Facebook and your business

Your organization can only stay in business if it sells products or services. And you can only sell stuff if people know what it is you have for sale. One way of achieving this is to use Facebook as a way of communicating with the public, and letting them communicate with you.

The first thing to do is to create a Facebook Page for your organization or product on Facebook – and you probably already have one.

One thing that Facebook introduced recently is the “Boost Post” button at the bottom of a post:



If you click on “Boost Post”, you’ll see:

Boosted posts are seen by existing fans and their friends. There is a facility for targeting by location, age, gender, and language, but not by interests or category. The posts are visible in news feeds on laptops and smartphones. Of course, you may not want to pay to get your message to people who have already liked your Page.

The advantage of using this technique is that you don’t need to understand how to create adverts, and you can set your own budget, whereas, if you’re advertising, you pay per click.

You can set a price limit for a boost – as long as it’s over $5. It’s possible to reach lots of people for a small amount of money. And you may find that other posts on your Page are being read by those friends of friends.

The alternative is to try Page Post Ads. Page Post Ads allow you to promote a post that you made on your Facebook Page, and they come in two types – there’s simple Page Post Ads, and Page Post Sponsored Stories. You have to use the ads create tool. The first thing to decide is whether you want to advertise a Page, event, app, or Web site. Facebook now provides image customization for Page Post link ads.

Before you start boosting posts or advertising, you’ll want to know how many people are actually looking at your Page. And you may be a little confused by some of the technical terms used by Facebook, when you look at the admin panel for your Page. Page ‘Likes’ is fairly obvious – the number of people who’ve liked your Page. But what about ‘Reach’? According to Facebook, Reach measures the number of people who received impressions of a Page post. The reach number might be less than the impressions number since one person can see multiple impressions. OK, you say, so what’s an ‘impression’? Again, Facebook tells us: Impressions measure the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked on or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, a fan might see a Page update in News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.

At the bottom of a post you’ll see:

‘Like’ allows people to say they like the post. ‘Comment’ obviously allows people to comment, and ‘Share’ allows people to share the post with their friends. And these numbers are shown on the Admin panel.

‘People Talking About This’ is defined by Facebook as the number of people who have created a story from your Page post. They add that stories include: Sharing, liking or commenting on your post; Answering a question; Responding to an event; and Claiming an offer. Finally, ‘Engaged Users’ is the number of people who have clicked anywhere on your post.

As well as looking at the ‘Reach’ figure, you can look at the bottom of each post to see how many people have seen a post. If you move your mouse over this, you’ll see a pop-up window showing how many ‘Organic’ and ‘Viral’ views there have been.

Organic is the number of people who saw a Facebook Page post through their News Feed, Ticker, or on the Facebook Page itself. It’s usually the highest number.

Viral counts the number of people who’ve accessed a Page post from one of their Facebook friends. Cute animals and ‘uplifting’ phrases are often shared by people, and so the viral number can increase.
Paid Reach is the number of people who saw a post in an ad or sponsored story.  All three types added together give the total reach for a post.

And how do you get people to visit your Page and like it? Here are some suggestions:
•    Post frequently – at least once a day
•    Post pictures – they’re more likely to be commented on and shared
•    Post short comments rather than longer ones
•    Post questions – so people will answer them
•    Ask people to like, share, or comment on posts
•    Run contests to get more likes
•    Try to be entertaining and educational.

Whatever you do, you want people to come to your Page and you want them to return regularly, and, most importantly, you want them to buy your product or service.

And while we’re talking Facebook, click on the link and Like the iTech-Ed page at https://www.facebook.com/iTechEd.

How to create an e-book

For those of you who’ve been living on Mars, an e-book is a book that you can read using an e-reader, such as a Kindle or using the Kindle app on your smartphone or tablet. And the great thing is that anyone can publish an e-book. You don’t need to find a publisher, you just need a computer. On the other hand, the really bad thing about it is that anyone can publish a book, no matter how little merit it my have!

Now, obviously, there must be technical standards, so that the e-book you create can be read on a standard device. But like everything in IT, there are more than enough standards. Amazon’s Kindle uses a version of mobi and calls it Kindle Format 8 (KF8). Apple has an iBook standard called EPUB for books available from its iTunes store. Barnes & Noble have their Nook standard. And there’s Kobo, Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, the iRiver Story, and probably lots of others - including simple PDFs. The majority of e-book formats are based on some kind of HTML (like a Web page).
 
So, how do you create an e-book? Step 1 is to write something! E-books generally work best with text rather than text and pictures. And it seems Word is fine as the source of the text. Once you’ve done that, you need to create a nice cover, a contents list, and all the other things that you find in the front of a book. It seems to work better if you insert a page break at the end of each partial page or blank page.
 
If you want to publish for the Kindle, Amazon has KindleGen software available. I must admit, I couldn’t get it to work on my laptop. I put the files in the right place, ran it on a command line, etc. Kindle Previewer software lets you see how the layout of the book will appear on a Kindle.
 
If you have InDesign 5 or above, you can export to EPUB (for iTunes) and there is also a Kindle plug-in available.
 
