This is a speech I gave at the Society for Technical Communication of the Palm Beaches. Camera work by my son Stephen, age 10, with some fidgeting and excess use of zoom, but the basic content is there.
The video referenced in the “Movie Break” section is available at bit.ly/luvdocu. I’ve posted references, notes, and the slides at bit.ly/socstc
This is a list of references to source material and further reading to accompany my presentation on “How Social Media Is Changing Communications” presentation to The Society for Technical Communication of the Palm Beaches.
PDF of slides: How Social Media Is Changing Communications
Blog post with video from presentation:
http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/social-media-in-technical-documentation-a-presentation/
Blog: http://www.justwriteclick.com/
Book: http://xmlpress.net/publications/conversation-community/
“Coordinating Documentation and Support: Turning Complaints into Contributions” on SlideShare.net
http://www.slideshare.net/jenzed/coordinating-documentation-and-support-turning-complaints-into-contributions
http://www.sdl.com/en/sites/livecontent-2011/
http://www.sdl.com/en/xml/resources/position-papers/
Blog post: How Community and Social Media Changed Communication
(source of some of the graphics used in my presentation)
http://blogs.communitiesrus.in/communityconnect/2011/07/02/how-community-and-social-media-changed-communication/
How Social Media Has Changed Business Communications
http://www.slideshare.net/jeffreylcohen/how-social-media-has-changed-business-communications
The Difference Between Friends, Fans, and Followers
http://www.briansolis.com/2010/12/the-difference-between-friends-fans-and-followers/
Contact, Friend, Follower: It’s Complicated
http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2011/05/09/contact-friend-follower-its-complicated/
Game-theoretic Models of Information Overload in Social
Networks
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ssayedir/papers/waw10.pdf
Coral Springs, Florida – Thousands are expected to celebrate the centennial of Girl Scouts in the U.S.A. at the Coral Springs SportsPlex on Saturday, November 19 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Girls Scouts of today, yesterday and tomorrow and their families will explore the history of Girl Scouts and the new programs introduced in time for the 100th year.
“This is an event for families – boys, girls, moms, dads. Everyone is welcome,” Phyllis BeJune, chair of the Girl Scout Experience said. “We want everyone to come and feel like they spent very little money and had a great day experiencing what Girl Scouts gives back to the community and how it helps develop the leaders of tomorrow.”
Tables will highlight Girl Scout centers from around the world, charitable community activities, and vendors who offer program options for girls and their families. “The goal is to have activities at every table so that people who attend have a chance to really experience Girl Scouts BeJune said. In addition there will be entertainment throughout the day and a “cupcake war” event. Games and activities for preschool children are sponsored by Lutheran Ministry in Christ’s preschool: Early Childhood Ministries of Coral Springs.
“I’m looking forward to seeing how I can help local charities more and meeting girls from other troops,” Theresa Carr, a Girl Scout in fifth grade said. “A lot of people think we are just about the cookies, but we do so much more.”
There is an $8 cost to attend the event, but only for those in Kindergarten through grade 12, for whom most of the activities are aimed. When you preregister for the event by November 12, the cost is only $5 per child. Food will be available at the event for an additional charge by a Boy Scout troop and the Lutheran Ministry in Christ Church of Coral Springs. For more information about registering, see our web site at www.TheGirlScoutExperience.
Vendors and Sponsors
We are seeking vendors and table sponsors to help keep the costs down for families who want to attend as well as to sponsor tables for charitable organizations. Starting at $50, vendors will be allotted a 10’ X 10’ space where they can have a canopy and tables. Vendors can promote their business, offer samples or promotions, and are encouraged to provide a related activity aimed at those between the ages of 5 to 18. “Our vendors are an integral part of this event,” Vendor Coordinator Deborah Reif said. “Parents want to see what’s out there for their family to do while their children are busy with the event activities.” For more information about becoming a sponsor, see our web site at www.TheGirlScoutExperience.
About Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.
Founded in 1912, Girl Scouts of the USA is the preeminent leadership development organization for girls with 3.4 million girl and adult members worldwide. Girl Scouts is the leading authority on girls’ healthy development, and builds girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place. The organization serves girls from every corner of the United States and its territories. Girl Scouts of the USA also serves American girls and their classmates attending American or international schools overseas in 90 countries. For more information on how to join, volunteer, reconnect or donate to Girl Scouts, call (800) GSUSA 4 U (800-478-7248) or visit www.girlscouts.org.
