Sean Cook is CEO of ShopVisible LLC. With more than 11 years of experience in online marketing, management and new technology innovation, Cook translates ShopVisible’s premier e-commerce platform solution into bottom line results for clients.

Social ecommerce is becoming more and more important on networks like Facebook. More than another “new frontier,” it is attracting innovative marketers that are taking advantage of new technologies and responding to their consumers.

Working with fans to create unique shopping and sharing opportunities empowers the kind of viral experiences that were fundamental to Facebook’s own rapid growth and consumer engagement.

But how can you maximize the social network to close sales for your own business? Here are five tips to help you design a Facebook presence that makes buying your products more desirable and easy.

1. Make it Unique

Your Facebook store should be different from your main website. The key is offering fans an engaging experience that makes sense within the environment. You can’t just put a shopping cart in Facebook and expect people to use it. Give your consumers a reason to become fans and give your fans a reason to purchase on Facebook. Consider offering exclusive merchandise available only on Facebook or making products available before you can find them in stores.

2. Encourage Collaboration

Facebook is the perfect environment to create a compelling and collaborative buying experience. People love sharing on Facebook — it’s what the space is built for. Letting people share this information is a great example of how retailers can join the conversation in a relevant way.

Retailers who harness the potential of comments, likes and shares will empower messages to go viral. Facebook makes it easy for your fans to share deals and purchases. Offering incentives, loyalty programs, checkin capabilities and other word-of-mouth generators will not only spread your reach further but give your fans a reason to purchase on your Facebook Page. The retailers who offer wish lists, collaborative shopping experiences and incentivized sharing on Facebook will likely see a surge in traffic and sales.

3. Create an Exclusive VIP Experience

We know from the success of companies like Gilt Groupe that people like to be “in the know” and they like to invite others to join the club. Let your Facebook fans be first in line to access new merchandise, limited edition pieces and products that are only available to them through Facebook. Your fans are more apt to share their limited-access purchase with other fans. This builds buzz for hard-to-get products and prompts Facebook users to become fans to get involved.

4. Privacy and Security are Paramount

Facebook stores that immediately ask permission to access personal data are a major deterrent for all consumers, especially those who are simply looking to browse. Offer an experience that doesn’t require fans and consumers to install an application. Consumers are wary of their personal data being tracked, so if you do require an application installation, specify what information you are going to access and what you’re going to do with it.

People like familiarity, especially when it comes to their financial data. Offering familiar alternative payment methods like PayPal or Amazon checkout will extend greater buying confidence. Make sure that consumers know you maintain the highest security during the checkout process. Make sure you only use technology partners that maintain PCI Level 1 compliance — it’s the right thing to do.

5. Make it Easy to Navigate and Work

Don’t want to lose your customer? Make sure your Facebook store is easy and intuitive to navigate. Consumers shouldn’t endure more than two to three clicks to find the product they’re looking for. Facebook recently introduced customizable navigation links on the left side of the page. Retailers can use these links to provide their customers with quick links to their top product categories. It’s also crucial to offer search capability within your Facebook store. Implementing a search bar that also offers predictive text allows a customer to get directly to the item they’re searching for.

Your website is not the community, and Facebook is not your company site. Don’t just copy and paste between the two. There is a reason why Facebook is unique — it is a community for sharing, collaborating, being the first to know, and much more. Give your fans something of value and make it fun, and they’ll reward you by telling everyone they know.

Social media isn’t only about news, opinion and commentary. It’s also a potentially profitable form of raw data, at least if you ask Wall Street.

Many on Wall Street think they can use social media networks to reliably predict how the markets for their investments will trend. One London-based investment manager says it will launch a fund dedicated entirely to using Twitter for investment decisions. The fund, managed by Derwent Capital Markets, has colloquially become known as “the Twitter hedge fund” among some Wall Street insiders. Although the launch has been perpetually delayed, it has an estimated $100 million in capital.

Wall Street’s interest in using social networks is far-reaching. Many other social media platforms are receiving attention from investment managers who are searching for the next edge; looking to slice and dice content from social networks to arrive at meaningful conclusions. They are not traditional Wall Street personalities. They’re not personalities at all. Instead, they’re computer-driven algorithms designed to buy and sell massive volumes of stocks, bonds, options, and other financial instruments on their own. Don’t think Gordon Gekko. Think Watson, but for high finance instead of Jeopardy!

