquare group coupons Facebook and Twitter, it will be intrusting to see which they adopt.

Every time Facebook makes changes to their privacy statements or policies people get really irate. I mean REALLY irate, like in this video clip. First there’s the people that are appalled that Facebook would have the nerve to share their private information. (Ahem. You gave it to ‘em, how else are they supposed to make money?)

There there are the folks who are appalled that people could be so amazingly stupid to think their information was “just between friends” in the first place.

Finally there are the marketers who get really excited about all that lovely data about to be theirs so they can market to you right where you live. Odds are good they won’t even have to pay that much to get it either. Deleting your account still leaves the information out there on the pages or groups you posted on, your friends’ walls etc.

This post from my friend @PeterCampbellpretty much sums it up. Go read it and tell us what you think.

Here’s what I think
The internet is not a private place. Simple as that. If you don’t want your information shared with the world then don’t put it out there. Facebook is a business and they will use whatever they have at hand to keep growing and make money. So would you if it was your business. Does that make their new changes acceptable? Certainly not. Why? Because they portrayed it as a safe haven and now they’ve switched gears when the majority of their users weren’t looking.

Who knew?
I’m a geek. I live and breathe this stuff for my clients..and… well. because I’m a geek. You’re probably one too. You read blogs like this to stay on top of changes. You probably don’t share things on the internet you don’t want to be public. You’ve probably know this for a long time.

But what about the people who are casual users of sites like Facebook and innocently posted family information or private thoughts on their Facebook pages? They may not be so savvy. So do us all a favor. Share Peter’s post with those people. Share the link to the video below. Help get the word out that if you want something private don’t say it on the internet.

For a site that is often purported to be all warm and fuzzy, full of social enthusiasm and community they don’t seem to get the idea of community and camaraderie very well at Facebook. First there was the privacy policy debacle, then there was the whole thing about not using contests to grow your Fbook friends list and a bunch of other rules about what you can and can’t say about Facebook.=. In the latest post from the social media giant this morning, Facebook announced what they call “New Tools to Control Your Experience”. The whole thing smacks of Big Brother breathing down your neck don’t you think?

According to Fbook, the privacy settings are now “simpler” and there will be a tool to set the privacy levels on every post you make (doesn’t that seem simpler?)

Shortly when you log in to Facebook you’ll be asked to make choices about opening up parts or all of your Facebook updates to be publicly visible. You can set these levels yourself but it appears the default will be public. This means that for every post you’ll want to click the little lock icon in the bottom right corner and set your privacy settings for the post.

Minors however will have tighter settings so that anything they make “public” will stay within Facebook and any networks or groups they’ve joined through the site. Minor information will not be released to the search engines.

All in all I get it. Sure, I want my profile to be public so my friends and business associates can find me, but hey, I’ve got a lot of profiles out there to get that info across. Do a search on Janet Fouts and you can find me. I, like a lot of users kept Facebook to my close friends and the business folk I really like and want to know more about on a personal level. Now how are we supposed to deal with these new anti-privacy settings? Don’t tell me privacy is dead. I know that, but a network where we could have a semblance of control seemed like a nice (if naive) idea.

I dunno. After all, the service is free. Should we have a right to whine about it all? Where’s the line here? What do you think?

I’ve just had a remarkable two days working with Tech Soup volunteers in the “Tech Soup Kitchen” at the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault Leadership event in Sacramento.

Our mission: Help attendees understand how they can use social media for outreach, education, fundraising and branding.

We worked hands on with members on a one-on-one basis, setting up user accounts and walking through the tools and techniques to enrich their networks and reach more people.

Most were relative newbies, but there were also quite a few who had more advanced questions and I think I can say we all learned from each other as we problem solved and shared tips and tricks as well as trusted resources and tools.

Some issues an organization like this faces are beyond what most of us bloggers have to deal with. For example several people were concerned that they had been involved in court cases and other actions that resulted in jail time and fines. Privacy of the personal details of beneficiaries, volunteers, staff, and their loved ones is crucial.

Because they deal with government agencies they need to document everything carefully, so creating a data trail is important as well.

