Using SSO, developers are able to save their users time and frustration of logging in to their apps repeatedly. The developers also have access to the Graph API to build in-app social experiences.

Facebook recommends the following 4 Pro-Tips for developers:

Pro-tip 1: Include Facebook Login at User RegistrationApps will often only use SSO and Facebook Login when asking the user to enable Facebook features in the app. You should also include Facebook Login anywhere you prompt the user to Register for your app, often times when users launch your app for the first time. Users can enjoy a simplified registration process, and you can request the same information, such as e-mail address, that you would normally collect manually from the user.

Pro-tip 2: Store the user’s session in your appAfter your user authenticates for the first time, you should immediately store the authentication result locally. This way, you can keep the user logged-in to your app without having the user re-authenticate each time.

Pro-tip 3: Request only the permissions your app needsWe have streamlined the SSO permissions dialog, along with all permission dialogs in our recently announced Improved Auth Dialog. You should only request the permissions you need to get the user registered and using your app’s social features.
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve privacy protections for Facebook users, we’ve deprecated the ‘offline_access’ permission. Instead, you now have the option to extend the expiration of existing, valid access tokens for a limited amount of time without requiring the user to login again. Learn more about upgrading access tokens. Also, many apps incorrectly ask for ‘publish_stream’ when using our Feed Dialog. Your app only needs ‘publish_stream’ if it will be publishing to the user’s feed programmatically with the Graph API.

Pro-tip 4: Complete all iOS and Android Fields in your App SettingsBe sure to fill out every field related to your app in your app settings in the Native iOS App and the Native Android App fields. You can access these app settings for your app here. On iOS, If these fields are not configured, we will not be able to drive traffic to your app or the iOS App Store. In addition, we use the iOS Bundle ID to streamline authentication for users who have already authenticated your app.

“We started doing it cause it was fun,” said Gramo.

The business quickly grew out of his bedroom and began to gain sponsorships. As Gramo explained to us, one aspect that was and continues to be key to live streaming successfully is consistency. He believes in having consistency not only in content, but also in production value.

Gramo told us that the lighting, sound, and product have to be “awesome.” If the production quality is high, it brings about consistency. As a result, it also frees up the talent to do what they do best – be creative. They don’t have to worry about audio not working or the stream cutting out and can concentrate on connecting with viewers.

For companies and individuals that want to begin streaming, Gramo said that, in addition to consistency, you need to have a strong, reliable Internet connection. Also, you need to be concerned with latency speeds to avoid delays in the stream. In other words, it’s ideal to have a solid Internet connection with low latency.

Gramo also recommends that beginners utilize free streaming services such as Justin.tv, Stickam, Livestream, and Ustream. Although theStream.tv doesn’t use the software, it does use some of the services. It uses the Adobe Flash Media Encoder and the TriCaster XD850 to send the signal to Justin.tv to be streamed live. Gramo did point out that they use a separate computer for every aspect in order to make sure the stream is secure.

Another interesting element of theStream.tv is the interactive experience it creates. Each show is first broadcasted live on Justin.tv, and during the program, it has a person monitoring all the conversations taking place online. Gramo said it allows everyone to be on the same page and the voice of the viewer to be heard. Any issues that need to be addressed can be taken care of while the show is airing live.

Gramo also emphasized proper testing before going live. He suggests that the talent and the production rehearse their roles in order to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Going forward, Gramo believes that live streaming will become more popular than television. TV currently has more leverage because it is where the old media buyers that are stuck in the old ways are spending money.

“Once everyone figures it out that you can actually track the amount of people watching on the Internet and the duration that they are tuning in for, I think eventually it’s gonna change,” said Gramo. “It will switch, but it will just take time.”

He went on to say that there is a lot of power of advertising during live programming since viewers cannot fast forward few commercials as they are accustomed to doing with DVR devicea. He thinks that advertisers will soon realize this and take advantage.

By the way, I think it’s safe to say that Gramo knows what he’s talking about because, even though his business had a humble beginning, theStream.tv now occupies a 4,000 square-foot studio in Hollywood.