This investment philosophy isn’t platform-centric as much as it’s content-needy. Wall Street doesn’t care which platforms users are on, only that social media continues to be a goldmine for content to analyze. There are three primary reasons why this is happening now.

Social Media and Trading: Three Connections

Despite coming into prominence in the mid-1980s, this type of computer-driven trading –- now termed “high-frequency trading” in industry parlance -– generally receives little attention from the mainstream business press. In 2009, it broke into the news, with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal among the outlets that published articles meant to explain the technology to a mainstream audience.

The relationship between social media and this kind of trading goes something like this:

• Today, computers make most trading decisions. Some estimate that between 46 and 73% of equity trading volumes in the U.S. are made by these high-frequency systems, which are designed to use computer speed and processing power to crunch massive amounts of data and seek small profits on enormous trading volume. A system that can reliably make a few cents per trade on hundreds of thousands of trades per day is quite valuable to a firm.
• Social networks have unique qualities that make them particularly well-suited for the machines that now dominate Wall Street. The sheer amount of content produced on social networks is enormous and continues to grow. The content production itself is a voluntary act. Even the ways with which social networks interact with one another –- the so-called semantic web -– make content production across multiple networks extremely quick. And of course most social media content is public at some level, especially when a carefully programmed algorithm is doing the searching.
• Other competitive advantages are going away. This growing enthusiasm for social content isn’t so much borne from newness as it is from necessity. As the BBC recently reported, the speed at which high-frequency trading can function is approaching its physical limitation. Speed is a competitive advantage for these platforms but it’s quickly becoming ubiquitous. If and when speed –- called “low-latency connectivity” -– is further commoditized, firms will require a new way to get a leg up on the competition.

These three realities have conspired to create demand for new ways to parse out conclusions from content on social media platforms. Having reliable sets of information -– Wall Street tends to call information “data points” or “market data” –- is centrally important to high-frequency trading platforms. Experimentation in sourcing information from social networks is rising rapidly.

These initiatives are certainly impressive. But they should also raise some eyebrows.

Where Trading Via Social Data May Fall Flat

It should shock no one to learn that these sophisticated models sometimes make mistakes. Recent history is wrought with examples of algorithm-driven trading gone awry, from the shocking collapse of a large hedge fund in the late ’90s to several high-profile market failures in more recent years and probably scores of horrifying details that have gone unreleased.

The problems ironically begin with the very human tendency to jump to conclusions. Paul Rowady, senior analyst with consultancy Tabb Group, says that high-frequency trading platforms can use social media data as trading indicators, either supporting or rejecting an existing hypothesis.

However, it would become problematic, he said, for a trading platform to mistake a trading indicator for a trading signal. Differentiating between indicator and signal is important. Indicators are derived from raw market-related data, such as content on social networks, and serve as inputs to models. Signals, usually based on multiple indicators, are the output of those models and eventually become orders to buy or sell financial instruments.

Wall Street calls the mathematicians and engineers who develop these models “quants,” short for quantitative analysts. They program the models that turn multiple indicators into a specific order.

“Social media can play a role in the form of trading indicators, but at this stage, not in the form of pure trading signals,” he said. “The signal-to-noise ratio for that dataset is simply way too low.”

Figuring out how to determine if a set of social media data is good news or bad news for a particular stock or trade is also problematic. It’s easy enough, said Rowady, to use social networks to capture which stocks will move on abnormally high volume in a given day. Reliably establishing whether they will move higher or lower, however, is another matter entirely.

“You can say, ‘There’s a headline on this ticker, so volatility is going to go up.’ But as to the bias of that volatility, is [the price] going to go up or down? That’s a much harder problem to solve,” he said.

Rowady is referring to the difficulty of measuring negative sentiment on a social network, a familiar barrier for many other industries grappling with social media analytics. Users don’t frequently un-like something on Facebook, and using Twitter to complain about negative consumer experiences is dependent on that user’s personality, not the platform’s architecture.

Where are these blind spots, and how should high-frequency trading platforms treat them? How do algorithms find patterns in language used across the social media sphere while at the same time controlling for false-positives? Those are a few of the questions that are keeping Wall Street from mastering the use of social media to inform high-frequency trading strategies.

