Maybe your personal friends and family don’t feel the same about their phone numbers. We don’t know. We haven’t asked them.

Just like Facebook hasn’t asked us if we want our phonebooks to be public.

How to disable your Facebook Phonebook

Go to your Account – Choose Edit Friends

On the left, see the Phonebook

When you click on Phonebook , you get this message To learn more about Phonebook or to delete any contacts imported from your phone, click here.

OK – let’s click

Another page! Facebook Phonebook displays contacts you have imported from your phone, as well as your Facebook friends. If you would like to remove your mobile contacts from Facebook, you need to disable the feature on your mobile phone and this page.

We click once more. After this journey we arrive at the message

Remove Imported Contacts

When you import contacts into Facebook from your email, mobile, or instant messaging service, we may use this information to create friend suggestions for you and your friends. We also display these contacts in your Facebook Phonebook.

If you choose to remove your imported contacts, they will no longer appear in your Phonebook and friend suggestions may be less relevant to you and your friends.

To remove all imported contacts, please make sure to disable the Facebook synchronization feature on your phone first, if you have ever enabled it. Then, click the ‘Remove’ button below.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t use my phone for Facebook and consequently don’t have the ‘Facebook synchronization feature’.

For all my friends and contacts who use their phone to upload photos or send text, it looks as though they don’t have a choice.

I’m looking for a way to work around this. You know how to? Let me know. Please.

SquidLit is a portal specifically for lenses about books and it practically creates itself. But like other Squidoo quickbuilders (wizards), there’s a right way to use it and a (very) wrong way.

Why not open one now and have a look? Here’s the link to SquidLit (That opens in another window so you can still read this page)

This what the page looks like when you open it.

Pretty straightforward, eh? My grandson would say ‘Cool!‘

After you’ve typed in your book title and author, you will be taken to a page which firstly confirms that it’s the right book and then asks you

How obsessed are you? Just answer these 5 easy questions, so we can build you a really great book group discussion page.

Which is odd. There are only 4 questions.

1. Your review. Imagine you’re describing this book to a friend. What would you say? (Go ahead, rant and rave).

2. Write a quote! Step aside New York Times. What single quote or phrase would YOU write about this book? (Like, “A carnival of weird that will ruin your day” or “Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar; I loved it”)

3. Do you know the author’s official website or blog? Add it here as a way to help more people discover his or her work.

4. What was the best line from the book? (It’s okay to paraphrase if you can’t look it up!)

Let me give you a tip. You don’t have to write everything in just now! Just write anything you like – you can always rewrite when you get to the actual lens workshop.

Let me give you another tip. Use that link Google, help me find some links!. Something super may pop up. Once again, you don’t have to use everything.

There’s a lot of modules in there, but I delete the ones I don’t want and add a few more to make my SquidLit personal. That’s what you want in your lens – the personal touch,

The modules in all of the Squidoo wizards aren’t set in concrete, they’re there to give you ideas.

First tell us about your opinion of the book, what made you choose to read it, what you got from it etc.

Have a look at those interactive modules, the Poll and the Duel. I always rewrite the answers in the Poll. Maybe people haven’t even read the book yet, so how can they rate it?

Have a think about that Duel module. It’s already titled Your Turn. Is there a question about the book, about an idea in the book, about a character in the book that would fit nicely into the Duel module?

The purpose of the Duel module is to engage your readers in a fight debate.

Type in the overall question and then choose two options as answers. Put a bit of meat into them!

Personally I don’t care for the wikipedia module but as I say, that’s my personal taste. You may like it, you may even love it! Your call.

I always add an About Me module to a SquidLit, indeed to every lens I make. You might consider that too.

Here’s a SquidLit Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

Best of luck with it! Send me the link when you’ve finished.

A Facebook Fan Page is free and easy. It takes just a few minutes to make – add some information, URL, upload an image for the page logo, write something in the status bar – your page is live!

Why wait? Make a Facebook Fan Page now

The cheapest way to reward your existing customers for their loyalty is to give a free product away. Depending on the price of your product or service, offer one free when a customer has bought five or ten. What a great way to say thank you! You could print off a discount card on your computer if you prefer, just remember to ensure your vouchers/tokens aren’t easily forged. If your customer base is small enough you can keep track of purchases by customer name and mark off their purchases.

Let people purchase a gift voucher for a friend. Sell the vouchers or have a link on your website where people can pay for a service in the name of their friend.

Have themes that hook into events that are happening and how people feel about them. Watch out for sporting events or newly-released popular movies and cash in on their marketing spend. Brainstorm how to relate themes to your business.