She said, “Never turn down money. If they didn’t want to give it to you, they wouldn’t have given it to you.”

True story.

What if you could have received some of that wonderful grandmotherly advice about the internet? Boy, that sure would have made things a lot easier.

Spanish advertising and creative director Chacho Puebla has created an series of photographs – an installation really – that he calls Grandmother Tips. “Just a few tips that my grandmother should have given me, but unfortunately never did,” he says.

When you’re younger you think you´ll never fall into that same kind of discourse, until you find yourself talking about stupid (cliché) stuff with your kid, about how important school is and if you don´t have a degree you´re nobody. I hope I can give better advice some day. In the meantime, here are some tips my grandmother should have given me.

The awesome old woman in the photos is actually his great-aunt, but you get the message. Here are some examples of that sage wisdom only age can provide (internet style) –

What sage advice about the internet would you give your children or grandchildren? Let us know in the comments.

[Chacho Puebla via Ultralinx]

That’s the advice from ProBlogger founder Darren Rowse. Your content has to engage the reader, and you have to build a community of people that respects your style and looks to you for more than just simple information.

“Content plus branding plus ads plus seo plus marketing plus link bait plus design equals successful blogging. Not necessarily. What I found to be true is that it’s really where the heart and the smart come together.”

Here are some key tips for blogging from the heart:

• Passion: “If you want an engaged readership you need to be engaged with your readers and your readers need to be engaged with each other.”  Successful blogs have writers and an audience that are all truly interesting in the topics they cover.
• Tell Stories:  This is all about being unique to your readers.  When you tell stories to your audience, it creates engagement.  “Write the type of posts that create memories with your readers.”
• Build Community: Remember, everyone can provide information.  Do something more.
• Inspire People: “When you inspire, something amazing happens on your blog. The inspiration can motivate your readers. Inspire people first, then inform.”
• Be Personal:  A good way to build you brand is to bring your own life into your blog.
• Be Playful
• Be Yourself
• But remember to be useful.  “If you can help people solve their problems, you are blogging from the heart.”

Blogging from the heart is important, but it’s not everything. It’s about being smart.

“I began to hear a spectrum of disillusionment. People think that if you blog from the heart, good things will happen to you. But blogging from the heart is not enough.

If you want to be a business with your blog, treat it as one today.”

To do this, Rowse says you have to define what “success” means to you. You have to have a plan for what you want your blog to achieve in one year, in five years, and beyond. You have to focus on branding, which can be thought of as “what you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room.”

How can you grab an audience and keep them? It’s about “hooks.”

“How are you going to make readers stick to your blog? It may mean some sort of social media. Perhaps the biggest hook is email or Twitter or rss or Facebook or Flickr. What do you want your readers to do? We know that if we can get people to subscribe to our email and signup for our Twitter or Facebook, then we have them hooked.”

In the end, don’t be afraid to try new things.

“Experiment, test and tweak. I am constantly trying new things. I had this crazy idea of trying to write 31 posts in 31 days. It had a very positive response. We then put this together in an e-book, which was our first product. We have now sold over $300,000 worth of our e-books.”

Very often we join a social network and never take the time to review our online privacy – especially in relation to content that we are happy to share with others either connected to us in our social network or a broader community.

In this video I share four key privacy controls that you should review – this is especially useful if you are doing an upgrade and review of your LinkedIn profile and it’s something I always start my LinkedIn for business training workshops covering. After all when you are updating your LinkedIn profile, you don’t always want everyone in your network to see the changes you are making.

Alternatively access the video on YouTube at this link.

If you have questions about using LinkedIn to help you build your online visibility for your own career management goals or for lead generation for your business, remember to post your questions to my Facebook Page.

Originally published ot BizGrowthNews

On Quora, someone asked, "What is the process involved in launching a startup at SXSW?" It’s a great question that many entrepreneurs have no doubt asked themselves, and are currently asking themselves as the huge event, in Austin Texas draws near (March 11-20). 