Social Content is Unlike Business News

It is incorrect to assume that social media content is similar to breaking business news, which Wall Street has long depended on for trading-related information. Business news, of course, is generally filtered by editors and varying levels of fact-checking, and its impact on the markets is dampened by news cycles and copy deadlines. Generally, everyone gets access to breaking business news at the same time, which is entirely by design. Business news is also reliable in all but the very occasional instance -– a news outlet may report a hoax as fact once in awhile, but the press gets it right far more often than not.

On social networks, content is oftentimes published with little to no editorial standards, and the flow of content is constant. Social networks can disrupt, complement, reinforce, or inform the traditional news cycle, but they do not replace it. Any trading algorithm that replaces news feeds with social content or co-mingles the two is inherently faulty.

Going a step further, it would be fairly straightforward to use fraudulent content to manipulate high-frequency trading platforms that misuse social media data. That’s one reason why the Derwent fund set to launch using Twitter is routinely met with skepticism among some Wall Street insiders.

Realistic Expectations for the Future

For Wall Streeters, however, there are a few reasons to be excited about social media’s potential utility, despite the occasional red flag.

Because social media is a global phenomenon, capturing sentiment in hard-to-reach markets could become easier. Some of these markets don’t have established mainstream press — or, if they do, the press may be censored -– making the technical difference between “real” news and social content immaterial to the strategy.

Certain algorithms can also analyze words in a language-neutral manner. The contextual advertising industry is currently making strides in using multilingual or language-agnostic technology to deploy paid content, and the financial markets probably won’t lag far behind.

Perhaps the biggest potential lies with social media’s ability to reinforce or refute certain signals that ultimately lead to trading decisions. It’s akin to a friend giving the final arm-twist that drives you to order ice cream for dessert, or a helpful mentor saying you probably shouldn’t make that one decision. Social media wouldn’t be an adequate determinant by itself. But paired with all the other available information, it could nudge a set of observations into an actual decision.

If Wall Street ends up using social networks for this purpose, it would represent a shift in the role of automated and high-frequency trading and potentially earn a role for social media in the market.

Interested in more Business & Finance resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

David Hartstein is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company that works with organizations to develop and implement their online presence. You can connect with David on the JG Visual Facebook Page.

The word “Facebook,” so ubiquitous across the world, is enough to make any educator uneasy. When I was teaching at an elementary school in New York, the topic of social media came up from time to time. And generally when it did, it was about how teachers were being fired for posting too much information or were receiving disciplinary action for an ill-advised status update. The prevailing thought was, “better safe than sorry.” Basically, we were advised to be very careful when mixing our professional and personal lives in our use of social media.

Such an approach seems to be quite common and is understandable to a certain extent. When dealing with children, it is especially important to be mindful of protecting their well-being in whatever ways you can. There is always the possibility that teachers will say something that is inappropriate or share too much information. But “being safe” shouldn’t mean missing out on a key opportunity to engage the community.

It makes sense to have a policy to discourage individual teachers from posting specifics about their students to their personal profiles. But schools should counterbalance such a policy by setting up a Facebook Page to represent the school. Students, families, and faculty members are going to use Facebook regardless of whether or not schools choose to do so. By setting up a Facebook Page, schools can establish a controlled, professional presence that allows them to capitalize on this social space in many important ways, while still protecting their students. It’s important to note that while a Facebook Page is an excellent opportunity for schools to supplement their web presence, it doesn’t fully replace the benefits of a robust website.

Here are some ways that schools can benefit from establishing an effective Facebook presence.

A Quick Note on Protecting Students

As we discuss the potential benefits of using Facebook, it’s important to frame the discussion with a warning about protecting our students. Before launching a Facebook Page, school leaders must ensure they’ve thought through the types of content they’re going to share with the world. Before sharing any information about any student (including pictures, videos, first names, work samples, etc.) school leaders must ensure they’ve obtained consent from the child’s guardian. Additionally, schools should avoid sharing last names of students as this can potentially jeopardize their safety (and in some cases is actually illegal). With a little forethought, Facebook can offer a variety of benefits without risking any safety to students or members of the school community.

Share School News

Facebook is an excellent opportunity for a school to connect with families and share information rapidly. If a school is consistent in keeping the information updated and accurate, students and families will likely come to rely on the Facebook Page as a resource to find information about what’s going on at the school. There are many different types of information that a school could choose to share on its Facebook Page.

