Facebook recently announced their new “Places” feature which allows you to check-in at any location and send it as an update to your Facebook profile and will show in the Recent Activity on the Places page for that location . The Places feature is similar to other geo-location services like Foursquare and GoWalla.  By checking in with Facebook Places, you can also see or find out if any of your other Facebook friends are also checked in at the same place or who are nearby. This can be helpful is everyone is attending the same event and you all agree to check in as a way to find each other.

Everyone on Facebook has the option to set who can see your Places check-ins as well as whether or not you want to allow any of your Facebook friends to check you in or tag you where they are. You will want to review these options closely in your Privacy settings and set them accordingly. Specifically, look for Places related privacy setting in the “Things I Share” and “Things Others Share” sections. Also, in the Application and Websites setting, there is a setting in “Info accessible through your friends” that includes Places I Check Into. However, you decide to set your Place privacy settings is up to you, but it’s good to be aware of where to find them and what information or access is available to your Friends or others on Facebook.

You can check-in with Facebook Places by downloading Facebook’s application for the iPhone or by logging into Facebook’s mobile site with your Android phone. You can access it at touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation.

Facebook put out this video, Facts about Tagging and Places, this week which provides a good overview of how the new feature works.

If you have a brick and mortar business, then you’ll want to be on the lookout for an upcoming post about how to claim your business’ Place on Facebook and how to get it merged with your Facebook Page.

Image courtesy of Facebook

Lots of people (including me) say automation can be the death of conversation on the internet. The idea is that if all of your content is pumped out through automated channels and even your private messages are automated that there is no conversation at all. You might as well talk to your PC. While I stand by this in principle in practice, there are some places for leeway.

Let’s say every morning you spend an hour over your rss feeds and surf for news and good information to share with your networks. Do you dump all that great stuff on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin all at once? That would be a waste. By the time someone could have responded you’ve moved on to the next topic. People can’t keep up so they quit trying. THAT is the death of conversation (too).

So, what to do? Take a look at Objective Marketer. This tool can spread that load of great content over a day or even more. Got an upcoming event to remind your followers about? You can set OM up to tweet a countdown or post a series of clues to where the party will be on your Facebook page. Set up a series of posts timed to go with a conference or presentation you’re giving, complete with the links you promised them in your talk. They’ll be impressed at how on top of it you are!

Rather than being a tool to spam your network it allows you to spoon feed them interesting bits of content and information and then sit back and do the actual conversing when they respond.

Janet created these videos to show you how to use this tool. There will be more added in the future, so be sure to come back and check. In the meantime be sure to sign up for a free trial account on Objective Marketer and use these tips to try it out.

Setting up accounts

Creating Campaigns

Scheduling Posts

Landing pages

note: The link above is an affiliate link. We truly believe in this product or we wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to create the videos or this post. We hope you find it useful and help support us by using that link to get a free demo of Objective Marketer.

LinkedIn announced last week the addition of a Promotions tab to Groups where members can post sales and promotions. The Promotions tab will be helpful in cleaning up the discussions area and helping members to more easily find discussions they might be interested in. It’s not uncommon to find a whole page of the discussions are with group members posting announcements of webinars, trainings or other business offers. Now with the new Promotions tab, this moves those postings from the discussions area and will help facilitate discussion.

You also have the ability to flag a post in the discussions  as a promotion and move it to the Promotions tab. Anticipating that members will continue to post promotions in the discussion area because it is a higher visibility area, LinkedIn implemented this feature to empower members with some element of control in helping moderate the discussions area and keeping it restricted to discussions. This means that members must also help and be vigilant about flagging inappropriate posts in the discussions area.

Another newly released feature is a section called Group Rules. This allows group moderators to create and post the rules for the group so all members can easily find and review the rules of the group. Previously, there was no section for this so rules either ended up in the Group Summary or was posted permanently at the top of the Discussions area.

LinkedIn users who frequently look through or participate in Groups will welcome these new features. It appears these features along with other recent changes to the Groups area, indicate that LinkedIn is making an effort to help clean up Groups and make them more user friendly and less full of spam. Many Groups on LinkedIn have either been over-run by spammers or abandoned by their moderators which generally have the effect of driving down member participation. With these features and changes, Groups will become a more useful networking and information exchange tool for LinkedIn users.

Facebook surprised some of it’s users last week by announcing the layout changes will finally go live on August 23.