For more information about registering or becoming a sponsor, see our web site at www.TheGirlScoutExperience.
Media Contact: Beth Anne Carr, 954-752-6852, bethanne@carrcommunications.
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I figured out how to address a few requests for greater customization options and also how to add a preloader image if a pages are sometimes slow to load. The theme option was also partly inspired by my recent work on a Facebook extension to WP e-Commerce, which was a sort of spin-off of Facebook Tab Manager code.
I’m just starting the process of moving most documentation over to facebooktabmanager.com, so see the links below for more details.
Based on the success of Facebook Tab Manager, I got contacted a few weeks ago by the makers of the WP e-Commerce plugin to consult on creating an extension that would allow merchants to display products with a version of their storefront embedded in a Facebook business page tab.
An early version is available for download here – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-fb-commerce/ - and I’m at the stage where it would be helpful to get feedback. Also, since I don’t currently run a live e-commerce store, I’d like to to see what this looks like with a real assortment of products loaded into it. I’ve got a little Facebook Specials demo store running on the Carr Communications Facebook page, but the product listings aren’t particularly realistic.
This isn’t up in the WordPress plugins repository yet. Here is the description from the readme.txt
WP FB Commerce is a companion plugin to GetShopped’s famous WP e-Commerce. Market featured products or your whole catalog on Facebook.
Contributors: davidfcarr, mufasa
Donate link: http://www.rsvpmaker.com
Tags: facebook, iframe, page tab, e-commerce, wp-e-commerce, shop, cart, paypal, authorize, stock control, ecommerce, shipping, tax
Requires at least: 3.0
Tested up to: 3.2.1
Stable tag: 0.1
WP FB Commerce is a companion plugin to GetShopped’s famous WP e-Commerce. Display featured products or your whole catalog on Facebook and allow customers to check out directly within your Facebook business page.
This early release includes code adapted from Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress, customized for the e-commerce application. Use the provided theme for displaying products on Facebook or provide your own.
WP FB Commerce was created for GetShopped by Carr Communications Inc. http://www.carrcommunications.com
For more information about WP e-Commerce visit http://getshopped.org
wp-fb-commerce to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory/wp-content/themes/ directory. This will allow you to modify the template files and style.css independently of the plugin code. It may also perform better.WP FB Commerce displays your storefront as a tab on a Facebook business page. You will register a URL pointing to your web server in the Facebook Developers utility at https://developers.facebook.com/apps
Click ‘Create a New App’ and follow the instructions. Many of the fields on the app registration form are optional. The most critical fields to fill in for our purposes are in the Page Tab section where you will enter a Page Tab Name, Page Tab URL, and Secure Page Tab URL. You must be able to host SSL secured / https pages for this to work properly.
You can find the URLs to record on the ‘Products -> FB Featured’ and ‘Settings -> WP FB Commerce’ pages. You have a choice of either displaying products from the default view of your WP e-Commerce product catalog or a select list of featured products set on the Products -> FB Featured screen. The URLs include a query string parameter in the form of ?fbx=1 for the featured products list or ?fb=commerce for the default listing.
After saving the settings for your “app”, click the link on the left hand sidebar to View App Profile Page.
From the profile page, click the link for ‘Add to My Page’. Facebook will display a listing of all the pages you own or have editing rights to. Click the Add to Page button next to the page or pages you want this storefront view to appear on. Then navigate to your business page, and you should see the new tab displayed on the menu on the left side of the page.
If you are logged in as an administrator of the page, an ‘Edit’ link will be displayed at the bottom of the list of tabs (navigation links within the content for your page). This allows you to delete or rearrange the tabs. If you have a long list of tabs, you may need to click ‘More’ before the ‘Edit’ link will be displayed.
You can edit or rearrange the tabs.
Look for an additional menu item under Products titled FB Featured. You may select up to 20 products to be displayed as featured offers.
When a visitor first accesses the Facebook Page Tab containing your storefront, the query string at the end of the URL tells WordPress to display the Facebook theme. As the visitor continues to navigate through the product catalog, a PHP session variable tells WordPress to continue to display content with the Facebook theme.
