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Adding Facebook Like button to WordPress blog

Matthew Ho — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:03:43 +0000

You Like?

I’ve added some new plugins into the blog which you may notice including the Facebook Like button.

I have wanted to add this since Facebook introduced this feature a few months ago. It allows you to “like” a webpage and notify your facebook friends. Its great because its a personal recommendation and so easy for users to undertake this action.

I thought that I needed to paste some code into the css/html settings. However, the wordpress open source community has created an easy plugin that only requires a few clicks. The thing I love about WordPress hosted blogs is the access to the treasure trove of plugins which do not require any technical ability to install. I’ve long been an advocate of simple, easy and low tech solutions.

Adding the Facebook Like button

These instructions are only for wordpress hosted blogs (as this is what I use). These are the blogs that have been installed onto a server. For example, it does not include the ones that end in “.wordpress.com”.

1. Search in the plugins section for “Facebook like”. There are a number of options. I chose the first in the list by Ahmed Hussein as it had the most installations. This gave me confidence as approximately 27,000 other people had done it.

2. Click install. It should automatically activate the Facebook Like plugin (too easy!).

3. You will be asked to fill out some settings. Firstly, you need the AppID for XFBML version. Click “Don’t have one”. As long as you have a Facebook login (i.e. an account), it will connect automatically when you use your FB credentials.

4. You are required to enter your site name and site URL. For the URL ensure you have a “/” e.g. http://inspiredworlds.com/

Facebook Application Key

I’ve installed it on two blogs, and both times it did not seem to connect on the first try. However, it actually did it. If you refresh, you can try it again. Then get the API code and paste it into the Facebook Like settings on your blog.

5. Other settings to choose (see pic below):

Facebook Like WordPress Settings

Decide whether you want to show the like button on homepage, posts, or pages. I’ve gone for homepage and posts.
Before or after content. I generally like to have it “after content”. So when you are finished reading you can hit the button.
I have chosen not to display faces i.e. facebook profiles. I would prefer to remain anonymous, and I suspect most people would too on a public site. It just becomes a numbered count i.e. “2 people like this”.
I’m using the standard “like” rather than “recommend” text.

How easy is it to install the Facebook Like button!

If you like this post hit the facebook like button =)

I’m out like Myspace,

Matt Ho.

Que es Quora?

Matthew Ho — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:24:47 +0000

I try to keep my eye out for new websites and my ear to the ground. However, not all new websites catch my attention. It’s impossible given the cambrian like explosion of new blogs, social websites, and online innovation.

What I look at are websites that are interesting to me or have an interesting/unique concept. Another important factor are the people behind the website.

Now, Quora was interesting because the team is made up of ex-facebookers. Not just ordinary employees at Facebook but “Adam D’Angelo, who was previously CTO and VP of engineering at Facebook, and Charlie Cheever, who led Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform”.

So I signed up to Quora a while back, and one day a beta invite popped up in my inbox.

Beta invites are cool because they are not open to the general public and you need to sign up and register your interest. Websites are in beta for a number of reasons, one of these is that they are still in development and might not be able to handle the load if it was open to the public. Having a beta limits the number of users and allows them to get feedback and develop iterations rapidly. The other thing is that it generates a level of excitement in tech geeks who think they have exclusive access (see @inspiredworlds).

Que es Quora? (What is Quora?)

According to the website:

“Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.”

The closest analogy I can come up with is Yahoo Answers. Quora aims to be the best place to find answers or knowledge about a topic. They do this by having the community ask questions, and having the community answer it. Sounds like any forum right ala stackoverflow, or a wikipedia or google’s attempt at knol.

A particular feature is that certain people have expertise in an area, so their answer should be given more weight. The analogy Quora likes to use is if Michael Jordan answers a question about basketball, its not the same if you or I answer the question (though I do claim to know a lot about bball!). Clearly, an expert that answers a question knows a lot more about the topic.

In addition, the community can vote up the answer similar to a forum. The community can also edit the question, summarize answers, categorize, etc…similar to wikipedia. Quora tries to use people with real profiles and real names.

Here is an example below of a question about Firefox’s growth:

Right now, there a lot of interesting questions and insightful answers being posed like the above pic. Mostly, they have a tech skew because these are generally the first adopters of these kind of websites. The quality of the answers and the experts answering them are also really good. You can see in the example above, one of the original co-founders of Firefox answered, then the current CEO, and a bunch of people that use to work there or developers that have worked with it.

