Joe Ciulla just watched the Socialcam video “Great white shark eats gangster beating up girlfriend”

Don’t you hate it when your Facebook timeline is filled up with posts saying what videos or articles your friends are watching on

• Socialcam
• Viddy
• Yahoo reader
• Washington Post, et cetera

especially since you know your friends didn’t want you to see what they were reading/watching.

Here’s how you stop your friends from seeing what you are watching:

• click Facebook in the upper left hand corner
• in the upper right, beside Home click the arrow
• click Account Settings
• on the left, click Apps
• Yikes.  There are probably a bunch of them.
• to remove an app, on the right, click the X.  Great tip – to remove a bunch quickly, click the X, then when it asks for a confirmation, click Enter with your left hand, and that one will be deleted, but the next one will have its X under the mouse.  Rinse, lather, repeat.
• if you want to keep the app, but not have everyone see what you read, click Edit.  The 3rd line down says “Posts on your behalf”.  On the right, click Edit, then “Only me”.

Now the rest of the world can’t see your white shark gangster fetish.

You’re welcome.

P.S.  those videos are never as good as the posts make them appear to be.

You have extra season tickets for Red Sox games.  I’ll show you how to use LinkedIn to make great business connections, and maybe someday get some new referrals and sales.

Details:

A favorite client

One of my favorite clients, named Vology, in Tampa, Florida, is an award winning computer reseller, selling computer networking equipment like Juniper routers.  They brought me down to teach their sales people how to use LinkedIn and Twitter to make more sales.

They have season tickets to the Tampa Bay Rays games (3rd row behind home plate) and arranged the seminar so that I trained them during the day, and we went to see the Red Sox play the Rays that night.  Awesome.

I asked them what they do if they can’t find a client to take their season tickets for a game.  They said that they’d typically give them to employees or corporate friends.

Innovative relationship technique: use LinkedIn to make “influential friends” using your tickets

I gave them an idea that was worth the price of admission.   I said that they should find Chief-level officers from Tampa on LinkedIn that liked baseball, and ask them to the game.  How?  Do an Advanced Search with:

• Title: Chief
• Location: within 50 miles of Tampa
• Keywords: baseball or rays

This way, they could find anyone with the word “Chief” in their title who liked baseball so much that they put “Baseball” or “Rays” in their profile.  There are 11 matches.

Now track them down and make the most fun cold call ever:

You: “Want to go to the Rays game tomorrow night?  Third row behind the plate.  Free premium buffet.”
Them: “What’s the catch?”
You: “No catch.  We do this 10 times a year, and we make friends with other baseball fans.”

Think that some of them some might give you some great referrals?  Think you’ll have a great time regardless?

How cool is that idea?

Invite me to a game.

Join my newsletter

This is a tip that I sent out in my newsletter last summer.  Sign up for my newsletter of awesomeness and you could get tips like this before I put them in my blog.

Good luck out there.

If you use PowerPoint, and want to jump to slide number 51 quickly (instead of pressing the Right Arrow 51 times), put in slide number, then Enter.

Details:

I wanted to give you a quick tip from my newsletter last summer, which you could have gotten 6 months ago if you got my newsletters – so sign up in the upper right hand corner of this page!

In the video below, I show where I explained it at a keynote speech, and they applauded for it, admittedly after I told them to.

Problem:

When you get out of a PowerPoint presentation to show another file, like a video, internet site, et cetera, it isn’t always trivial to jump back to the slide number where you left off.

Solution:

In a PowerPoint Slide Show, if you want to jump to slide number 51, type in 51, then Enter, and PowerPoint will jump to slide number 51, as I show in the video at the top.

Cool, huh?   Be careful out there.

LinkedIn may now use your picture to advertise other products.  Change privacy settings if you don’t like this.

Details:

LinkedIn is doing “social advertising”, which means that they can use your picture in LinkedIn ads that are shown to your connections to advertise products that you might not endorse.  Your connections may be misled and think you endorse them, depending on how savvy they are.  (Facebook did this at one point, and most people hated it).

LinkedIn was probably using my picture to “get attention from the ladies”.

Here’s how you stop it:

1. Hover your cursor over your name in the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page
2. Click Settings
3. In the lower left, click “Account”
4. In the top middle, click “Manage Social Advertising”
5. Uncheck and Save

Call LinkedIn and offer to sell the use of your picture for $500,000 per year, as I did.

Still waiting.

Do you care if they use your picture?

You can start a YouTube video at some point other than the beginning by using the #t option.

Details:

I love this tip.