If you administer pages you may have already seen it in the pages you manage.(Admins are getting Up to now a user created tab could be as wide as 760 pixels wide, giving you plenty of room to create a great looking page with lots of content and make that the landing page when users visit the page.

As of the 23rd of August that’s going to change to just 520 pixels wide, dramatically reducing the real estate and messing up a whole lot of great looking pages.

Most of the big companies have changed their layouts already like the Gap, and some like Victoria’s Secret seem to be in transition. We cropped the page below to show you the difference.

Current Tab Width

New Width 520

Needless to say it’s got Facebook app developers scrambling to catch up, so if you need a Facebook page created you should keep the new sizes in mind and be patient as you look for an app developer.

By the way if your developer didn’t let you know about this it’s not really their fault. Although the changes were announced a while ago there actual date they were going into effect were vague at best and even denied from time to time. Many developers took a “wait and see” attitude or decided to let the pages go as long as possible to keep them looking great. Currently there is no tagging to allow a dynamic change so you either wait or change now and live with it.

You can’t help but wonder what they’re going to do with that extra space. Two columns of ads perhaps?

Boxes are changing too
Besides the size change it’s important to note that boxes will disappear from your profile and pages shortly too. To find applications that once were in your boxes users will have to bookmark those apps instead. Here’s a really great post from Bryan Person on how to manage the boxes  change.

I saw this video and just wanted to share with you some thoughts on blogging for business.

Blogging can help you put down on paper what makes your business the one that everybody should flock to instead of the other guy’s. And that’s YOU.

YOU are the heart and soul of your business and if you aren’t you should be. When you blog, it allows you to talk with your readers about industry trends and events that shape the way you do business. It allows you to reveal how passionate you are about what you do and why it should matter to them too. It sets your business apart from the shop next door by distinguishing what makes you special. Blogging allows you to reach out to your community and other bloggers who have important things to say too and offer their thoughts and opinions to your readers too. Blogging allows you to finely tune your message to the world through the process of writing it. You have to really think about what message you’re sending, collect data and provide insight, and that makes you better at what you do. It can be like a mini retreat where you think about one particular facet of your business at a time, turn it in your mind until it all becomes clear.

When a reader develops a bond with you on your blog they are much more likely to care about your business. Here’s what Seth Godin and Tom Peters have to say about it. What do you think?

Recently there have been several injection exploit attacks on Wordpress through specific hosting companies. Godaddy, Network Solutions, and most recently Media Temple hosted sites were targeted for the attacks.

The one I just dealt with on this blog (and 23 of my own and client blogs) was called JohnnyA. It inserted a Javascript that re-directed my site to a spam site and then spread PHP files through the site like fwrite.php, fclose.php, eregi.php and modified several including index.php. It created new users with admin permissions on some of the blogs affected. Once we got in there, it turned out there were more than one type of Javascript inserted so find and replace caught only some of them initially. And of course this happened less than an hour after we’d launched our new Wordpress Classes! Yucko.

Cleaning all this up requires knowing what to look for and finding it file by file including every file in the database. A hugely daunting task when you manage as many Wordpress installs as we do. Even though we’d taken a lot of precautions, we still got sucked into I signed up for service on Sucuri.net, a security consulting firm that scans and restores sites that have been attacked with Malware. I spent all weekend working with it. The team at Suciri went above and beyond to get me the information and tools I needed to get up and running quickly and their support team was helpful and responsive even outside of their posted support hours.

After running the scripts they gave me I spent the rest of the weekend tightening up all of the installs and making it at least a little harder to hack in. I know it’s not going to stop a dedicated hacker attack, but something more random might bounce off and Sucuri will let me know the minute it happens again so I can deal with it.

Now I have to say that although Media Temple initially sort of threw up their hands and passed the buck to Wordpress when they realized the damage it was going to do to their reputation they stepped up and created a bunch of support docs and the Media Temple support team made every effort to answer calls. That said many clients reported 30 minute or longer support queues which is not at all common on Media Temple.

Bottom line it could have been any server. Maybe it could have been handled differently but it IS true that not updating often enough and being a bit sloppy about making your Wordpress install secure is asking for trouble.

So, enough griping.
The fact is some of us have been lazy about security and that’s gotta stop now. It took me many hours of stress to resolve this, and a lot of frantic client calls in between. These kinds of things happen and as Wordpress is so popular, PHP based AND open source it’s bound to happen again. Should you change blogging platforms? Probably not. It could happen to any of them. So I’m sharing with you what I did to resolve it, how to know if something happens again, and some steps to take to make Wordpress secure. At least a little more secure than a standard install.

