In my career, I have started over 30 businesses… yeah I know, short attention span. In some of these I had partners, in others I went solo.

Maybe it’s just me, but looking back, I usually made more money when I had a partner, of course I have been involved with partners where I didn’t make money also, so it’s no sure thing. I felt this webinar platform idea was going to be huge, so I decided right at the outset that I did not want to carry the full load alone.

A while back, I was contacted in my capacity as a SCORE Volunteer counselor to do some speaking through Scores’ speakers bureau. Carmine Denisco was looking for speakers to add some related content to workshops he was doing on video. Carmine and I really hit it off and we developed a good relationship that was in place at the time the webinar idea came about. In fact, I think we both saw it at about the same time. So we decided to move forward with it on a 50/50 basis.

Carmine is a stand-up guy, and we can finish each other’s sentences, but I did not really need a partner for this idea. I was perfectly capable of developing this on my own, but I wanted a partner. I think too many people try to keep everything to themselves, to reap 100% of the reward. I have found that is not only lonely, but also you end up with something that is based solely your opinions, including any biases or perceptions that you may have. Without someone to say “That’s Stupid” every now and then, you will probably develop something no one will want. Another issue, particularly in the internet space is time, if you don’t get to market fast enough, someone else will, so how fast can you work by yourself?

A partner needs to bring more to the table than just pointing out your moronic maneuvers, and I have always found it a good idea to divvy up the responsibilities early on. Understand that effort will never be equal. I have seen many viable businesses explode because a partner felt he was carrying too much of the load. Its gonna happen, there will be inequities in the work load distribution, sometimes these will shift back and forth, and in some cases they will always stay tilted in one direction. That’s life. If it gets too out of hand then maybe there needs be a discussion of the financial distributions, but it is usually a disaster in the making to start comparing skills brought or hours or minutes spent. Who knows, maybe that one time your partner said “that’s stupid” led to the ultimate success of the venture.

Next post in series: Product Development

Previous post in series: Inspiration

So you may assume from my activities that I am Mr. Current, you know, all the latest gadgets etc. Well I may be quick to adopt soft technologies, but I take a while to jump onto new hardware… like phones. So I still carry around a Blackberry Curve. I’m used to it and its easy to use, maybe because it does not do very much. But Blackberry does have some apps for it and I have a few installed. For example, I have apps for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Skype and a few others. The template I use shows 6 icons across the bottom of the screen for quick access, I have to push a key to see the rest of them. Anyway, in order on this quick list I have: Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Skype, all of which I use all the time. The remaining two spots are for Social Media, and up until yesterday I had Facebook and Twitter in those spots. This worked great for quite some time. Recently, I noticed that I was having to click that key to show the other apps quite often to get to LinkedIn. Yesterday afternoon, I switched LinkedIn to the top and moved Twitter down because I seem to be accessing that more often. I felt a little strange afterward, even a little guilty that I would do such a thing to Twitter and it occurred to me that “This is Twitter’s fault”.

I know there are distinct camps out there. Oh sure we may all have accounts on all the social media sites, or at least the major ones. But most people seem to have gravitated towards one or the other as their favorite communication tool. Some of you are quite zealous about it. It reminds me of the Mac vs. PC user war. I find it interesting that PC users just bop along, but Mac users feel the need to climb up on a soapbox and tell the world, not how great Macs are, but rather how crappy PCs are. The same goes for iPhones vs, Android and iPad vs. anything else. I mentioned to an iPad user friend of mine that I thought the new Motorola Xoom looked pretty cool and you would have thought I just said I was joining the Nazi Party. Zealots permeate social media also, and I see a similar war of opinion going on in the Facebook vs. Twitter user world. LinkedIn just sits on the sideline, watching quietly. I saw an interesting study the other day about the traction of mentions. Mentioning Facebook or Twitter within Facebook got about the same traction. Mentioning Twitter within Twitter got a lot of traction, but mentioning Facebook on Twitter went nowhere.