Problem:

You want to show someone a video, but you don’t want them to waste their time with the introduction, or you just want them to see a small portion, but its 2 minutes and 2 seconds into the video.  You could just tell them to start at 2 minutes and 2 seconds into the video, but here’s how you make them automatically do it.

Solution:

Add the option #t=2m02s to the URL, where the “2m” tells Youtube “2 minutes” and “02s” means “2 seconds”.  For example, there’s a very funny, short African frog video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEzvdlYRes

If you wanted to start it 7 seconds into the video, use the URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEzvdlYRes#t=0m07s


Another example, and embedded YouTube video

You can also do this in embedded videos.  For instance, on my demo video, I bring in my Mom 23 seconds into the video at Start embedded YouTube video at different start time

Save your friends some time with this feature.

Cool, huh?

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:

Before you call a prospect, check their interests.  Or you can look for interests in a “reverse direction”.

Details:

If you are

• cold calling
• calling a new prospect
• meeting someone for the first time

you should have some way to start the conversation.  If you care cold calling, you need some way to get their attention in the first 5-10 seconds, since most prospects don’t have time for idle chatter.

LinkedIn tip

Look at the prospect’s LinkedIn profile and look at their “Interests”, which are at the bottom.  This is a clever technique that very few people use.

Real example of scrutinizing a LinkedIn profile:

When I went to do the keynote in the video above, I knew I would meet the CEO of AMS, Jim Bourdon.  I looked at his profile and noticed that he listed “golf” among his interests.  Therefore, the first thing I started talking to him about was golf, and the conversation went effortlessly.

Using interests in “reverse” fashion:

Let’s say that your target prospect is typically a CFO, and you are trying to get some new prospects to join you for a golf outing near Boston.  Try the following – do an advanced search in LinkedIn with the following search

• Title: “chief financial officer” OR cfo
• Keywords: golf OR golfing
• Location: near Boston

Now take a look at the results, and the CFOs that you contact will probably be much more interested in your golf offer.

There are even better, smarter, and more efficient ways to do this, and we teach them in our training sessions, which are full of awesomeness.  Call (617)-PATRICK for more.

Go forth and prospect.

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?”

There’s a new sleazy technique that spammers are using to get an account with lot of Twitter followers, and got 20,000 a day using the “Charlie Sheen” effect.  The trick?  Create a charliesheen account, but replace the lowercase “L” with and uppercase “I”.

Details:

On the day I wrote this blog entry, Charlie Sheen was the biggest thing in the news, outdoing

• Spring training
• An NFL strike
• two wars
• uprisings in Libya and Egypt
• whatever Justin Bieber is doing

By the time you read this, I assume Charlie Sheen will be dead, probably from “abdominal pain”.

Regardless, a sleazy spammer figured out a way to get 24,000+ followers in a day by exploiting Charlie’s fame.

Here are the facts and techniques:

• Charlie Sheen had one of the craziest TV interviews of all time, which was completely nuts and completely entertaining, and created new words and phrases like “tiger blood”, “Adonis DNA” and “bi-winning”
• Parts are shown in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aSa4tmVNM
• Charlie creates a Twitter account, and gets over 1 million followers in the first day – unprecedented in Twitter history
• New hashtags appear which are related to Charlie, including #tigerblood, #teamsheen, and some others which become Trending Topics due to their popularity

This is where it gets interesting from a Twitter point of view.  Someone creates an account called charliesheen, but since charliesheen was already taken, they created an account that is spelled the same, but they replace the lowercase “L” with an uppercase “I”, which looks identical when you look at the Twitter name in the font that Twitter uses.

Sleazy. Nerdy.  Clever.

They also choose the same picture that Charlie uses on his real account.  No one would type in charliesheen with an uppercase “I” instead of a lowercase “L”. but if you search for sheen, or click on the hashtags to see what all the fuss is about, you’ll see tweets from the fake account.  If you click on the (since the human eye can’t detect the wrong spelling), you see a brand new account with 24,000+ followers, and you’d probably think it was him, so you might follow him.

Why do this?  One reason is that some nerds and hackers just love to get away with it.

Another is that after a few days, they will probably have a Twitter account with 50,000 followers.  If they now change their name to something like Make_More_Money the account will look authoritative because it has such a huge following, without following anyone back, which is almost impossible to fake.

There isn’t much you and I could do about this other than flagging the account as spam.  Twitter should see it and fix it, and should change their font to minimize the possibility of this being done again.  In fact, if you look at a similar account on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/charIiesheen you can clearly see that the lowercase “L” was replace with an uppercase “I”.

Regardless, I thought it was an interesting study.

Therefore I rant.

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…