@aaronmclay

The piece below is a writing sample from an internal employee newsletter. Some of the contents may have change to protect the innocent.

Our goal with the newsletter is to reach a young audience trying to grasp the fundamental attributes of the Great Game of Business

THE GREAT GAME
Monkeys On Your Back

Youʼve heard the expression, “Monkey on your back,” right? Itʼs the origin of our company’s Monkeys (or Zombies) but what is a monkey? Letʼs explore a huddle and see how to identify and use a monkey. For example, you mention that the store is getting complaints regarding the cleanliness of the widgets.

Your huddles makes a line on the board to get fewer complaints by cleaning the widgets more often and assigns a line owner. Then you realize and say, “We donʼt have gloves to clean with. We need to get more cleaning gloves!”

This is a monkey, itʼs an action that needs to happen to make the line work. You then continue, “Since Iʼm closing tonight, Iʼll call “gloves” in with our nightly inventory.” Thatʼs your monkey. The note-taker will write it down and the line owner will follow up to make sure the gloves arrive at your store with the next delivery!

If you’ve not read up on the Great Game of Business and Open-Book Management I highly suggest you read it! If you ever have a problem managing anyone from my Generation (Y!) then you need to pick up the system!

This is my first draft of a flow chart showing how I used Posterous Auto-Post service to automate the distribution of stuff I like to share across the web. Missing a lot of critical pieces but it’s starting to take shape.

I've found that I have three posting contexts.

1. Personal
2. Professional
3. Professional Focused

Professional focused simply means that I'm writing for a particular blog The Mactitioner or company and I want to cross post to my “branded” sites. Fu.

I wonder if Franklin wrote the forward.

Aaron M. Clay
Sent from my iPad; please excuse the brevity & grammatical errors.

Cleaned Up
Facebook for better or worse has always tried to enhance the user interface to benefit their users. It's almost always meet disdain until people get used to it and go back to enjoying their daily interactions on Farmville.  I've loved almost every single iteration of the user interface, as each has been a much needed face lift; until now.   I don't like the new user interface for one reason: Fan Pages are ushered to the back of the bus to quietly rot away -- and groups have prominent placement? (Groups will be an entire other post. Fail.)

Small Business Fan Pages Sample Use Case
For most small businesses fan pages were used to connect user with that businesses product & brand value. Pages status updates, links & photos could be shared with the entire community and slowly but surely you could keep constant interaction with a growing fan population. 

For the business I work with we would update our status almost daily. We would talk to our clients and provide tips and tricks to enhance the service they received or will receive soon. Each of these interactions generated a news story on Facebook and in turn generated pages views and more fans. 

We asked current clients to join our Fan Page on Facebook, most had already joined and they informed us that, "because stories were created in my news feeds I was reminded to make an appointment." Awesome. 

Great, now we are generating revenue & brand awareness...then things change. 

Change Is Good?
I was excited when Mashable broke the story regarding the UI change. Without testing it I thought it would help put Pages (FB Mail) Updates in a more direct location. After a week of waiting I finally received the update and was astonished to find that most of the pages I fanned seemed to be missing from all of my feeds. I could only see random Fan page updates inside the home page under "Most Recent." 

I am a highly organized Facebook user, in fact, I have over 25 friends lists to organize who I interact with. However, I know that I am in the minority of people who even use friends list. Which means that if your clients, customers or users want to catch a fan page update they must be on the "Most Recent" tab on the home page OR create a friends list for your pages, assign pages to the list and remember to check it for updates. 

Those two solutions won't fly. Users are not going to change their browsing behavior. =( If you're a small business you are going to see a large dip in traffic to your page and perhaps to your website from Facebook until something changes. 

Possible Solutions. 

So here is my solution for small business owners who need to promote their goods and services on Facebook. 

1) Redefine your marketing goals with Facebook put greater emphasis on generating action outside of Facebook.
2) Continue to update trying different peak times for your target audience so that they'll see you in the "Most Recent" column. 
3) Create an App or Interactive Page to move people to your website
4) Focus on using Facebook Connect to facilitate communication interaction on your website.
5) If you create a Facebook App -- make sure it has a Bookmark feature for easy access on the left Dashboard. 
6) Focus on getting user to sign up for Email Campaigns or RSS updates. (ugh) 
7) Encourage Brand/Business Employees to bring your message to their circle of friends and clients.
8) Talk to your Marketing folks, I follow a lot of them and everyone has a few good ideas. 

Facebook's 400 millions users can't be ignored and FB ad's only go so far. I'm interested to hear your ideas or to see what your business's fan page is going to do. Good luck. 

Aaron M. Clay
www.aaronmclay.com

Before we begin, I'm angry with Dan Pink or ignoring me on Twitter. I saw him in the lobby. I was going to say something to him but he was preparing for his speech and I wanted that to be ateast good.

You get a pass today @danpink but ignore me again and it's on! Now, on to the show...

Aaron M. Clay
www.aaronmclay.com