I have never been one to take sides, I gravitate towards the tools that solve my particular problems and could care less about someone else’s opinion of the tool. I am a PC user, not because I don’t like Macs, but rather because that is what I have always had, I know how to solve my problems with it, and I have no interest in learning a new piece of hardware. I have nothing against Macs, never used one. Probably why I still carry around the Curve, it solves my problems. When it comes to the Facebook vs. Twitter user war, I don’t have a dog in that fight either, I just use what solves my problems the best. Let me go ahead and reply in advance to those of you who may be thinking about commenting that there is no war and that everything is just wonderful… you’re full of crap. You may not have taken a side, but sides have been taken. I see the zealots all over the place, more often it is the Tweeters talking about how much better Twitter is than Facebook. I would like to see a study of the ratio of Twitter users on PCs vs. Macs, I have a sneaking suspicion that Mac usage among Tweeters is high.

Anyway, I can only speak for myself and my own needs, and I have never found Twitter to be as much help in solving my problems as Facebook, and of late, LinkedIn has been better for my needs than Twitter. So Twitter drops to second row on the phone. I also turned off the new tweet notifications. I think that it may not be long before I delete the app entirely, Oh No!!

So is this the beginning of the end for Twitter? Does any of this resonate with you? Or am I just a boob.

I don’t know about you, but I’m simply not as productive as I could be. At the end of every day I feel like I have not accomplished anything and the day just flew by. My problem? Shiny Objects.

Basically I spend my day on the internet and social media sites in particular. As a speaker/trainer of social media, I obviously need to keep myself up-to-speed, but that does not explain my problem. Well they say the first step is admitting it, so here goes. When I run across an interesting update or tweet linking to something… I click it. There you have it… I am a Click Addict. One click, usually leads to another click and before you know it I have 40 tabs open in my browser. When I see something interesting, I bookmark it so I can come back to it and feed my addition more later. As a result, I have over 1,000 things bookmarked. But I never seem to have the time to actually get back to any of them, because there is always new stuff. I have concluded that bookmarking is actually a waste of time for an addict like myself. Those bookmarks are old and there’s new stuff coming at me a too rapid a rate to look back anyway.

When I am not at my computer.. it’s even worse. You see, I’m also a podcast addict, which of course enables my click addition. I listen to a whole bunch of podcasts about internet business and social media. I listen while I’m driving, at the gym, in the grocery store, on the phone with boring people, and of course when I’m in front of my computer. These people are talking about sites and companies and their links and names so fast I can hardly jot them down fast enough. The worst part is, when you’re driving and hear about something really cool, and then later have to re-listen to five podcasts again to find it.

So if you, or someone you know suffers from Click Addiction, please let them know… there is no hope.

Take our Facebook Ads module for example.

First we add to what we already know by scouring the web collecting every single method, tip, example, training product, video, pitfall, success and shortcut we can find, running down every rabbit hole and dead-end for weeks. I have personally watched hours of video miss-information, some even suggesting techniques that will not only fail, but probably get you kicked off of Facebook entirely. Then, my partners and I go through all of the collected information with our entrepreneur’s hats on (yes, we are all actually entrepreneurs first). We cull out the out-of-date and just plain bad information to distill the best information for business success.

We develop and add our own implementation strategy layers (lot’s of arguments here til we reach consensus). Then we test every strategy and step to make sure they work as intended and absolutely better than anything else out there.

Once the data passes these tests to every partners’ satisfaction, we assemble it into a step-by-step comprehensive plan that anyone can understand and lay it all down in a professional video track.

The result of these hundreds of hours of blood, sweat and tears? About an hour of video we believe to be the world’s best training on Facebook Ads for Business.

BTW, that’s ONE module, we have over 30 in our training system.

So for the guy who asked me how our training is different from him just watching YouTube videos on the topics, now you know.

It is very easy when you are in a space, to forget that there are a lot of people who have no idea what you are talking about. Sometimes the simplest explanations, are not simple enough for someone who has not grasped the basic concept. If you don’t understand what “Poaching” is, the fact that all that is required is an egg and hot water doesn’t help you much. For most of you who follow my stuff, you can probably click off here as this is going to be very elementary. But for those of you who still are having trouble grasping the very basic fundamentals of Facebook, I will try to fill in the gaps for you.