Time is the most obvious barrier for many, but when we showed the potential for expanding their reach and funding opportunities balanced with how to use alerts and scheduling to work more efficiently the benefits were obvious.

Working with these people (mostly women) was a treat, and experiencing the passion they have for outreach is exciting and moving. We truly felt we were making a difference and we’ll be watching and helping as they flex their social media muscles and the inevitable questions come up. I want to do more of this!

I owe the team at Tech Soup a huge thank you for inviting me to take part, and the team (Susan Tenby, Evonne Hening, Megan Keene, Scott Moore, Saki Bailey ) for their help and camaraderie over the last couple of days, and of course to the amazing CalCasa team.

Here’s a quick video of Evonne Heyning working with a participant. If you were at the event add your links in the comments so we can see what you’ve been up to!

I’m very excited to announce that my book, Social Media Success! will be released late this fall (Maybe early October!). This book has been a long time coming, and I’m fortunate to have a fabulous publisher and lots of support from my family, friends and clients while I pull together case studies and information that will really help make sense of all this social media hoo-ha.

As a social media coach I run into all kinds of situations but one thing is abundantly clear. For people trying to run a business, start one up or grow it even more, there is just too much noise to value ratio. They don’t know where to start, how to find the right networks for their message, which tools make a good fit and what the techniques and processes are that can ensure social media success (whatever that means to them specifically) without having to drop everything to learn this stuff.

The book is written as a practical guide to understand the concepts and identify your goals, draw up your own social media strategy and get down to it with a minimum of panic.

The case studies are from real world businesses. Nonprofits, small businesses and individual examples to show you how you can use social media to build relationships, use inbound marketing techniques, and do it all efficiently so you actually have time for work!

So here’s the part where we can help each other out.

I’ve set up a fan page on Facebook for the book. I’d love to hear what your challenges are and what kinds of cases you’d like to see. I’ll be posting excerpts from the book, links to downloads and maybe even some videos to support what you’re going to be learning in the book. After the book is released this is the page where you’ll find links to resources in the book, interviews, events and all kinds of cool stuff I haven’t even thought of yet!

Win your copy

Over the next couple of months I’ll randomly draw 10 fans names to win a copy of the book and a 30 minute social media coaching session about your business or your personal social media issues.

Social media channels are perfect for grassroots organizers to quickly create buzz and find their following. Take the case of Help a Mother Out. Lisa Truong and Rachel Fudge saw an Oprah segment on the tent cities outside of Sacramento filled with homeless people with nowhere to go. They were moved to contact local shelters to see how they could help and the shelters told them their biggest need was for diapers and toiletries for babies and children.

Then they discovered that Federal and State safety net organizations who support poor and homeless families do not provide diapers for babies. Federal support funds like W.I.C. and food stamps do not allow the funds they give to be used for buying diapers. This leaves poor mothers in the position of deciding to use what expendable cash they have to buy diapers or food.

So they set out on their own to change things. They contacted their personal network of friends and family. They set up Amazon wish-lists so people could donate funds directly, publicized the lists on their blog and set up several direct drop locations where people could donate. Although the original target date was for Mother’s day, the response was so overwhelming that by the end of May they had collected over 15,000 diapers, as well as thousands of other hygiene items for babies, children and mothers.

Lisa says “A year ago I was totally anti- social media – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, all that stuff. Once I got on Twitter and started talking about what we were doing it just took off!

Now we’ve got 700 followers and we’ve connected with so many people across the country that have the same passion as we do. We’ve seen some far flung friends who saw what we posted and became very closely involved and host drives in San Diego and Santa Clara. A friend in Italy heard about it and got her friends in Tucson to set up a program.

The blog has been good too. People are linking back to us. We got in touch with a couple of good connectors who had bigger networks than we do, and they shared it with their networks.”

While on Twitter Lisa noticed that some Silicon valley moms were talking to Katie Couric about children in the recession. She picked up on their Twitter hashtag and basically crashed their Twitter conversation to tell them about what Help a Mother Out was doing. Although she never heard from Couric, Kim Tracy Prince picked up on it, and became the Los Angeles coordinator for a program there. A producer at KGO radio in San Francisco ead a blog post about them on SFAppeal.com and brought them onto the show for an interview.

