Mention new media or social media to anyone, and very likely they will instantly get a picture in their mind of a young person using Internet-dependent technology.

A college freshman tries Twitter to impress his friends by sharing scathing opinions about Lady Gaga’s newest hit.  A grad student suffers the indignities of being accused of a new addiction known as Facebook friend whoring Okay, these are deliberately sarcastic examples, but doesn’t it seem true that the Internet, iPhones, blogging, wikis, and all of social media are tools of youth?

I frequently am asked: “Isn’t this social media stuff only for young people?”

Every day I use these so-called tools of youth even though I was born into the ancient world before there was cable television, MTV, personal computers and the Internet.  I regularly use terms like Web 2.0 and social media and Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.  But, it all boils down to one thing–the effective use of today’s communication technologies to find answers to give clients that will help them respond wisely to their challenges and organizational needs.

It is a prominent myth that Internet-based tools have some sort of built-in relationship to how many birthdays the user has enjoyed.  I happen to think that popular way of thinking is completely false.  I believe that there is a more accurate way to think and work.

If you are helping someone (a client) use the Internet, the age of the organization might be a consideration.  Some agencies of the US federal government, for instance, had origins in the late 1700s.  The problems, needs and challenges of any mature organization–even ones that are not yet hundreds of years old–can be expected to predate the Internet, Google, Twitter, and Facebook.  Yet, because of the power of such well-known brand names, your clients may ask (or sometimes demand) that you give them these tools to address their business needs.

When any company sends in young-looking people to talk to potential clients about the benefits of using social media, that can be a problem.  It is not a good thing if the decision-makers at those potential clients accept the myth that social media are “tools of youth”.  Why would a potential client need your help since they already employ young people who are using the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth?

If you want to be successful incorporating social media into solutions for your clients’ needs, I suggest that you switch your thinking so that you perceive of such Internet-based tools as blogs, microblogs, social tagging, and whatever else, using the most basic and accurate context.

Start by asking a few essential questions:  How do these tools work?  What do they do?  Do the ways in which these tools work provide functions or benefits that otherwise would not be available to a person?  How do we adapt the messages we want to send to audience so that the audience will accept what we send?  Those are the most basic and accurate starting points before you even should think about Twitter versus Facebook or other choices.

I believe that the age of the user is not a relevant factor when asking questions about what such tools can do.  The way such tools work is identical whether you are 17 or 71.  Of course, a person may have a resistance to accepting and using new technology and new tools that use technology.  But, such resistence to new things and new ways is not an accompanying trait of normal aging like gray hair. 

Public-facing websites have existed for less than 20 years now.  Yet, the successful methods by which websites can communicate with online visitors using text, still pictures, moving pictures and audio have existed for a much longer period of time. Having skills and talents in writing, in producing still pictures or moving pictures and audio matter as much (if not more) if you are being paid to create and launch a website that uses such methods to reach a target audience.

We’ve all seen websites that appear to have been built in half an hour by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.  Colors clash.  Words are unwisely chosen.  The audio is at too low a level to be clearly heard.  Images and/or videos are out of focus.  Or maybe the camera jerks around from side to side like on episodes of Battlestar Galactica.  We also have seen tweets and Facebook pages that evidence zero awareness on the user’s part about how to get a simple point across.

Skills, talents and experience in communication are required for those who would use the so-called “tools of youth” available today.  You can be young and effective only if you have some essential communication skills and talents.  But, a person’s youth alone will never substitute for an effective skills set in communications using social media regardless of how technically adept a person might be.

The true selling point for your potential clients is not that you can bring exciting and cool social media to address an organization’s problems and needs.  Anyone can start a website or get a free Twitter account.  The future of successful online communications belongs to those who have skills, talents and experience in communication and who can adapting messages to target audiences using Internet technology.

Here are some basic first steps you can take in establishing your Facebook presence is to select a unique username unused by anyone else that is all one word and has no spaces or punctuation.  Ideally, your personal or organizational or campaign brand should be reflected in your username to make it easy for searches within Facebook to find your presence. 

Example:  If your brand is Blue Wolf Den Mothers, your username should be bluewolfdenmothers.