Facebook Defined: Facebook is a web-based social media platform that provides a digital means for people to connect and communicate with each other by forming “social networks”. A social network is essentially the digital equivalent of the ordinary real life relationships that we all have. Facebook uses the concept of “friends” to establish symmetrical relationships between 2 people. For example, if you are a Facebook user, you can send a Facebook “friend request” to someone you know who is also a Facebook user. If the friend confirms your request, the two of you are now “Facebook friends”. Pretty simple so far.

As a Facebook user, you can post comments on your Facebook “wall” concerning your daily life. Likewise, your “friends” can make comments on their own “walls” as well as your wall and vice-versa. Your Facebook “wall” is like a personal bulletin board and is generally what “friends” will see by default when they visit someone’s profile.This is what drives the voyeuristic aspect of Facebook. This is how moms see what they kids are doing for example. By going to their kid’s page and seeing what their kid posted on their wall as well as what their kid’s friends may have posted on their kid’s wall.

But it goes farther than that. By posting something on your wall, your Facebook friends are able to view it in their “news feed” without having to go to your profile. This is where i find a lot of people getting lost. The news feed and the wall are two different but connected things. When you log in to your Facebook account you are taken to your own “Home” page. On that home page you are looking at your “news feed”. If you clicked the link to look at your profile, which is your public face on Facebook, you would be looking at your “wall”.

The Facebook news feed is the heartbeat of Facebook and is composed of the aggregate wall posts (sometimes called “status updates”) made by you and your friends. As you view your news feed, you are kept informed of the day-to-day comments made by your network of Facebook friends in a sort of ticker tape fashion without the cumbersome task of serially browsing from wall to wall of each of your Facebook friends. Likewise, as your Facebook friends view their own news feed, they are kept informed of messages you have posted on your wall.

Let’s take it a step further now. Facebook is the clear leader in social media. Facebook now boasts over 500 million active users and the average Facebook user spends an hour a day on Facebook. The impact and potential of Facebook rests on its “viral” nature. As Facebook users accumulate more friends, they approach a point of activity and exposure whereby they start to receive friend requests from “friends of their friends”. As they accept these friend requests, their personal social network continues to grow even though they are not actively soliciting new friends. This phenomenon was so profound that Facebook imposed a limit of 5000 friends to protect their infrastructure from melt down.

At first, Facebook users mostly posted information concerning their personal lives. The majority of news feed posts were personal and perhaps even shallow. Posts such as “having coffee with so-and-so”, “my child is running a fever”, and other such posts were common. However, with the growth of Facebook, business interests were quick to catch on that Facebook is a viable communications platform for their advertising. Given the audience that can be accumulated, it is easy to see why commercial interests would soon pervade the Facebook news feed.

In order to protect its “social” intent, Facebook created a new idea of the “fan page” (recently renamed to just “Pages”) which are separate and distinct from your personal “Profile”. So, to be clear we now have “Profiles” which are people and “Pages” which are businesses, often people, even experts, use these terms interchangeably, but they are two different things.

Advertising on Facebook was a violation of the Terms of Service, but was running rampant and unabated on Profiles. By offering Pages, Facebook gave businesses a vehicle to advertise themselves to as many “fans” as they could attract – thus presumably preserving the “social” Facebook experience by diverting business related content to these Pages. To keep things unnecessarily complicated, Facebook recently changed the concept of a “Fan”, to just someone who “Likes” a page. Apparently it is less of a psychological commitment to simply “Like” something than to declare to your friends that you are a “fan” of something. While a lot of people still use the deprecated term “Fans”, the correct term now would be “Likes” or “Likers”. I know, it doesn’t flow as well.

With Facebook Pages, any organization with a message could benefit by taking advantage of a Facebook Page. After all, it’s free and easy to set up. Once you have a Page, you solicit Facebook friends to “Like” your page. Liking a Page is as simple as visiting the Facebook Page and clicking a button. Once you accumulate “likes”, you are able to post messages to the Page wall which will then become a part of your “Likers” personal news feeds.

Pages have met with varied degrees of success. Unless you are willing to invest in some bells and whistles design, your page will look like all other pages. The only difference is the label at the top identifying your organization. There is little compelling incentive for someone to “like” your page since the likely result is that they will receive commercial messages from you in their news feed. There are several recent schemes to attempt to overcome this, mostly consisting of nicely designed “teaser” pages that greet a visitor offering them something if they “Like” the page, and these are useful tools for the Page owner. But users are getting wise. Often before liking a page, they will first take a look at the page’s wall to see what kind of content they might expect to be dumped into their news feed. If it is all promotional content with no interesting information, they are not likely to “Like” the page.