They also started a conversation with a diaper bank in Michigan, and Sally Lieber (a former California assembly member) started a conversation to encourage changes in the way WIC works so they begin to cover diapers.

Help a Mother Out teamed up with a tiny baby shop called Baby Buzz in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood for a donation drive. The goal was to bring in 1000 diapers for a local women’s shelter. Local bloggers picked it up and blogged and tweeted about it and a local bank (Valley Credit Union) saw it on Twitter, gathered up over 1,000 diapers and the staff delivered them to the shop that very day.

The immediacy of seeing something Tweeted, being able to take action and get immediate satisfaction of helping is a very powerful thing. Valley Credit staff did a video of the event and posted it on their Facebook page, which was linked to by many supporters of Help a Mother Out as well as people in Valley Credit Union’s network and it was a clear win for everyone involved. The store got great publicity and felt good for helping. Help a Mother Out donated the diapers to a family shelter and an Asian women’s shelter in San Jose. Valley Credit Union staff got the immediate satisfaction of taking action and helping out as well as positive press as caring members of the community.

“The Help A Mother Out campaign is exactly the kind of grassroots effort that is needed today. Social networking in service of supporting mothers in need is a fabulous idea. Through innovation and utilizing the free tools the internet has to offer, HAMO has made a big difference the lives of many women and children, and in such a short period of time.” –Danica Remy, President, Point Foundation – Publisher, Whole Earth Magazine & Catalog

There are hundreds of examples like this of grassroots organizations springing up organically around a simple desire to help. Social media allows them to quickly spread the word to their networks and if the idea is valid it’s likely to take off very quickly.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Facebook is now allowing the creation of “vanity URL’s” on their site. In other words, instead of your link to your Facebook page being Facebook.com/people/youruser/w35235y050 it can now be your user name like so “http://www.facebook.com/jfouts “.

Since Facebook opened the floodgates just a short while ago over 500,000 people have registered their user names. So go to Facebook and register your name if you think it’s important to retain it for branding purposes or otherwise.

One small thought before you go. Once you set your Facebook user name you can’t change it (for that email address anyway) so take a moment to think about what you want it to be. Many people use Facebook for just their friends and family and don’t relate it to business at all. Do you really want all of your Linkedin and Twitter friends to friend you on Facebook too? If you keep more personal information on Facebook as opposed to your other networks maybe not.  True, if they really want to find you on Facebook they can, but maybe having it be default makes it too easy?

By the way, Facebook page owners will also be able to register their business name. For the moment it’s only for businesses with over 1,000 users for the page, but as of  June 28, 2009 any small business will be able to register their business Facebook page as well. For now you’ll have to make do with filing a notice of Trademark violation if you feel that is the case.

I know I’ve told you it’s important to build a network of social media profiles to grow your visibility, deliver your message more broadly and gain more opportunities to learn from your connections, but I do not subscribe to the belief that mega-networks really pay off. At least not all by themselves. That said, I had a sort of revelation a few weeks ago that changed my mind and helped me see how a large network really could be useful.

I have a couple of monster-networker friends on Linkedin. I’ve always sort of pooh-pooh ed the “LION‘s and the people who had thousands of connections of Linkedin as multi-level-marketing opportunists who figured the more connections they had the more likely the spam they kept throwing out would find a home somewhere. So I pretty much avoided connecting with people who had a LION designation or had thousands of followers.

I answered a question on Linkedin, the person thanked me and asked me to join her network. She’s a mega Linkedin Q&A person, and I could tell from her answers that she gave them some thought and really tried to be helpful. So I connected. Over the last few years I’ve only gotten helpful posts from her, the occasional newsletter, but she’s never once tried to sell me anything. I figured she’s a rare exception to the rule, and when I see something I think will be useful in her business, I send her a shout.