So much of the web is uncategorised. When you search in google, you are presented with web pages that best match your keywords. It might not actually ANSWER your question or search intent. What Quora is trying to do is create some sense of order in the web by having the community organise it, and giving priority to experts. The community also help shapes the answers by giving feedback.

Here is an example of a question I answered on Yammer. I corrected the person below who answered Blellow as a competitor. Yes, most people would see it as a competitor but its actually a different service.

One of the issues that I have is that right now there are a lot of really good answers from credible people at lot of tech companies. What will happen when Quora scales? When the questions drift away from tech, will the quality of questions and answers decline? Will it become like Yahoo Answers?

Honestly, I find Yahoo answers a bit of a hit and miss. It comes up often in google searches, but there are a lot of crass comments as well useless junk in there. Much will depend on the quality and willingness of Quora’s community to curate and moderate the content.

You can find a lot of interesting and insightful comments all over the web. Its buried in blogs, forums, reviews, wikis. A major problem is that you don’t know how authoritative or useful that information is. I mean, you can’t believe everything you read on the web right? You don’t know who posted that information or who answered a question, what their experience is with the subject matter. Maybe Quora will help bring some categorisation + order + expertise into topics.

As of this moment, this website is best described as Yahoo Answers meets Wikipedia, with a dash of facebook engineering =)

I’m out like beta invites,

Matthew Ho.

When all likes lead to Facebook

Matthew Ho — Sun, 09 May 2010 03:43:08 +0000

When all likes lead to Facebook, and liking requires a Facebook account, and Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos — those attributes which make the technology industry so interesting and competitive

- Chris Messina on understanding the open social graph protocol

Great little facebook campaign

Matthew Ho — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:32:01 +0000

I came across this via a colleague. Check out this simple little idea to promote the new IKEA store in Malmo, Sweden. You probably can’t do it now due to the Terms & Conditions changes (see Westfields campaign) as it gets into people’s news feeds and status. Although I would think it was ok and also had a huge viral element to it as well.

They were able to create an interactive campaign and a live photo album. Watch it!

New Facebook API’s by Microsoft & Seesmic desktop

Matthew Ho — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:10:21 +0000

Came across this story via techcrunch. Facebook now has open stream API’s, similar to how Twitter has developed their API’s and let it loose into the developer community. I’ve seen two instances of cool facebook API integrations today. I’m using Seesmic desktop and got the email update this morning and it was one of the top trending topics on twitter. Check out the facebook API using microsoft silverlight – its very cool!

With Seesmic, the facebook integration is something that I’ve always wanted. A way for facebook to dynamically update using Adobe AIR. In the past, i’ve often found myself refreshing the page to find out there’s new updates. Now, I can just use facebook via Seesmic desktop. I’ve been using it for the past couple of hours since it was announced. Although they say that there is “full integration with the feed”, you can’t respond to status updates (i.e. comment). All u can do at the moment is check the ”like” box. if you want to comment, it opens up a new window in your browser and may need to login again. Which is annoying.

I’m out like the old facebook,

Matthew Ho

How can you control social media? You can’t!

Matthew Ho — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 09:42:14 +0000

I can understand that legal authorities did not not want the details for the suspected arsonist’s for the Victorian bushfire to be published. You can tell traditional media like print, tv, radio not to say anything because there are regulations and perfectly legitimate reasons. You don’t want to prejudice the trial if people see the name and face and make decisions based on prior information.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzGNXflnQ9k]

How do you expect to control what people put on facebook? It’s idiotic to think so. To control the public en masse as to what they publish on facebook is not only difficult but impossible. People will talk about anything online and anywhere. People will update via facebook, tweet it, blog, etc…. As Laura Papworth suggests to shut down one network is to only force the conversation to move elsewhere. I must say in defence of the lawyer (defending a criminal defense lawyer!), he is right about some aspects re child pornography. If someone makes a child pornography page then it should be shut down by facebook. But I’m sure this is part of the terms of service, that you won’t do anything illegal on facebook. Of course publishing the details of the arsonists is also illegal, but I don’t see how you can put the responsibility on the ISP’s or social networks.