So, if you have a Page for your business, how would you go about increasing your audience? Well, it is likely that it has attracted a few likes, even if only from your requests to your friends. While no case is typical, for purposes of illustration, let’s assume your page has 60 “Likes”. Now you can post a message on your page wall that will in turn become part of the personal news feed of those 60 people who like your page. Impressive since it’s free. Each of the people who see your message in their personal news feed, has the opportunity to pass it on to their friends by “Sharing” your post. So now your information has landed in the news feeds of their friends. So why would somebody “Share” your information? Because they felt it was “share worthy”, or maybe they are just a friend trying to help you out.

So think about this. You create a post of some kind, which can be text, a video, photo or whatever, that turns out to be “Share worthy”. The 60 people who like your page see it in their news feeds. Lets say half of them decide to share it with their friends, and for simplicity sakes let assume everyone has 60 friends (even though the actual average is more like 130 friends). Okay so now your post, with your page link attached just went out to another 1,800 people. If it was good enough for half of the original people to share, why wouldn’t half of those 1,800 people share it, so it bounces out to another 54,000 people, and so on. If anyone along the way likes what you posted enough, maybe they click on the link and go to your Page. If they like what they see, maybe they “Like” your page and the cycle continues. You get the idea.

If what I just said sounds easy, I apologize, because it is not. People are fickle, many will like your information and your page, but never share. Many will like what you have to say and come to your page often, but never “Like” it, therefore denying you that ongoing dialogue access we all desire. Many Page owners will turn to Facebook Ads as a way too “kick-start” their pages, but that is an advanced topic beyond my premise for this post.

So there you have it. Facebook, oversimplified in a nutshell. Hopefully I was able to clear some fog for you.

If you would like to learn more about how to Master Facebook, check out our training systems .

I welcome any comments, feedback or questions.

I can hardly keep up myself. Places, Deals, Revamped Groups, Revamped Profiles, Revamped Pages coming… keep it up Zuckerberg.

So why am I so damn happy?

Well, for one thing, I just got a whole bunch of new stuff to talk about at my event this Thursday. As a Social Media Speaker, I never give the same presentation twice. Which is good for my attendees… not so good for my workload. I have 3 days to completely revamp my presentation. I have been deep into the new features, following every rabbit hole to figure out not only how to use them, but how to apply them to business owners, which is my core audience.

My to-do list for this weeks presentation:

• Completely redo Profiles
• Completely redo Groups
• Update Places
• Add Deals
• Show soon-to-be-launched Pages changes
• Get the oil changed in my car
• Pick up another jar of pasta sauce from Publix
• Return sneakers that are too small
• Update Ipod
• Hide Christmas decoration storage boxes
• Replace wheels on sliding door screen

Man, I better get to it!

Later.

Steve

Guess what? Social Media ain’t your club. It Never was.

You early adopters simply had a head-start on the rest of the world which gave you the illusion that the space was yours to craft into a private Utopia.

I received a message from a Facebook friend a while back telling me that if I don’t stop face-tweeting, they will un-friend me because they don’t use Facebook like that. I thought to myself “Why should I give a shit about how you use anything?”

I recently helped Derrick Brooks sort out his Facebook page. One of the things we did was to connect Twitter to his page. Of course, why wouldn’t we? This step is even recommended by Facebook during the setup. I started following Derrick’s tweets as a result. As many of you know, Derrick is a guaranteed lock for the NFL Hall of Fame, an eleven time Pro Bowler and a Superbowl ring wearer. Personally, I feel privileged to be able to hear his thoughts through his tweets. Now Derrick is far from a Social Media elitist and he frequently tweets in all caps. Why? Because he feels like it. Occasionally, some nobody jackass will feel compelled to tell Mr. Derrick Brooks that he is doing it wrong. According to who? The idiot below actually felt so strongly about it that he tried to enlist Warren Sapp to support his cause. Warren told him to pound sand by the way.