The URL that Facebook will create for you will be based on your username, but your URL will also contain various codes and numbers that you cannot control.  So, you will likely end up with a long URL that will not be able to be promoted in print or by word of mouth.

Use a Shortened URL

Each time that you promote your Facebook presence online (such as using Twitter) you should always rely upon a shortened URL so that you never have to use a long string of characters.  Shortened URLs can be created easily and at no charge using http://bit.ly/ or http://tinyurl.com/ or in several other ways online.

Essential Ingredients for a Facebook Presence

Image: After you create your Facebook presence, you should next use or create an image that visually represents your personal or organizational or campaign brand.  A picture of a person may not necessarily be the best visual representation.  A simple, yet effective, visual representation of your brand would be to use what is known as a text treatment—letters and/or other text characters that are presented visually in an interesting manner.  Bold or Italics are effective text treatments even if you are producing your visual representation without using any colors. 

However, if you do use colors in your visual representation, you should take care that the colors go together well and look appealing together.  For example, using a green background with red letters would not be a sensible choice since these colors clash when used together.

When producing your visual representation, you will want to end up with a square image in which all four sides are of equal dimensions.  This is necessary because Facebook crops and shrinks images so that they appear as a square.  You will want to avoid producing a visual representation that is rectangular in shape in which the width is greater than the height.  After Facebook crops and shrinks the image, rectangular images will display only what is in the very center and the remainder of the image will not be visible when displayed.

The file size of your image must not exceed 4 MB or Facebook will not upload it.  Facebook controls how your image is displayed, so it is best if you use a square image that is under 4 MB in size.  Facebook crops and shrinks images, so you are not able to control how your image appears throughout Facebook other than to make it square.

Text Descriptions: Throughout Facebook, there are various places where you can enter text to describe why you have set up a presence there. 

The “Wall” on Facebook is like a home page where there are opportunities for you to place text descriptions.  Using your wall on Facebook to communicate is very easy.  You type in characters in a text box to answer the question “What’s on your mind?” What you type appears on your wall on Facebook.  You or someone will need to type in text in your wall or Facebook or it will remain blank, which is undesirable. 

You can also insert text into “Boxes” on Facebook that you can positions in various places through the pages on Facebook that you control You will need to use text characters as economically as possible since Facebook sets limits on how many total characters can be used.  You can easily modify any text that you place on Facebook, so getting the most effective use of our your text descriptions is just a matter of practice.

Photos: Beyond your square visual representation image, Facebook also allows for posting of additional images, which are called photos.  Even though the name photos suggest that you need to post only photographs, on Facebook you can post any of the common digital image formats.  The images that you post within the photos section on your Facebook presence should be related to the reasons why you established a presence there.  Posting unrelated imagery will dilute the effectiveness of your Facebook presence.

Links: Of course, your Facebook presence should feature a link to your website.  It is common practice to use Facebook as a way to generate traffic to websites.  But, you should also link from your website to your Facebook presence because doing so suggests that you are savvy in the use of social media.  Your Facebook presence also can present links to other websites than your own, but posting links that are unrelated to your reasons for having a Facebook presence will add unwanted clutter and also dilute your effectiveness on Facebook.

Applications: There are an ever increasing number of applications that can be used on your Facebook presence.  You will need to weigh the benefits to you or your organization or campaign when choosing which applications you want to use on your Facebook presence.  For instance, just because you can set up a message board on your Facebook presence does not mean that you should do so.  You will need to evaluate whether you want to add applications that enable access by other Facebook users to post content on your Facebook presence.

One of the most desirable applications you can use on Facebook is RSS (Real Simple Syndication) because this enables you to pull in content from elsewhere online.  One particularly effective use of RSS would be to pull in your Twitter feed so that it displays on your Facebook presence.  Doing so would provide your Facebook presence with fresh content automatically and unattended.

You may want to establish a Twitter account that you can use as a source of your RSS feed into your Facebook presence.  But, you can also use RSS to pull in content if you have a message board and blog.  You should not pull in RSS feeds to your Facebook presence that are unrelated to you reasons for using Facebook because these will add unwanted clutter and also dilute your effectiveness on Facebook.