Share What’s Happening

A Facebook Page is a great place to post noteworthy happenings around the school via a status update that posts on the Page’s wall. This is an easy way to keep families informed as to what’s going on during the school day. Additionally, it only takes moments to do (which in a school is always a good thing). If an event is particularly exciting, take some photos to share. For instance, Citizen Schools shared photos of a recent visit from Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong.

Share Upcoming Events

A Facebook Page is an excellent opportunity for a school to post upcoming events using the Facebook Events app. This app not only allows people to RSVP, but also makes it easy for them to share that they’re attending. Utilizing Facebook Events can potentially lead to increased attendance at school functions. A school can also update attendees about any change in plans and send out a reminder as the event approaches.

Make School Announcements

Facebook is a great space for schools to make announcements to parents and students. For instance, if there is an ever-coveted snow day, announce it on the Facebook Page. If a school shares the snow day on its Facebook Page, the news will be sent to the walls of everyone that has Liked the page. Consistency is the key here. If the page is consistently updated with school news, followers will develop an expectation that they can count on the Facebook Page when they want to learn about something concerning the school. I’d also bet that news like a snow day will get plenty of Likes, which will spread the news quickly across the community’s social graph.

Use Media to Showcase School Culture

Many schools pride themselves on creating a unique culture that promotes not only academics but also the social development of its students. Facebook provides an opportunity to showcase this unique culture with those who can’t be in the building during the school day.

Share Photos

Photos are an excellent way to showcase school culture. A school may choose to use photos to highlight a variety of aspects of the school, including:

• Students exhibiting values the school encourages
• Celebrations of student work
• Field trips
• Experiential learning activities
• Assemblies or school-wide celebrations
• Recognition of individual students for excellence

Share Videos

Videos can be an incredible way for a school to personalize its online presence and actually demonstrate what it is that makes it special. A school may add videos that showcase a lot of different things, including:

• A variety of learning, including different subjects and age groups
• Assemblies or school-wide events
• Community meetings
• High caliber teaching and student engagement
• Students, teachers, and members of the community discussing what makes the school special
• Share songs, chants, or cheers that are used as a part of school culture or academics
• Sporting events
• Plays, concerts and other performances

Use as a Recruitment Tool

Facebook has potential to help a school attract talented teachers and school leaders as well as raise the overall level of awareness surrounding the hard work it’s doing. By using Facebook, a school can add another layer to their recruitment efforts and help attract staff and, if applicable, attract students as well.

Using Facebook to Attract Staff

Facebook is a logical place for schools to focus some of their efforts when recruiting talented teachers and school leaders. For starters, the aforementioned use of media to share details of the school will provide potential staff members a glimpse inside of the school. I know if I was torn between applying to work in two schools, I would likely favor one that was providing me with photos and videos to complement their description of what they’re doing to support students. As long as a school actually has a strong culture and learning community, sharing it effectively can significantly bolster its recruiting efforts.

Additionally, Facebook is a great place for a school to post its job openings. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to share content, which means if I know someone who’s looking for a certain teaching position and come across such a position on a school’s page, I can easily send it his or her way. Current teachers can also share job openings with people in their network that may potentially be interested in applying.

If a school has an online system for accepting job applications, it should include the link on the Facebook Page. If a school doesn’t have such a system in place, it may want to consider using an application that integrates with Facebook. Here’s an example from TEAM Schools, a Network of KIPP Schools, which is using the Job Magic Facebook app to recruit and accept applications.

Using Facebook to Attract Students

For schools that also focus on recruitment of students or enrolling students in a selection lottery, Facebook can be an excellent resource. First of all, a school can share the aspects of the school that make it appealing through photos and videos. But it can also share key information about enrollment, including deadlines, links to an online application, and links to resources that may be useful for a family that is interested in enrolling a student. The fact that information is easily shared via Facebook again bodes well for a school interested in recruiting students.

The Power of Data

Many schools use their strong academic results as a key to their recruiting efforts. Facebook provides a great opportunity for a school to share their aggregated academic data with the world. Not only is it available to those interested in potentially becoming a part of the community, but is also accessible to students and families that are already in the school. These results are easy for students, teachers, and proud family members to Like and share with people in their Facebook network.

Get Feedback from the Community

Facebook allows a school to lower the barriers to participation for members of the community. By effectively leveraging Facebook, a school can make it easier for community members to get involved and share their opinions on a variety of fronts. While some schools may fear this increased participation, others will embrace it as it not only increases involvement, but can also lead to a healthy discourse about what’s happening at the school.