I got news for the social media snobs. It ain’t your playground. Social Media is a public park were everyone is invited, like it or not. So gird yourselves for the onslaught of faux pas that will continue to leave you seething behind your lattes realizing you have lost control of the teeter-totters to the new kids.

Of course, one of the nice things about most social media is that we all have a choice of who we want to follow. If you are bothered by the way someone uses the tools, you can easily stop following them and the MADNESS WILL END for you. But, I suggest that you simply give into it. You really don’t have a choice anyway, there are way too many heathens over that rise.

I received an email from Hubspot, an SEO company of sorts whose list I am on. I usually ignore any information from an SEO company, but Hubspot has sent along a few things in the past that I thought were interesting and this one peaked my attention. There is some kind of “inbound Marketing Summit” coming up next week in Massachusetts. In advance of this event the promoters (I guess) sent out a survey to Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott and 17 other top Social Media and Marketing pros in the industry today. The survey asked these “experts” several questions for their thoughts about today and their predictions for 3 years out, 2013. Here are a few nuggets I found interesting:

The experts were asked “What Service or Website Drives the Most Business Value” today and to predict for 2013. Not surprisingly, 80% saw Google as the “king” today with Facebook as a fairly distant second. I have been telling anyone who listens to me that I think that Facebook will eventually eclipse Google, and indeed the experts predicted that Google will slide by 2013, but they also predict that Facebook would slide by a similar proportion! The experts predicted that “Other” will become a major force. “Other” as in something that may not even exist or at least is not on the radar today.

In response to the question “What Channel Drives the Most Business Value” the experts also gave some interesting assessments. Mobile Marketing and Social Media Marketing are expected to grow significantly, while Organic Search (SEO) and Email Marketing drop precipitously over the next 3 years. Interestingly, blogging stays about the same: not particularly significant.

There were a lot of different responses to “The Most Important Metrics to Track” across channels. For example “Comments”, seemed to be the most mentioned metric for blogs. “Interactions” for Facebook (I’m not sure how you even measure that). Re-Tweets was mentioned a lot for Twitter metrics. But for “Social Media Marketing”, “Inbound Marketing” and “Marketing Overall” I was pleased to see that good ole “Sales” was still the most relevant metric.

When asked their opinions on “Biggest Marketing Trends for 2011″, some responses were: Mobile Video, “Smart” Display Advertising, Geo-Location, Real-Time Search, Embedded Demographic Mobile Advertising, Curation and The Right Time Web. Based on this, seems to me like Mobile will be even hotter next year…duh.

I would love to hear your opinions on what this “Other” could be, let me know in the comments below.

To see the source go to

http://www.hubspot.com/webinars/view-insights-from-19-marketing-experts/

They will want your contact info, but some of their stuff is pretty good.

I am sure all of you are aware of FBML…no? Well I wasn’t either, it stands for Facebook Markup Language. Already sounding confusing huh. If you have been to any of the really big companies’ pages, you may have noticed that they seem to have a lot more going on than yours. My first thought was that FB made a special concession for them, that they were not likely to make for lil’ ole me. That may actually still be true, but I did realize that some of what they were doing, or maybe even all of it, is available to anyone who discovers FBML.

Some of you may know that in addition to my presentation business, I also do some web development work. I am one of those “self-taught” developers, which means I don’t really understand how some things work, but if I can get it to work for me, I don’t care. I develop with the “Trial and Error” technique, and a lot of Copy, Paste, Edit of code snippets I find on the web, until I make things work for me. That is how I converted this website to a wordpress 3.0 platform, that still looks like the non-wordpress site that I started with. That is also how I figured out the really cool moving audience behind my head at the top. If you don’t think it is cool, then you are probably a “real” web developer, in which case you will be unimpressed with this entire post. But for the rest of you, I want to share how I made my micro-site on my Facebook page. BTW, while you are there I would really appreciate if you would hit the “Like” button.

I did a lot of looking around on the web for instruction on this, and as usual, I could not find a single, simple complete answer. But from about 20 different sources, and my copy, paste, edit methodology, I was able to figure it out. In this post, I hope to save you all of that trouble. Hopefully, this will be a complete and easy to understand “step-by-step” to save you a lot of time.