I’m out like controlling social media,

Matthew Ho

Top 25 Social Networks

Matthew Ho — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:37:08 +0000

Compete has ranked this based on monthly unique visits (UV) and also on total visits. We see that facebook has jumped to #1 for this time last year and Linkedin is steadily rising. Twitter has made the biggest jump to #3.

I was talking to this guy at my church who’s in year 12, approximately 17 years of age. He uses Bebo but not so much lately and Friendster, but has stopped this as well. I used to be on Friendster 6 years ago too, however I found it to be too dodgy. It was the first social network I joined. I used to get random emails from Friendster telling me it was my friend’s birthday and they should add me. I had no idea about what social networking was, but clearly Friendster was ahead of its time.

The social network that I have been spending a lot of time in lately is Linkedin, twitter and facebook. I’ve actually stopped checking my RSS reader for the last couple of weeks. Twitter is my news service now and provides all the updates I need, plus I’ve been really busy. Iwill blog more about Linkedin later but I wanted to show you this graph I came across a few weeks ago. It’s the growth of Linkedin over the past year. A colleague of mine commented that its reaching criticial mass now. We’re seeing a lot more usage because of the worsening economic situation, so people are using linkedin to stay connected to their friends, build their professional networks and to source for job opportunities.

I’m out like Friendster,

Matthew Ho.

Yammer updates, interview and Yammer clothing line!

Matthew Ho — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:47:45 +0000

Quick post on yammer:

Yammer released some new updates on highly requested features.

I found out about this update via the Yammer fanpage on facebook. Some of these are no brainers such as private DM ala Twitter. I really like the import RSS feed as well. I’ve already posted the link to the new features in our work yammer group and will discuss them during the week. I like to discuss features on yammer one a day – as it gives people a chance to try them out.

Yammer CEO interview on social networking watch

This is a pretty good interview and gives you an insight to how Yammer works and where it is positioned against Twitter. I also left the following comment on the page:

“its interesting how Yammer has no insight into how companies are using Yammer because of their privacy guarantee, other than via blogs / twitter. Not every co. on yammer will blog or twitter.

Perhaps they should look into creating some Yammer user groups. identify who is the key yammer person in each organisation, and do a test pilot with 30 or so people providing feedback via yammer. they could eventually scale to hundreds of people. that way they would get greater insight. create subgroups for large organisations, IT organisations, FMCG, educational, etc… Why not use yammer to get feedback on itself?

the problem i’ve found is that even though we have yammer in our organisation, people still send out mass emails if they really need to get a message across, and we need to change that culture.

I’ve been appointed as the Yammer Evangelist in my company and i’d be happy to give feedback whether via a usergroup or directly. i’ve also written about how my company uses yammer here: http://inspiredworlds.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/mc-yammer-cant-touch-this/”

Yammer basketball singlet

Check out my new Next Digital basketball singlet. I decided to get a yammer inspired nickname, combined with my favourite retro rap star/dance star phenomenon/twitter superstar, MC Hammer:

I’m out like MC Yammer,

Matthew Ho.

Seven Commerical Uses of Twitter

Matthew Ho — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 06:20:26 +0000

I’ve been on Twitter for more than a minute now. I signed up around May 08, but didn’t use it much. I posted up a few updates and couldn’t see the value of it. However, I decided to give it another try this week and I’ve been hooked.

I posted previously about Twitter and how my company uses Yammer, a Twitter spin-off. Basically, Twitter allows you to text 140 characters about what you are doing. To be honest with you, when I found this out I thought it had really little value.

However, in the past week I’ve used it for different purposes and this is where I see Twitter as having value:

1. News Service

I decided to follow a couple of news services just to try it out. So I followed @Digg_2000 for stories with more than 2000 diggs and @NYTimes, so I’m getting constant updates about the major news stories. There’s also a couple of other social media gurus out there, like @guykawasaki, @joywayng (Jeremiah Wang of Forrester research & author of Groundswell). I get to hear their constant thoughts, articles they want to share interesting people & companies that they are meeting (more on this later).

Another pertinent example was highlighted this week. By now, you’ve heard about the plane crash in the Hudson River caused by flock of birds. The first place this was reported was Twitter & the pics were on Twitpic. Janis Krums, who was on a ferry going to the rescue of the plane wrote:

“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy“.