Stand out in the Shopping Mall and pass out flyers or otherwise spread the word. Make sure you dress the part.

Even big companies benefit from the stories of their founders. Look at Richard Branson – he personifies the company that made him very wealthy. Write a personal bio on your website. Don’t be afraid to build your business around yourself, people like doing business with real people. ]]> http://www.smoothstuff.com/2010/06/five-marketing-ideas-on-a-bootstrap/feed/ 0 http://www.smoothstuff.com/2010/06/two-things-not-to-do-on-facebook/ http://www.smoothstuff.com/2010/06/two-things-not-to-do-on-facebook/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 23:59:47 +0000 Susanna http://www.smoothstuff.com/?p=382 Many times we take Facebook for granted, chatting with friends and generally enjoying ourselves, but before you start posting your favourite links today, check these two essential security steps first.

(I’m assuming that you DON’T have your home address in Facebook, right?)

Your Password

Don’t use a password that’s easily discovered. Don’t use simple names or words (even if you do tack numbers on the end).

• Mix upper- and lower-case letters, special characters and numbers
• Use at least eight characters in a password.

Here’s an example using the word oranges – &orAn!gEs%

Your Birthday

Why tell the world your birthdate? Do you hope to receive virtual gifts (many of which can be extremely unsafe) from passing strangers? Your friends should know when your birthday is. If they don’t, remind them offline.

Birthdates are a tasty target for identity thieves. Don’t make it so easy for them to gain access! Keep your personal details to yourself.

Go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information and

• Give a wrong date on your profile.
• If you’ve already posted your birthday details, at least remove the year or
• Leave the birth fields completely empty.

The problem is, the privacy rules just kept on changing. Over the past six months, Facebook made a number of alterations to its privacy controls leaving you with 50 buttons and 170 choices about your personal data.

This week, Facebook bowed to public pressure and has

• simplified its privacy settings, creating one single page where you can control the visibility of your information.
• allowed you to block outside software developers from accessing your personal information.

Reclaim your Privacy

This is the magic button to check your privacy settings on Facebook.

Check your Privacy Settings!

Facebook Game Players

You may not wish your personal details to be freely available to advertisers, phone sales and marketing consultants but if you play those games there’s not much you can do about it,

However – to make sure companies aren’t viewing your details, you’ll have to give up your small army of farm animals and delete those smoochies and “Which Simpsons Character Are You?” application from your profile.

Here’s a concise guide from lifehacker on how to use the Facebook Privacy Controls.

Manage your online presence

If you have things in your past you don’t want made public, then there are real dangers in social networking. Friends, family and associates may reveal information or opinions that you would rather have kept private.

As the lines between private and public blur, you must actively monitor your online reputation.

Exercise your own spin control by deleting unwanted comments or removing your name from photos.

You control who can see the photos and videos you’re tagged in which appear on your profile. Keep in mind, the owner of a photo can still share that photo with people you’re not friends with, so remove the tag from the photo or video if you don’t want that to happen.

But we’re often our own worst enemy in keeping personal data under wraps. The information we consciously or unconsciously disclose – by posting comments, rating stories, joining fan pages or connecting to certain friends – amount to digital footprints that advertisers, employers, landlords and law enforcement can, and have, used for very different reasons.

Don’t forget to keep your birthdate and private address just that – private. The best way to keep them private is not to enter them at all.

Now I’m a WordPress junkie. I love WordPress. I’m certainly not alone, tens of millions of people love it too.

Even better, Google loves WordPress.

With WordPress you don’t need to know anything at all about coding or techie stuff, if you can use MS Word or Open Office, you can use WordPress.

WordPress is blogging software but also a delightfully easy small business CMS. Updates are a breeze with WordPress, leaving you more time to concentrate on your business

I have two wordpress customisation options for you, one which integrates wordpress into your current website and one which is a standalone installation.

Contact me for details

Your Mission Statement defines your business. So you need a clearly defined Mission Statement.

Your Mission Statement states the goals and objectives of your small business. It reminds you of what your business is really all about and explains how it benefits your customers. It can be anywhere from two to five sentences. – it’s not an elevator pitch, but a paragraph whicj tells, not only potential customers, but yourself, just what it is that you do.

Elevator Pitch
An elevator pitch is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (for example, thirty seconds or 100-150 words).” – Wikipedia

Seth Godin asks What’s your Super Power?

Find your Super Power, define it in one short sentence and that’s your elevator pitch.