I will explain each step below, but if you are like me, sometimes you would like to skip all the hows and whys and just copy and paste something that you can edit yourself. So here is the exact code I used for my micro-site. (BTW, if you copy and paste this as is, you will have “my” micro-site on your facebook page).

Copy all green text from below this line:

If you like my page, please click the “like” button above!

Home
About Me
Services
Consulting
/div>

The Professional Paraphraser

There is an obvious disconnect between some of the truly innovative technologies out there and the potential client/users. If you are a developer or provider of such technologies, this is not news to you. So how do you
make that connection?


I am one of those unique individuals who can speak both languages. I can not only understand the complexities and nuances of your technology, but I can paraphrase and present these complexities and nuances to be understood and appreciated by your customer base. Connection Made!


When you engage my services, I will dive deep into your offering to gain a thorough understanding which I will use to craft a user friendly presentation that I will professionally present to your clients in one or more of several formats.


Why would you engage me to do this? Well, maybe you are not comfortable in front of crowds, or maybe you are not good at articulating your product features to laypeople, or maybe you are not a convincing spokesperson, or maybe you just have too much on your plate. Either way, there is no reason not to engage an expert presenter to help you make that critical connection, and create that “aha!” moment in your client’s minds for you.

egomaniac, narcissist, megalomaniac, comedian

Only my closest friends use these adjectives when  describing me. But since you don’t know me, you will have to make up your own mind. Granted, these are not traits that you would want to have in your neighbor, but they are the exact traits you want in a spokesperson for your company. It’s true that I do not lack in self confidence, but I am nowhere near schizophrenic, I swear.


Presenting is something I have done for 30 years now, and I have a knack and an ability to sway others to agree with my message. I focus my efforts in the technology space, but also serve other markets.


I enjoy the work, I am good at it, and I want to do it for you.

Services

I do a bunch of things, but primarily I produce workshops, webinars and seminars for tech companies.


I also do voiceovers and videos for your websites or other promotional needs.

Please go to my website to see examples of my work and to find out more about me: www.stevemordue.com

consulting

Do you have an important pitch coming up? I can join your team and assist with that specific task.


You may well be the best  choice for the client, but as you know, that is not always enough. You  are probably familiar with the phrase “Form over Substance”; you may  have lost opportunities to competition that was not as capable as your  firm, yet presented well. In the best case scenario, “Form equals  Substance”.


I can help your team organize and develop your  presentation, as well as acting as the lead, or sole  presenter to give  your clients a first impression that backs up your true capabilities.

Copy up to, but not including this line.

For the rest of us, here is my step-by-step and full explanation of above.

1. First, create a Page (formerly Fan Page) if you do not have one:
   • After Logging in to Facebook, click on the Home tab, and then the link “Ads and Pages”, which will be in the list below your profile picture.
     
   • On the next page, click on the “Pages” link below Campaigns.
     
   • Then click on the “+ Create Page” button.
     
     
   • Next click on the radio button for what kind of page, in my case “Local Business” and select the type from the dropdown. Give it a name, in my case “The Professional Paraphraser”. Check the box that you are the one who can do this, and click on the “Create Official Page” button.
     
   • You will then be brought to your new “empty” page. Click on the “edit Page” link below the Question mark.
     
   • Here you can go ahead and edit your settings etc., I am not going to go into detail here as this is similar to you regular profile page and you can figure it out.
     
   • If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you will see the “more applications” section and the “Static FBML” link. If the link is not there then click on “browse more” and search for it.
     
   • After clicking on the “Static FBML” link you will be taken to another page. Click the link to “Ad to my Page”
     
   • This will bring up a window listing all of your pages, if you have any others, and let you add this feature by clicking the “Add to Page” button next to the page you want to add it to. Click that and then close the window.
     
   • It would be nice if Facebook took you right back to your new page here, and there may be a faster way to get there that I don’t know about, but I just click the “Home” tab at the top, then “Ads and Pages” again, and finally “Pages” again to get back to my list of pages where, if this is your first page, only one will be listed. Click the the “Edit Page” link.
     
   • You should now notice in your Applications list, the FBML application as active. If not, repeat the above steps because you missed something. Click on the “Application Settings” link of FBML.
     