Twitter was updating furiously with news like this about the Hudson plane crash. I went to the Twitter search engine and looked up “plane crash” and every few seconds someone was saying something about it. It gives you an ear to the ground.

Due to the availability of the internet on phones, people can immediately micro-blog on their phones and post to the internet via applications like Twitter and post the pics. Twitter allows citizen journalism, for ordinary people to report on stuff straight away and for it to be spread like a viral message.

2. Customer Service

Telecomms

I noticed from reading a couple of blogs, that @Comcastcares was using Twitter to respond to customer complaints. Twitter can be used as a public forum, and if you use it to complain about service or product, and if you have enough followers, you could be quite damaging to their brand.

So in a wise move, companies like @Comcast, @BigPondTeam, etc… are using it to get in touch with people that are bitching about their service. They get in touch with you and DM (direct message) you, to find out how they can help.

Atlassian – Confluence Wiki

I have experienced this from a different angle by praising a product. I posted the following:

“inspiredworlds is building a wiki on confluence (Atlassian product). It’s so easy to use!“

Then two people posted a response. One of them was @mattnhodges, in their customer service or marketing team, who previously has sent me an autoresponse email about the Wiki when I was evaluating the product and after I purchased it. Through Twitter, I’ve been able to ask questions and get responses and useful links. Another person associated with Atlassian, also posted a response and when they wrote a response to another customer about a sharepoint extender, and I got some useful info there as well.

Docstoc v Slideshare

During the week, I have been evaluating two websites for sharing documents. So I posted a general question: “Docstoc v SlideShare, which is better?“.

To my amazement, the next day when I logged in, @Serena from Docstoc had responded with “docstoc of course. DM me if you want tips about how to optimise your use”. That’s incredible customer service. Admittedly, I decided to go with Slideshare, even though it crashed a few times during the week, but at least I had that option and it made me more curious to check out Docstoc.

Monitoring how brands use it

To monitor this customer service usage, I have decided to follow a number of other brands to see how they will use it, and will post about that experience. I imagine its easier now for customer service, because they are not that many people on Twitter. But imagine if the whole Facebook crowd decided to join twitter, how much noise, clutter and compliants will be on Twitter?

However, I believe that Twitter does attract a certain type of person – someone that wants to be heard, slightly ahead of the adoption curve, tech – savvy, that can influence others. So that is why companies are providing quick responses on Twitter.

3. Brand building / Marketing

A lot of brands are on Twitter. I like that, because I get to follow my favourite brands and apps and find out what’s happening. For example, I’m a huge Chicago bulls fan, and @chicagobulls will post updates during the games and their thoughts:

“Duncan is clogging the middle but the Bulls are hitting shots. Hanging in 36-33 in the second.”

I’ve also signed up to hear updates from @WordPress, @Googlereader, @shareaholic, @yammer_team, @blogger. I like these products and brands, and I want to hear from them. In a sense, I’m giving them permission to enter my world. I don’t just follow anyone, I’m quite picky because otherwise you get too much clutter.

These brands have reciprocated by adding me as their “friend” by following me. So they are interested in what I have to say – perhaps to provide better customer service (as noted above). For example, during the week I posted how “It’s official, I’m a shareaholic“, and in response @shareaholic posted on their tweets:

@inspiredworlds Welcome!

Consequently, I’ve posted in reply that they should add Yammer as one of their new features. And then the @Yammer_team added me. How cool is that? Obviously, these guys are paying attention to what is been said about them.

I believe this is an area where brands can use twitter – to hear what customers are saying about them and to also build up the brand and stay in constant contact with their customers. How cool is that when a brand mentions you in their tweets? Admittedly, the novelty factor does wear off. It’s allowing me to be closer to my favourite brands.

One problem is “twitter squatting”. Some cunning people have snatched up some valuable online real estate. For example @jetstar is not jetstar. I don’t even know if @chicagobulls is even the real thing. So there’s no way to know, just have to look at the page, check their links, number of followers, and make an assessment.

4. Professional Networking

I’m relatively new in digital marketing with only 8 months experience in the industry. So it’s important for me to network with people and meet the who’s who of the industry. I can go through people’s lists and add anyone I would like to know and generally they reciprocate and add me. It’s not as intimate as facebook where they get to see all your personal info and pics. All you are getting in twitter is 140 character updates.