Set up an account with Sucuri
At least you’ll know when it happens the next time and the team at Sucuri will help you solve it before you lose everything.

Update Wordpress
Although Media Temple inferred that this didn’t happen on up-to-date installs that’s not true. I had updated several blogs to the most recent version and they still got hit. Still, update frequently. Here’s how to know when to update Wordpress.

Admin user name
It used to be the default for the admin username to be “admin”. WAY to easy to guess and then all they have to do is figure out the password. Set up a new user and give that user admin permissions. Then demote the old admin user name to subscriber, or if you haven’t got any posts associated with the admin user then delete it.

Database
Using the default name in your database tables “wp_yourdatabase” is asking for trouble. Many hosts give you the option of creating new names. Avoid using wp at all costs.

Login Lock down
Doesn’t it make sense that you don’t want an unlimited amount of login tries from the same IP address? That’s a common way for a hacker to find your password. This plugin blocks them after a set number of tries.

Secure Wordpress Plugin
This plugin removes code that is easy for a bot to find and link to Wordpress. It removes the version except in the admin area, sets permissions so only the admin is able to update plugins and themes etc and a slew of other things. They also offer a free security scan as well as a paid service on SiteSecurityMonitor.com

Windows Live Writer
This is notoriously vulnerable and so it makes your Wordpress install vulnerable too. Learn how to use Wordpress and you won’t need it.

Backups
Do regular backups of your database and your themes. That way if you have to restore them you won’t lose too much. If you’re using Amazon S3 there’s a great plugin to update directly to Amazon. WP S3 Backups.

Add a robots.txt file so search robots don’t index folders they don’t need to.
Here’s an example:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /spamming/
 Disallow: /wp-content/
 Disallow: /wp-includes/

It’s no secret that we think Wordpress is the best blogging platform, and we recommend it for Websites too. Wordpress can enable you to create an online presence for a fraction of what a traditional web site costs and have an easy to use content management system (CMS) to boot. Installing, configuring and training on Wordpress is a big part of our business at Tatu Digital.

Over the years we’ve gotten so used to using it that it’s pretty much second nature for us, but that’s not so for everyone. We get a lot of questions on how to use Wordpress, from basic “How do I create a page?” to how to install themes, using the editor, what plugins to use, etc., and it just makes sense to create a series of tutorials to share with our clients and the members of the Social Media Coaching Center.

It makes even more sense to offer it as a series of classes so that everybody can use it–for themselves or to offer to their own clients–(we’ve got an affiliate program) so we just launched Wordpress-Classes.com. There are over 20 tutorials in the series right now, something for all skill levels, and just for the launch period we’re offering the entire series for $20. Sign up now and you get access to all the tutorials we add later too.

When’s the price going to go up?

I don’t know yet. It depends on response and how many new tutorials we add. We’ve got to cover our costs after all and we can’t keep adding things and not raise the price.

Where are the new tutorials going to come from?

We’re asking our users to submit questions they need answers too. Who better to drive the process than the people who need it? We’ll create new ones based on that input and add them to the list. We already know we’ll be doing more tutorials on how to use the Thesis and Headway themes and some of our favorite plugins. We’re open to ideas and it’s built right into the classes.

Check out our Wordpress classes and help us spread the word. If you’re already a member of SMCC you can just skip to the Wordpress class list right here.

Wordpress gets frequent updates and you’re not always sure if, when, how or why you should update. This tutorial shows you how to upgrade your Wordpress install and how to decide if it’s time to update and what to look for before you hit that update button!

This post is part of Wordpress Class.

There are some amazing plugins and some that will make hash of your Wordpress install. The key is to know what you want, see if it works with your themes and version, then look at reviews and bug fixes to make sure it’s current and the reviews make sense. In general you can just un-install them if they break your Wordpress install, but it’s better not to have to do that.

The plugins listed here are some we use and trust as part of a standard installation. Your needs may vary! The links below go to the developers site but you can install them by searching for the titles in the “Add New” function of the Plugin control panel.

Akismet is the first step against spam. It comes already present but not activated when you install Wordpress.You will need to have an API key to use it but that’s easy. Go to Wordpress.com and create an account and you’ll get an API key to use with Akismet for free. We use it in tandem with other plugins to try to keep the majority of spam at bay.

Hello Dolly. As I say in the video, this is a cute and relatively harmless plugin that harkens back to the roots of Wordpress. It’s not activated and we find it irrelevant, but if you love old musicals go for it!