I used Mobipocket from www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/default.asp?Language=EN to convert my file. It didn’t like .docx, but was fine with .doc. However, I did lose lots of styling when I converted, so the document had to be reworked. As I said above, it’s not too clever with pictures and text boxes in a document. And that’s a problem with e-books at the moment. It’s important to keep your document as simple as possible. One other thing, the publisher edition of mobipocket protects the distribution of copyrighted content and includes Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, and text file import wizards.
 
There’s also a piece of software called Calibre, which is available from http://calibre-ebook.com/download, that can be used to convert from one e-book format to another.
 
There are online services, like Lulu (www.lulu.com/uk/publish/ebooks/?cid=nav_ebks) that can help you publish your e-book. You upload your file, then create a cover, describe your book, pick a price, and promote your book. This gives you a route to Apple’s iBookstore, as well as selling it on Lulu’s Marketplace. In terms of royalties, Apple takes 30 percent, and Lulu takes 20 percent of the remainder.
 
If you want to publish through Barnes & Noble you can use the online service PubIt! (http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=pi_reg_home). Create an account then upload your e-book and cover art. Then PubIt! converts the digital files for viewing on Nook devices. And then you can sell it. Royalty rates range from 40 percent (for any book priced under $2.98 or over $10) to 65 percent (for any book priced between $2.99 and $9.99).
 
If you self publish to the Kindle, you earn the highest royalty rate if your book costs between $2.99 to $9.99 range. You get 70% of the price.
 
Using iTunes Connect gets your EPUB format book on the iBookstore shelves. There is an approval process, and you’ll need an iTunes account.
 
For $19.99 (and part of your royalty) you can use BookBrewer (http://bookbrewer.com/home), which lets you upload your cover, enter a description of your book, and copy and paste chapters. The e-book can then be sold through Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Where am I in my investigation into e-books? I’ve created a book in Word that’s full of pictures with wrap-around text and text boxes with coloured backgrounds and shadows. It doesn’t convert very well. On the other hand, I have exported it as PDF and copied it onto my Android tablet into the Kindle app folder, and I can read my book using the Kindle app. (Older versions of the app don’t read PDFs.) My next task is to see whether I can ‘play’ with the HTML and create web pages that look more like my original Word pages and then go through the process again to get a good looking mobi file. At the moment, my PDF book doesn’t show up with the correct cover in the Kindle app.

If anyone’s got any suggestions, I’ll be interested to hear them.

Custom branding with SharePoint

Custom branding with SharePoint

For those of you working at new SharePoint 2007 sites, I have more of Darren Pritchard’s excellent beginner’s guides. This time he’s looking at custom branding.

There are a few different parts to custom branding a SharePoint Web application. You will need SharePoint Designer to create and change the pages. You will need to create a new master page and a CSS file to apply to the master page.

SharePoint Designer is a free application that is available from Microsoft at www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42&displaylang=en. SharePoint Designer allows you to open your SharePoint Web application to see and access all the component parts and elements of the application. You are able to navigate through the whole site, which will give you a better idea of how a SharePoint application is built. Be carefully not to change anything unless you know what it is – you could break the Web application if you remove or change the wrong thing!

SharePoint Designer also allows the pages and code to be edited, which is good news for someone new to SharePoint because everything is available within one location.

Let’s start with master pages. These are the templates that are applied to all pages on a SharePoint Web application. They are written in ASP.NET 2.0. When applying custom branding to a SharePoint Web application, this is where the majority of the development will be carried out.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to style the master page (just like on most Web pages). Within a SharePoint Web application, there is a ‘core.css’ file, which can be found in the ‘_styles’ folder. You won’t be able to navigate here without using SharePoint Designer. This is used by all of the master pages that come by default in a Web application. This file should not be changed. It is best practice to create a bespoke .css file and use this to override the core.css. This means that you will not affect the default master page styles that are used by other pages.

Content PlaceHolders Controls are regions of content on a master page that are predefined but customizable within SharePoint. So, for example, the PlaceHolder is in bold, which is housed within an HTML table:

<!-- Search Start-->
  <table border="0" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width="100%" class="customcss.class" >
    <tr>
      <td>

      <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat="server">
      <SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox"/>
      </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
<!-- Search End -->

This is an example of a table that will contain the search placeholder shown below:

Any images that are referenced from within the master page must be able to be viewed by all users. Otherwise, users will be asked to log-in every time they refresh the page if the don’t have permission to the library where the image is stored.

I would suggest creating a folder for your master page within the ‘http://Your App/Style%20Library/images’ and locating all of the images there. This will use the standard image locations from the master pages, but keep them separate so that they can be identified easily during future development or maintenance.

When you’re ready to import branding into a Web application, you need to use the following guidelines.

To import a master page:

1    In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2    Navigate to http://your site/_catalogs/masterpage

3    Click File

4    Click Import

5    Add your master page here.

To import an image:

1    In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2    Navigate to http://your site/Images

3    Click File

4    Click Import

5    Add your image here.

To import a CSS file:

1    In SharePoint Designer open up your Web application

2    Navigate to http://your site/_styles

3    Click File

4    Click Import

5    Add your CSS file here.

Good luck with your modifying your branding.