Note: If the visitor subsequently navigates to your external website, this session variable can cause the website to be displayed within this alternate theme. However, this should only be momentary — a JavaScript routine detects that the site is no longer being viewed within the Facebook iframe and redirects with a parameter that terminates the session, causing your site to be viewed within its normal theme.
This is a preliminary test release. Shopping and checkout functions should function much the same as they would on an independent website. However, the plugin needs further testing with WP e-Commerce options.
The latest release of Facebook Tab Manager includes tweaks to the default CSS and handling of custom CSS. I also updated the Reveal Tab Setup Utility.
From the changelog:
Reveal Tab Setup Utility
Me practicing storytelling skills.
Here is some of the work I’ve been doing for Information Week’s enterprise social media microsite, The BrainYard (see realtime updates).
One of the more useful features of Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress is that you can use it conjunction with other plugins to embed their functionality in a Facebook page tab. I’ve particularly gotten a number of requests for guidance on how to use Facebook Tab Manager with Contact Form 7, a popular forms management plugin.
You can do this by including a Contact Form 7 shortcode, which looks something like this: [contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"]
That code is generated by the administrator’s screen for the plugin. I’m not going to cover that in detail, but this utility allows you to lay out your form and the email notice you will get when someone completes it. You then copy and paste the corresponding shortcode into your page or post — in this case, into an fbtab post.
Here, I’m going to walk through an example of how to display a form only to page fans, while also including the JavaScript and CSS needed for Contact Form 7′s AJAX functions.. You could make this the landing page shown to newcomers, with a message asking them to click the Like button. Once they do so, Facebook Tab Manager detects that this person is now a fan of the page and displays the fan-only content, which includes the form. Perhaps once the person becomes a fan, you give them the option of filling out the form to enter a contest or get some special offer. The business scenario is up to you.
You can see the live example on the Carr Communications Facebook Page. Here is how it appears in the WordPress editor, with the contact form shortcode wrapped inside an fblike shortcode with a like=”1″ parameter to indicate it should only be shown to fans. An alternate bit of content is designated to be displayed to non-fans.
Shortcodes to Display Form to Page Fans
To get the styles and scripts for Contact Form 7 included properly, I need to let WordPress output the wp_head and wp_footer actions just as it would on a regular web page. The tricky part of this is deactivating functions that don’t make sense in a Facebook context. On my website, I have to be careful to turn off a function of my site’s theme that outputs a custom background image, a plugin function that outputs social media icons for my blog, and a few other things. The exact list of tweaks you will need to make varies from site to site, depending on the theme and plugin you have installed, so this is just an example – be prepared to experiment.
Checkbox options:
Click the Show Advanced button and check off the plugin and theme action/filter functions you want to exclude.
the_content filters to exclude
wp_head actions to exclude
wp_footer actions to exclude
Note: Make sure you have the latest release. While preparing this example, I found errors in the code for excluding wp_head and wp_footer action functions. This was fixed in version 2.8.3. Version 2.8.4 also fixed an issue with the Reveal Tab Setup utility and works better with the alternate approach below.
Facebook Tab Manager also includes a Reveal Tab Setup utility for designating alternate posts to be displayed to fans versus newcomers. To make this example with that approach, you would create one fbtab post containing the shortcode for the form, and check all the same boxes I explained in the previous example. You would then create a second post telling people why they should register to get access to your wonderful form.
In the Reveal Tab Setup utility, your choices look something like this:
Reveal Tab Setup for a Form
You can see a live example on my business page.
In version 2.8.4, I tweaked the way the special url generated by the Reveal Tab Setup utility is processed by WordPress, making it redirect to the permalink for fans of the page. This was necessary to make it work properly with Contact Form 7, which was otherwise confused by the non-standard URL.
Version 2.8 of the Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress has just been released. It fixes one important error with the handling of the included shortcodes for conditional display of content based on whether someone has liked your Facebook page. Something like the example below for displaying a form created with Gravity Forms only to page fans should now work.
[fbtab like="1" ]Thanks for liking us! Here is the entry form:[gravityform id=3]
[/fbtab]
I had misunderstood this documentation and thought that nesting of shortcodes was automatically supported, but it turned out I needed to include a do_shortcode call in my shortcode function. Thanks to Jason Lane for pointing out the error.