Login Lockdown keeps some extra security to your login process. Try to login too many times from the same IP address and it will shuty you down. It helps to have a great user/password combination but this keeps a bot from remotely trying forever until they get in.

Scribe is a search engine optimization script on steroids. It will teach you about SEO even if you think you already know all there is to know and it keeps you from being lazy when you write your posts. Here;s a link to Janet’s review of Scribe.

Flash Video Player with HTML5 is an easy to use player which will show your videos in the usual Flash player unless the browser doesn’t have Flash (like a phone or an iPad) and deliver it with HTML5 so they can view it.

Tweetmeme Retweet button allows you to add a link so readers can use Tweetmeme to tweet your post to their followers on Twitter.

W3 Total Cache Add database caching to make your page load faster and decrease server load. This is great when your blog gets mentioned on CNN or Digg and you get a huge load of traffic all at once!

Next Gen Gallery If you’ve got a lot of pictures this is a great way to organize and display them.

There are more of course. Feel free to add to the list in the comments!

QR codes are those funny looking blotchy boxes like the one you see to the right of this post. QR stands for Quick Response.They were originally developed in Japan as an inventory control tool and they’ve been using them for around 10 years now.

The code above is for the Social Media Coaching Center. We created it for free with Kaywa’s free QR code generator. Go try it for a phone number, a web site, a text message to whoever “reads” it or even have it send them a text message!

Take a picture of it with your phone or any one of the number of QR code readers out there and you can get more information about whatever it is, leave a comment about it, shop for it online or just record it for later. Think of them as interactive bookmarks.

Cool huh?

So, why is this social. Oh so easy to answer my friends. Think about how easy it is for you read a code like this and share it with your friends. There are rumors that Facebook will add them to your Facebook page so your friends could scan your QR code and save it for future reference. Being able to easily share information within your network, share data about a particular cause, item or location? Customers scanning a product and storing them on a QR network could bring their whole network to your door.

How are QR codes being used in the real world?

Real Estate
Savvy tech real estate agents are putting a QR code on Flyers and signs. A quick scan and you’ve got all the information on the house on your phone and you can text it to anyone you want to.

Hospitality
Scan the QR tag on the front door of many popular restaurants and then text the info to your friends complete with a map on how to get there, the hours and your favorite dish. (CitySearch is doing this now in shop windows in test cities like San Francisco).

Ticketing
Movie theatres are playing with the idea of a being able to buy your tickets by scanning the QR code. No paper.

Nonprofits
Imagine being able to donate to a nonprofit anywhere, anytime. You’re on a field trip with the Sierra Club and

Cities
Lost? Imagine scanning a QR code and getting a map with your current location.

Google
Google is offering QR codes for their “Favorite Places” service.

Shopping
Scan a code and get a discount and then share it with your friends. Scan a barcode on a product and see a review of the product left by another user.

Business cards
Show your inner geek with a QR code on the back of your business card with all your contact information.

Lifestream
Blogger Robert Scoble wore a t-shirt to SXSW with a QR Code that when scanned too you to his live Twitter stream of the event. You could do the same with FriendFeed, your RSS feeds for your blog or Flickr feed, anything you can link to.

OK, I’m hooked, where do I get a reader?

There are tons of ‘em. Not all work the same and some are specific to a particular type of design and layout of the code themselves (not all are square, barcodes and different shapes are also QR codes)

StickyBits

I first saw these at SXSW last year and it blew me away. Imagine sticking a post-it on anything you want and then adding data to share with anyone who finds it. Scan in a barcode on a product you purchased and leave a review for the next person who buys it. Attach a photo, music or even a downloadable PDF to any barcode.

The Kaywa Reader

How could we not like somebody who is letting us make free QR codes with their web site? In multiple languages no less? Oh…Cuz there isn’t an iPhone app yet. But if you’ve got a Motorola, Nokia, Sony or several others it will work for you.

Inigma

This is one of the best readers I’ve used. It captures the picture quickly and doesn’t lock up if it can’t see the code correctly as some readers do. They also have an option to make and download your own barcodes codes.

BeeTagg

Like several others, BeeTagg has a proprietary design but it reads other tags too. It works on most smart phones including Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm, Windows and Symbian. You can brand the tags with a logo, though that seems to escape the point?

Quickmark

Quickmark works on practically every phone and it reads quickly, is easy to use, and has probably the best online “how-to’s”.

Caveat!

QR codes are not secure. Don’t put your secrets in a QR code (yet).