Crowley is a great person to answer the question, having launched Foursquare at the event in 2009, only to have it blow up and become the poster child for a whole sector of the social media and mobile app landscapes – the location-based service. 

In a nutshell, in case you’re wondering, Crowley’s advice is to "hustle to get something built," tell people (friends and strangers) about it, search for what people are saying about your product on Twitter and respond as much as possible, set up a forum dedicated to the product, and have someone at home keeping an eye on things while you’re busy at the event. 

As alluded to, Crowley has given advice to entrepreneurs (via Quora) in the past. Back in November, he gave 6 "pieces of advice for entrepreneurs" in general:

1. Stop sketching and start building
2. Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work
3. Build early and often
4. Don’t let a lack of technology get in the way
5. Hire the best people you can find
6. Don’t get distracted

He elaborated on each of these, but you get the idea. 

When asked last month, what drove him to become an entrepreneur, Crowley said, "Never really started foursquare (or dodgeball) for the sake of starting a company… we just built things we wanted to use with our friends and the rest just kind of happened." 

That might be Crowley’s most important lesson of all. 

Crowley recently made the cover of the 2011 Trends Issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. 

Nevermind the fact that millions of businesses are blogging and multiples of those millions of customers are reading said blogs. In fact, 23% of the primary Fortune 500 corporations have an external corporate blog.

Blogs as a content management system make it very easy for content publishers within a company to surface informative, useful content directly to their “customers” and indirectly via search engines and social channels. Business bloggers report their activities have resulted in greater industry visibility, new customers & sales and thought leadership.

My take is that if a business has something interesting to say and stories to tell, then a blogging platform can be one of the most productive channels/methods for publishing and engaging. If not, then there are other, more important problems to solve.

For companies that are new to the idea of blogging as a brand, vs. individuals going out on their own and blogging about their professional passions, the notion of starting and maintaining corporate blog often invokes fears of being sucked into a black hole of “counterproductivity”. Writing, researching, IT support and hosting, plus marketing and measuring something that wasn’t forecast in the first place and without certain returns, can seem a lost cause.

For those remaining optimists that are cognizant of the benefits of a blog communication channel but don’t have the forecast resources for it, here are a few tips on blogging  that will get you started in the right direction in a manageable way.

1. Become a blog reader. I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t understand blogs from a consumption point of view, it’s debateable whether you’ll be able to produce one of your own.  If you read certain magazines, newspapers or email newsletters from certain sources, try subscribing to their blogs instead – or as an alternative. That way you’re spending nor more additional time (outside of a few seconds subscribing) and you might even save some time.

2. Set goals for your business blog. If you don’t have a destination for your blogging effort then “time suck” will become your unwanted friend. Don’t waste time trying to serve everyone. Be purposeful in your blogging effort by identifying a few, reasonable business outcomes and timeframe.  KPIs (key performance indicators) are a good starting point for measurement that can lead to outcomes.

For example, a common business outcome for blogging might be “increase relevant traffic to the corporate website”.   A blog that publishes useful, customer centric content a few times per week gives reason to come back and to visit more detailed information on the corporate website.

Set a goal for a percentage increase in blog and keyword referred traffic to the corporate website.  Create a blog editorial plan that pays attention to linking to corporate pages from topical blog posts and use keywords in the posts and links that are relevant to the destination pages.  Over time, search engines will see those links and send more visitors to the corporate website by ranking the pages higher in search results. The links can also attract visitors directly.

The common mistake companies make is to set a goal like, “attract more blog referred traffic to the corporate website” and then start blogging personal or corporate centric information: announcements, product and press releases, PR speak and other chest beating.

Ignoring what would be of interest to customers is a FAIL when it comes to marketing, let alone blogging. How to find out what customers want on your business blog? Ask them. Ping customers in the corporate newsletter, ask them in person at events, talk to your sales and customer service departments for customer topics and trends. Look at successful competitor blogs and topically relevant industry blogs as well.  Then create an editorial plan that gives your corporate blogging effort a chance to be successful by planning blog topics that serve customer needs and indirectly, business needs. As a result, the blogging effort will be more focused, intentional and likely to result in the desired business outcomes.

