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How Facebook Got 6 Million Free Workers

by Eric Miltsch on 06/15/2009 · View Comments

Give it up for Facebook and their latest marketing stunt: Vanity URL’s.

Within hours, Facebook wrangled about 6 million people to convert their profile URL from,

this: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1128085240
to this: www.facebook.com/ericmiltsch

Does this help you? Sure, maybe you feel better now that your name isn’t a number. Personally, I haven’t seen my Facebook profile move up in the search results.

Who does this help? Facebook. They’re hoping everyone forwards their address to everyone not on Facebook. Imagine if half of those 6 million people sends their new URL to 25 Facebook noobs. That’s 75,000,000 new, warm referrals. Imagine if your business got 75mm warm leads. For free.

Want to beat Facebook at their own game? Here’s two ways to make either your personal, or professional brand, just a little different from everyone else. And that little bit can go a long way.

Collateral full movie Shorten your URL using any site that shrinks URL’s with the ability to customize and provide tracking. Several sites will do the trick – for this example I’ll show you what I did using BudURL.com’s service a few months ago.

Radio Flyer divx I changed my original long URL to this: http://budurl.com/fbem. The last four characters signify ‘Facebook Eric Miltsch’

Other examples follow the same naming convention for consistency:

budurl.com/dgem | Digg

budurl.com/dlem | Delicious

budurl.com/viem | Vimeo

budurl.com/twem | Twitter

budurl.com/suem | Stumbleupon

Another easy way is to purchase your own custom domain name and simply forward it to your social profile site, such as: EricMiltschOnFacebook.com or some other variation.

You need to do everything possible to promote your personal or professional brand – put your name(s) first.

We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when Facebook Pages can get their Vanity URL’s as well.

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7 Ways To Prevent #FF from Jumping The Shark

by Eric Miltsch on 05/16/2009 · View Comments

Every Friday on twitter, you’ll find an a endless supply of recommended people to follow. If you’ve ever seen a tweet begin with #FF or #FollowFriday – that’s what its all about. Its a brilliant idea and a very unique way to use twitter; @micah is the bright guy who came up with the concept.

An idea that’s about to jump the shark.

#FollowFriday recommendations begin to flood the screen at the stroke of midnight on Thursday. People even like to sneak some in before midnight; some like to brag about being the person who delivered the first tip.

For the next 24 hours, you’ll see carefully crafted messages containing profile names like a shopping list. Oprah? Really?

The Queen of Spades buy

Afro Samurai: Resurrection movies Recommending quality followers is a great thing. I’d hate to see it turn into an exercise in futility. I enjoy being recommended just as much as the next person. Thing is, I don’t see a noticeable increase in Friday followers when compared to any other day. Probably because everyone else on twitter is busy making lists of people to follow.

Here’s the guidelines I follow to make it effective and reduce noise – adopt as you wish:

When recommending someone, at least be sure you’re following them; why would I follow them if you’re not?
Don’t re-tweet someone else’s tweet recommending you. Tacky.
Don’t send individual, public thank-you’s to every person who gave you a #FF bump. Send a DM.
Send out a couple individual #FF rec’s; include a meaningful reason for the recommendation.
Help deserving people with less followers than you; they’ll appreciate it and it’ll help build your presence even more.
If you can’t fight the urge to create a list of names, group them together others within a market segment.
Don’t brag about how many #FF rec’s you received that day. Yay. You’re popular.