Fans and Friends

Social media tools commonly use software that automate interactions between people.  This is often generically known as “friending” online.  Facebook allows for one to become a friend of an individual and a fan of a celebrity, business, campaign, or organization.  By whatever name, this is friending.

Your use of Facebook should be to bring together likeminded people or campaigns or organizations so that you can spread awareness about you and your campaign or organization.  This automated friending using Facebook software is the number one reason for anyone to use Facebook.  When you friend someone, you become connected through Facebook to them.  This, in turn, connects you to all those who are connected to that someone.  This connecting or networking of people via Facebook can quickly expand your connections to ever increasingly large numbers of other people.  What you type on your wall on Facebook also appears on the Facebook presence of everyone to whom you are connected as a friend or fan.  This is the second most important reason for one to use Facebook.  Depending on the total size of your friend or fan base, what you type into your wall can get very widely distributed to many readers via Facebook.  This use of your wall should become an ongoing responsibility for you or someone who represents you.

Note that any images that you post on your Facebook presence will also get distributed out to all who are your friends or fans.  You can easily distribute images in this manner to promote yourself, your campaign, or your organization.  Posting of images can be an ongoing maintenance responsibility should you choose to post images on a consistent basis.

The ongoing maintenance of a Facebook presence also will involve managing the friending function.  Specifically, you or someone will need to log on to Facebook on a regular basis to friend others so that your network of connections will grow.  One can unfriend someone as well.  This simply involves disconnecting from someone by making a choice to disconnect using the Facebook software.  The person who gets disconnected or unfriended is not notified by Facebook automatically, so you need not worry about seeming rude or ruthless if ever you choose to unfriend on Facebook.

Advertising

In the right sidebar on Facebook is advertising that is solely controlled by Facebook.  In effect, your use of Facebook gives Facebook permission to place advertising on the right side of each page that you use on Facebook.  You cannot control the content of this advertising.  Note that Facebook will use text parsing to select what particular advertising will appear on the right side of your Facebook pages.  For example, if you happen to use the word wolf anywhere in the text or tags on your Facebook presence, you can expect advertising may appear on the right side that contains that word such as from Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.  You should expect that there may be untended consequences of text parsing and an advertisement may appear on the right side of your Facebook page that you will not want associated with you or your reasons for using Facebook.

You can also pay to advertise your Facebook presence or your external website throughout Facebook.  This use of paid advertising throughout Facebook is entirely optional.  You can control how much money you spend on such Facebook advertising by limiting the exact dollar amount per day based on the number of clicks or impressions.  If you choose the Facebook Pay for Clicks model, you will need to bid on how much you are willing to pay for each click on your ad.  The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.  If you choose the Facebook Pay for Views model, you will need to bid on how much you are willing to pay for every thousand impressions of your ad.  The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.  Note that paying for such advertising is an effective way to increase the number of Facebook friends or fans that you have.  A higher number of Facebook friends or fans increases your reach for your messages and imagery.

Taken in April 2009 in Tysons Corner, VA.

If you plan to start gardening of a site for your organization, here are five basic best practices that you will want to keep in mind:

(1) Perhaps most important of all:  Preserve your ideas in text form somewhere (not necessarily on the site itself) so that what you know and believe about the processes of gardening does not reside only inside your head.  Even though turning the inside-your-head stuff into text that will reside in a Word document or even in html may seem threatening, you need to do this step.  If you choose to rely on keeping your ideas for process inside your head--which some people will just love to do--it is far better to take the time to transfer ideas into text.  The now-standard answer to justify why you should do transfer to text from stuff inside your head is kind of brutal and violent, but here goes:  What if you were to get hit by a bus tomorrow?  So, the first step is to write down your ideas and processes for gardening.  And, remember to look both ways before crossing streets where a bus may be heading in your direction!

(2) You should strive to balance your organization’s process requirements with an open and collaborative spirit.  That open and collaborative spirit should be genuine rather than someone’s idea of what should be happening at your organization.  Try not to lock down the processes so rigidly that you end up killing the spirit of gardening.  It is natural that people will be turned off by too many restrictions, rules and regs.