3.  Create a schedule. A blog editorial plan serves multiple purposes, including putting into action the above suggestion. It also helps direct content creation for business blogs with multiple contributors. It keeps writers on track with content that will most likely meet customer and business needs.  A planned blogging editorial schedule also helps when writers run into dry periods.  Yet another benefit is that it creates a set of expected editorial for readers. It creates an element of predictability they can count on to return to week after week.

For example, Mondays might focus on a message from the CEO or other business leader. By the way, if they won’t write it for you, call them and record a discussion on the topic. Then transcribe that recording into a blog post.  Wednesdays might be a tips post about your product or service and Fridays might be a news roundup for the week.  Tuesdays and Thursdays can be wildcards or days where you don’t post at all.

As time goes on, you can experiment with different schedules to see what works best.  Creating a schedule and executing on it does add time, but it does so in a way that makes your business blogging effort a lot more efficient and productive. Showing measurable outcomes from early wins can help you gain additional support and resources for the blogging effort.  Along those lines, why not do a little blogger outreach with some connected friends in the media? Getting mentions of your new business blog on other high profile websites or blogs can inspire internal support.

4. Be efficient with content. There are many ways to get more out of less with content creation and knowing what does well already in combination with an understanding of what your target audience is interested is essential.

One implementation of this kind of efficiency is the Oreo cookie news post.  Set up Google or Twitter style alerts on topics you’re covering to identify potential sources. Setup the issue/topic (top of cookie), excerpt the topically relevant article/blog post (white stuff) and conclude with your own observations and a call to action for reader opinions (bottom of cooke). That’s a classic blog post and if the writer can be engaging with the setup and conclusion, it works very well for a corporate blog.

Another type of post that’s efficient is the blog review. Find ranked lists of blogs in your industry and pick a handful of blogs to review every month or whatever interval works for you. Create some basic criteria and score each blog. Include screenshots of each blog and describe what you like about them. Link to those blogs and offer a badge for them to use as “flair” if they want.  Compile all those blogs into a list.

Interviews and guest posts (from internal sources, marketing partners, customers) can be especially effective and efficient.  Writing interview questions takes time, but the responses are written for you and that can be the bulk of the post. Guest posts of course are entirely written by someone else, you simply need to source the writer and edit.

5. Make blogging a team effort. Our 7 year blog birthday for TopRank’s Online Marketing blog is coming up in a few days. After 7 years of blogging, I can tell you that very few individuals have what it takes to create unique, useful and compelling content for more than 6 months, let alone 7 years. That’s why a corporate blog really needs to be a team effort in the long run.   It might fall on the shoulders of one person to start, but a smaller amount of effort from multiple people is more interesting, expands audience reach and it’s far more sustainable.

If you’ve started a business blog and weren’t successful with it or you’re thinking of how to implement a business blog efficiently with your online marketing mix, I can’t recommend enough the expertise of the team at TopRank Marketing. Few agencies have been involved with setting up business blogs as long as they have.  Also, be sure to check out the blogging category here for numerous “how to” posts on many aspects of blogging for business.

Originally published on the TopRank Online Marketing Blog.

Google has been offering tips for using Buzz more effectively. Last week, they offered the following five:

1. Format your posts
2. View a summary of you own Buzz activity
3. Use an @reply to send a post directly to someone’s inbox
4. Try keyboard shortcuts to fly through buzz
5. Mute posts so they don’t get sent to your inbox.

Details on how to accomplish each of these can be found here. Today, they are offering another five tips:

1. Post by Email
2. Prevent your boring chat status messages from being posted to Buzz
3. Look for the yellow line to see what’s new.
4. Link to a post
5. Follow the Buzz team in Google Buzz.

Frankly, Google could probably be doing more to promote Buzz usage, and get people engaged more. The aforementioned tips certainly must be aimed at doing so, but how many Gmail users regularly keep up with the Gmail blog, where these tips were shared? Google Buzz is a separate product, and eventually may even be usable without a Gmail account, yet Google Buzz doesn’t have its own blog (like most other Google products do).