   • Click on “add” next to Tab: Available, and then hit “Okay” to close the window.
     
   • Now let’s click on the “Edit” link next to FBML and we get this window. The Box Title will be the name for the tab that will now be on your page where you custom content will be. I chose “Micro-Site”, but you could call it whatever you want. You can come back and change it anytime, so don’t worry about it too much. Below the title, where is says “FBML”, is where the new custom code will go and I’ll get into that next.
     
2. Okay so you should now have your new page and your FBML App installed so let’s talk about the custom code. Without getting too technical, FBML is kind of a subset of html which is the language used for creating websites. Facebook obviously wants to limit what you can do on their platform, which is why they created the subset FBML language. So there are a lot of things you cannot do on a Facebook page that you can do on your own website. But there are still a lot of things you CAN do.In this example I am gong to walk you through creating a Micro-Site with multiple pages and a navigation menu, which is what mine is, so let’s break down my code that I showed above. I will assume that you are going to create a page just like mine except maybe different colors, text and images.
   • The first part of the code is the style section, this is where you specify things like the background color, fonts and font sizes etc. and it looks like this (the green is code, the black are my notes, and red are areas you should edit for your needs) :
     

     This ends the style declaration

   • The next section is the Navigation buttons and it looks like this:
     

     If you like my page, please click the “like” button above!

     You can change or delete this line
     HomeYou can change the term “Home” to whatever you want for this tab and the same for the others below.
     About Me
     Services
     Consulting

     
     

   • The next section is the actual first page that appears which is the Home page, and it looks like this (the next three pages are similar):
     
     This is my image file of me standing to the right, you will probably want to change this. You are going to need to create an image and upload it somewhere and point to it, this can be your website or a flickr account etc. My images are about 200px wide and about 550px tall.
     

     The Professional Paraphraser

     This is my page headline and everything below this is my page text, just leave the items in the brackets <> alone and edit the rest
     

     There is an obvious disconnect between some of the truly innovative technologies out there and the potential client/users. If you are a developer or provider of such technologies, this is not news to you. So how do you
     make that connection?
     
     These tags creat a little space between paragraphs
     I am one of those unique individuals who can speak both languages. I can not only understand the complexities and nuances of your technology, but I can paraphrase and present these complexities and nuances to be understood and appreciated by your customer base. Connection Made!
     
     
     When you engage my services, I will dive deep into your offering to gain a thorough understanding which I will use to craft a user friendly presentation that I will professionally present to your clients in one or more of several formats.
     
     
     Why would you engage me to do this? Well, maybe you are not comfortable in front of crowds, or maybe you are not good at articulating your product features to laypeople, or maybe you are not a convincing spokesperson, or maybe you just have too much on your plate. Either way, there is no reason not to engage an expert presenter to help you make that critical connection, and create that “aha!” moment in your client’s minds for you.

     
     

   • The last line is also optional, but if you have a Google Analytics account, you can create a profile for your page and enter the analytics account number here for detailed statistics.
     
     
3. Alright, so are you thoroughly confused? At the risk of making this long post even longer, I will try and simplify this further, go ahead and copy and paste the entire code below into the FBML box and we’ll edit it there:
   

   If you like my page, please click the “like” button above!

   Home
   About Me
   Services
   Consulting

   

   Your Home Page Headline

   Your Home Page text
   

   Your Second Page Headline

   Your second page text
   

   Your third page headline

   Your third page text
   

   Your fourth page headline

   Your fourth page text

   The easiest way to do this is to open a separate window in your browser so you can switch back and forth from your FBML page to your Micro-Site and refresh your micro-site to see the changes as you go. So try my copy, paste, edit method for yourself.

4. Lastly you will probably want to set your new Micro-Site to be the default landing page for new visitors, so go back to your page settings and click on “edit” under Wall Settings.
   

   Then select Micro-Site (or whatever you called your page) in the dropdown for Default Landing page:
   

5. Hopefully this was helpful to you, one thing I have been asked in the past is about hex-decimal colors, so here is a link to a conversion chart

Please comment profusely about ways to improve this or your experiences with this tutorial. If you would rather just have this done for you let me know, I won’t do it for free, but I won’t charge you much to do it either.

Thanks for reading!

Steve

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