(3) Select only those individuals who will lead your organization’s gardening efforts who have proven people skills.  So much of your organization’s day-to-day gardening work may end up relying more upon interpersonal communication skills than on Web 2.0 theories and principles.  Here’s a horrible secret:  Sometimes, people who work with today’s technology are not so good at interpersonal communication.  So, go the extra distance to select individuals who will lead your organization’s gardening efforts who have a track record of being able to interact smoothly with people.  Let me be even more controversial:  Don’t put anyone who is hot-headed or frustrated or impatient into a lead role in your organization’s gardening efforts. 

(4) Just because someone went to a major university doesn’t make them an expert in gardening.  This means that in addition to looking for individuals to lead your organization’s gardening efforts who have proven people skills, you should be very careful if you hire people to get involved in gardening at your organization who are fresh out of their undergraduate degree program.  It is always preferable to hire a person who has some full-time experience working on websites and editing of online content after their undergraduate degree program than it is to hire someone immediately after their graduation.  Let other organizations have the honor of being that essential first job after graduation.

(5) You can always train someone with little or no Web 2.0 experience to be conversant in your organization’s culture and online communication (whether that be with public-facing sites or with sites that are for internal communication only).  This means that you need not seek only people who have Web 2.0 experience when you are trying to hire the best possible candidates for your organization’s gardening efforts.  The bottom line is that when you select those who will work in your organization’s gardening efforts, you really should look for individuals with demonstrate strongly effective interpersonal skills, above-average intelligence, proven adaptability and flexibility amid rapidly-changing work environments, and, an enthusiasm for doing gardening.

I’ve been told that I have “a green thumb”.  What that meant when I was a kid:  The person knows how to care for and nurture living plants so that they remain living plants.  I maintain one house plant today and I treat it (him? her?) well and this living wonder has been kept alive for ten or more years now.

I got involved in gardening when I moved here to the Washington, DC market in 1995.  And I’m not referring to caring for living plants and using soil and fertilizer and all that.  The gardening that I’m referring to here is the kind that happens online and is really all about keeping a website fresh and friendly for the visitors.

If you Google the word gardening, you mostly get the kind that refers to living plants.  Even if you use the keywords online gardening, you still mainly end up with sites that present gardening (of living plants) online.  Calling those online gardening is kind of false advertising I think.

What I got into in the 1990s was never called gardening.  It was then called editorial management, which sounds an awful lot more important than gardening, doesn’t it?  And, I’ve never had to explain to anyone that editorial management has nothing to do with caring for living plants!  Although, I think it would be honest to admit that sometimes editorial management does have some connection to fertilizer.

So, as the years went on and old words got new definitions—suddenly bomb was a good thing and bad was not bad anymore—this thing I do with websites became known as gardening.  I’ve seen the founder of Wikipedia credited with coming up with the use of gardener to describe the job function of keeping a site (usually a wiki) all nice and neat.  I wish he had come up with something else instead.  I can only imagine how many times the was asked about what has this got to do with plants.

I guess you could say that I’m qualified--both as someone who actually cares for nurtures living plants, and, as someone who has done gardening online for websites for many years now--to post some commentary about gardening of websites.  Okay, here we go.

Gardening of websites is important to do.  If you know how to exercise moderation.  Just as one can give too much water to a living plant and end up killing it, one can overgarden a website.  Did I just coin a new Web 2.0 term here?  Well, then, let’s add undergarden just so overgarden has a friend and won’t be lonely.

The point is:  Gardening of website should be a loving thing and not something that causes one heartburn or rash.  Gardening of websites should result in things getting better on the website in question.  Gardening of websites should help the website grow.

Boy, as much as I try to get away from the allusions to plants here in this commentary, the more I keep getting pulled back in.  I think Al Pacino said that originally.

Take a look at five best practices for gardening that I have prepared for your consideration based on my professional experience.  If you want to learn more about gardening, feel free to email me and ask me questions.  I will actually reply to your email and won’t try to sell you anything.