We live thousands of miles apart, so we never connected face to face, but we’ve sort of stayed in touch and whenever there is a Linkedin event in my ‘hood, I often hear about it from her first. That’s how I met mega-networker #2. He was holding an event in San Francisco to meet some of his connections and she passed along the invite to her network in the bay area. I met some really great people at this networking event, and I learned quite a few things about how a real networker creates both a large network and strong relationships. I watched how he made introductions, then encouraged the others to connect and talk among themselves. The event was not about him. It was about the network.

See, the network by itself is only a list of names, job descriptions and resumes. In order to make a humongous network useful you have to go deeper than just making connections. You have to find out about people and connect to them on a deeper level. You need find commonality and a way to be useful to each other. Traveling to a conference in a far away town? Take a look at your network and find out who lives there. Where should you eat? What should you do? Do they have time for coffee? Somebody in your network holding an event you wish you could attend? Who else in your network might like to know about it?

Of course it’s likely you’ll never meet many of the connections you make face to face unless you attend networking events. How else can you be helpful and a valuable addition to their network? Read their blogs and comment or share the link with your networks. Send them an email about something you think they might not know about. Really take the time to find out who they are and why you’re happy to know them. Once you understand what their needs are, start connecting people within your network to each other. You are only the center of your own network from your perspective. Everybody else see it from a different viewpoint.

All this is to say that after all this time I finally see not all mega-networkers are spammers. There truly are people out there who understand the value of relationships and have large networks. So as we’re getting ready for another #FollowFriday on Twitter, take a moment to think about your networks. Who is adding so much value you can’t help but want to share them with the rest of your connections? I think you’ll see it’s worth the time.

<img src=”http://img.skitch.com/20090421-qbg3aujtsys66mk913igmfwkmb.jpg” alt=” Ben and Jerry’s” align=”left”/><p>Ben and Jerry’s put the social in social media</p>

Today is Ben and Jerry’s Free Cone Day, and to celebrate it I’d like to celebrate Ben and Jerry’s for being the progressive and social company they are. What’s more social than an ice cream social? Let’s face, ice cream is the foundation of social media today and it goes waay back before the internets.

Ben and Jerry’s as a company was into word of mouth marketing and social responsiblility before it was the cool thingfor corporations to do. They started tthe ben and jerry’s foundation in 1985 which donates just over a million dollars each year to worthy organizations and this list of grants is pretty impressive. They also do an annual report on the company’s environmental impact and what they’re doing for the environment.

But what are they doing in social media today? Well, for one I bet your favorite flavor has a Twitter profile. (mine is Cherry GarciaI think it likely that Obama’s is Yes Pecan!). There’s also a Facebook page, and you can log into the flavors section of their website using FaceBook connect, choose your favorite flavor and save it to your profile.

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• Yes Pecan! TakesPart Some More (takepart.com)
• It’s Free Cone Day? Mostly (chicagoist.com)

Recently we’ve seen a lot more games and contests on Twitter vying for attention. A couple I’ve been involved in, the Social Media Trivia Quiz for Composica and Twickets for the Pinot Wine Summit, were quite successful at building visibility quickly and fun to boot. Social media seems to be populated with legions of games that promote and entertain at the same time. Why not? We’re here at least in part to have fun right?

This post on Social Signal showed up in my RSS feeds the other day and Alexandra shares some really good tips for how you can reap the rewards of our need to play without spending big bucks to do it. She uses Twitter as an example, but there are lots of other social media tools that can be effective to get the word out and engage current and new users.

• ForRent.com is running a video contest right now called “Ready2Move“. win $10,000 for telling the story of why YOU need to move.
• Opera (the browser) ran a contest to build their following called Facebook on Speed Dial and gained 600 new members for the price of a few stickers and t-shirts.
• Beyond contests, some companies have had success with Twitter coupons, like the ones sent by twtQpon.

Not all contests go as planned. Molson ran a Facebook contest asking users to send pictures of themselves partying it up with Molson. Um, dumb idea? It became apparent pretty quickly that people reveal a bit too much about themselves on Facebook on occasion (oopsie), and the campaign was pulled.

So, what have you got to promote? How can I help you with that?