On the other hand, the tips listed above almost feel like a handbook, and while they are definitely helpful to know for anyone looking to become a better "buzzer", you have to wonder how many people want to be told how to use it. Twitter users have often expressed pride in the way they contributed to the evolution of the service. In fact, Twitter itself has expressed pride in this concept.

For example, the @reply was not something Twitter conceived of itself. It came from uers. Now even Facebook and Google Buzz use it. With Twitter, hashtags were born from users, and now they have been incorporated into Twitter’s own interface. Buzz seems to be a bit more driven from the company down.

This may be a key element to monitor along with the success of the service itself. Buzz has the potential to become huge, but if it flops like other Google-born social media projects have done in the past, this might be one of those things that people point to when assessing what went wrong.

For now, however, Google has high hopes for Buzz, and the industry seems to have taken to it (there are Buzz buttons everywhere you look)., regardless of the criticisms it has endured since launch. Google has been pretty open about responding to these criticisms, so that may also play a role in the service’s future.

For further reading on how to use Buzz, Google’s Rick Klau recently offered some advice on how to use it for monitoring.

1. In the first clip, Cutts discusses the topic of obfuscating email addresses. A common way to display email addresses for contact purposes on the wab has been to include "mailto:" link. This has of course been exploited by spammers, so people have turned to other ways to keep this from happening.

One way people have tried to get around this is by using javascript. This has generally worked well in the past, but Cutts talks about how Google is getting smarter, and may now execute the javascript, leading to email addresses being shown in search results. Cutts says you may want to find another way to do it.

2. In the next clip, Cutts answers a question about the relationship between the size of a site and the authority Google gives it. Basically, according to Matt, there is no relationship. It’s more about links. It’s not about the size of a site. If you have a million pages, but only a couple links, you’re not going to be considered an authoritative site in Google’s eyes. If Google awarded a site for having a lot of pages, there would be people cranking out pages just for the sake of gaining authority, and this would essentially contribute to the web being a "cesspool."

3. In the third one, Matt answers a question about Google showing local results for generic terms even when a town is not specified. They ask, "Is Google going to tart displaying different results based on location of the IP (even when logged out)?"

Cutts says that he wouldn’t be surprised, and that if Google finds something that’s nearby and thinks it would be a helpful result, it will probably show it.

4. Finally, somebody asks if a link back to a press article about a company will be perceived as a "reciprocal link" and therefore give less weight to the inbound link.

If two sites link to each other, they are by definition reciprocal links, as Matt says, but if you link to everyone that links to you, you’re basically just "tooting your own horn."

Some people have criticized the clarity of Matt’s answers in some of the above clips in the comments on their YouTube video pages. Do you feel like the questions have been answered? Do you find Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel to be a valuable source of information?

Related Articles:

> Matt Cutts Head Shaving Footage Revealed

> Geo-Targeting for Google with Webmaster Tools

> Where Google Stands on the "Keywords" Meta Tag

> Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google

> This Cesspool We Call the Internet

Take Pizza Hut for example. The company seems to appear in the social media news circles fairly often. One time it was for posting a job opening for a Twittering position. Another time it was for using Twitter as a tool to drive its efforts to help feed the hungry.

Look at Ford. They utilize all kinds of different social media channels. They go where the people are, and they interact with them in different ways. They keep it at a human level. They look for trends and try to determine what people want. They use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Delicious, etc.

Mattel is the latest big brand to make headlines with social media efforts. The company just announced a new e-commerce site with social shopping features. WebProNews reported on that here.

You probably interact in some capacity with big brands on a daily basis, whether that is something as simple as getting a Coke out of the vending machine or running around the neighborhood in your Nikes. Find products you use. Find products you like and are interested in. Then see how they are using social media (if they are). This way you are placing yourself directly in the role of the customer, and you can evaluate exactly what you are getting out of their social media experience.

Since you can look at this from the customer’s perspective, you can use that to determine strategies that you feel work, and those that you feel don’t. It’s not a bad way to find concepts you can apply to your own business or at least some that you can test.