So I’ve added in a couple of the big names in the industry overseas, as well as people locally that I meet. People also have “tweetups”, where they have real meetings with people in twitter. I mean, even speakers from the Future of Digital forum I attended, I’ve added them in Twitter. You can add someone in twitter and when you meet them, you can say “I know you from twitter!”.

5. Find out trends & buzz

I’ve covered this off above. If you want to hear what people are thinking about, just use twitter search. You will get live updates about what people think about brands, what’s being discussed out there.

6. Thought Leadership

As mentioned above, I’ve tapped into some of the key minds in the industry. And they also share a lot of useful links, which I’ve then read and commented on. They also talk about people they have met in the industry, company meetings they are going to, trends they can see and so on.

7. Microblogging

Twitter is so easy to use and update. This post I am writing now, has taken at least an hour. In between finding the links, going back through my emails and twitter updates. Microblogging is blogging in small lines of text, perhaps one or two lines. You don’t have to think too much when you twitter because you are concentrating on writing just one line. And you can update it again a few seconds or minutes later.

It could possibly over take blogging. Evhead, the CEO of twitter who previously sold Blogger to Google wrote about it on his blog. Twitter gives you smaller bite sized pieces to snack on and feeds our voracious hunger for constant updates.

Other thoughts on Twitter

I believe that the use of Twitter will continue to grow as it offers a differnet purpose to facebook and has commercial value as noted above.

With the advent of aggregator services like Shareaholic, Fring, Xummi, Friendfeed, it allows you to manage multiple social network services at the same time like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Delicious. So belonging to multiple networks is possible and will grow in popularity.

Their are also a couple of innovations out there like Brightkit, which allow multiple people to “tweet” under one account, manage multiple accounts and to time your updates. I thought there was no way @guykawasaki could be pumping out so many updates throughout the day, but they must prerecord them and have several people tweeting all the time. Brightkit is free now to manage one account, but charges for multiple accounts.

I’ve also come across Ginx, which Pierre Omidyar the ebay founder has started. It allows you to share links, and then share comments about it, with the twitter page taking up the top part of the page. It’s eerily similar to sharing facebook comments about a shared link, where the option to comment is just above the page or even like Digg.

One of the biggest problems I have with social networking is the multiple logins and passwords you have to remember. Concepts like OpenID (having one identification) for all websites will allow one login for all.

Twitter will not replace Facebook, but it takes one of its most popular features the status updates and builds on that. Status updates combined with tiny URL’s, will allows for greater sharing and social bookmarking. Along with the popularity of internet on mobiles, instant messaging, the time is ripe for Twitter.

I’m out like the era before Twitter,

Matthew Ho.

[Updated: Dave from BrightKit - Thanks very much for including BrighKit in your article. One thing. We don't charge for multiple accounts. BrightKit is entirely free right now while it's in public beta. If you wouldn't mind changing that, we'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!]

Who would you delete from Facebook for a free whopper burger?

Matthew Ho — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:19:07 +0000

The Facebook blog currently reports that 150 million people are using Facebook and in the past year 6.6 billion friend requests were made in 2008. But don’t you feel at times, you have too many friends on your facebook account? People that you rarely know, you met once at a party and never saw again, that “friend” at primary school or university who you never spoke to, but all of a sudden wants to be your friend?

So Burger King has decided to flip the script on this. Delete 10 of your facebook friends and get a free whopper! I like this promotion because its poking fun about how we’re all adding friends and getting a bit overboard with the friend requests ( I mean 6.6 billion – that is a lot you know).

I can’t believe BurgerKing in the US is actually doing this promotion!

You install the Burger King sacrifice widget on your facebook page, get rid of ten friends and then get a burger coupon.

Suddenly I feel the urge to clean house. Mathematically speaking, if I delete 40 friends does that mean 4 whoppers? No, because its only one coupon per facebook account. D’oh! Apparently 180k friends have already been “sacrificed”. Are you next?

And I would do anything for a whopper, because I love’em …..so I might start reviewing my list of friends!

I’m out like sacrificing your friends for a free burger,

Matthew Ho.