Use Facebook Discussions

One opportunity lies in the Discussions tab on the Facebook Page. A school can create a discussion about a specific topic and allow members of the community to share their thoughts within the thread. Admins will be able to moderate the thread and remove any posts that are inappropriate.

Use Polls

Polls provide a chance for a school to solicit feedback directly from its followers. The nice thing about using a poll is that a school can limit the choices available and, with a few simple clicks, blast it out to all of its followers. It’s a great way to quickly collect data that can help inform decision making.

Use Facebook Questions

An alternative to polls, Facebook Questions allow a school to solicit feedback from the community while being a little less restrictive. Questions provides the option for a school to allow users to write in answer choices as well as share the question with others in their network. However, it’s worth noting that Questions opens responses up to friends of friends, which may not necessarily provide the best sample if a school is trying to poll just members of its community. If only sampling those in the school isn’t a priority, Questions could be a good fit. For example, YES Prep Public Schools used Facebook Questions to help determine what mascot they should use for a new school they’re opening in the fall. As of the writing of this article, “Titans” is winning handily.

A Note on Settings and Privacy

Once a school has set up a Facebook Page, there are a few settings it may want to consider to ensure it’s easy to monitor. Please note that in order to do any of the following you must first be logged in and designated as an Admin of the Facebook Page.

Posting Ability

It’s a good idea to control the permissions regarding what content users are allowed to upload. To access permissions, do the following:

1. Click “Edit Page” in the upper-right of the Facebook Page
2. Select the “Manage Permissions” tab on the left side of the screen
3. Uncheck “Users can add photos”
4. Uncheck “Users can add videos”
5. Leave “Users can write or post content on the wall” checked
6. Click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page

It’s a good idea to start off by limiting these permissions. If a school ultimately decides it would like to expand the permissions it offers its followers, it’s easy to do so. It’s better to become more permissive than more restrictive.

Also, it’s worth noting that unlike with personal photos on Facebook, followers won’t be able to tag people in the photos that the school uploads to its Facebook Page. As discussed above in the privacy section, this is a good thing when children are involved for many reasons.

Profanity Blocklist

Facebook allows the Admins of a Page to enable an automatic screener for profanity. To enable this profanity blocklist, do the following:

1. Click “Edit Page” in the upper-right of the Facebook Page
2. Select the “Manage Permissions” tab on the left side of the screen
3. In the dropdown beside “Profanity Blocklist:” select “Strong”
4. Click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page

If there are specific words that a school would like to prohibit from being used, it can write them in the box beside “Moderation Blocklist” on the same page. If a user tries to use one of these prohibited words, it will automatically be marked as spam and won’t show up on the Facebook page.

Enable Email Notifications

To prevent page Admins from having to constantly be checking the Facebook page, it’s a good idea to enable Email Notifications. To do so, do the following:

1. Click “Edit Page” in the upper right of the Facebook Page
2. Select the “Your Settings” tab on the left side of the screen
3. Check the checkbox beside “Email Notifications”
4. Click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page

Now, whenever a user posts or comments on the Facebook Page, the Admin will receive an email letting them know that the interaction has occurred.

Make It Personal

The key to any school successfully leveraging Facebook is finding what fits the personality of the individual school. The above ideas are merely suggestions as a way to get started. The important thing is that each school makes their Facebook Page an extension of the amazing things they are doing every day in the classroom.

While Facebook is at times a bit daunting, when used effectively it can provide schools with an excellent opportunity to engage the communities they serve and act as a key component in a school’s online presence.

Is there a school in your community using Facebook to its full potential? Do you have any additional tips? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Interested in more Education resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RichVintage

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The term “photo blog” has almost become redundant. Between the popularity of microblogging, and the fact that smartphones are capable of producing high-quality images, our digital communication has become increasingly photo-centric. We consume so much content in our digital lives, it seems we’ve developed a need for it to be presented in the simplest, most efficient way possible. Enter: the photo blog.

If Flickr gave us the photo-sharing bug, then services like Tumblr, yFrog, Instagram and even Foodspotting are making it standard practice.

So how can you get in on the action? There are a few basic rules. First, it should be said, a photo blog can be pretty much anything you want it to be, so long as your content is predominantly –- you guessed it — photos. These pics can be your own, pulled in from across the web, submitted by users or some combination of the three. Basically, when it comes to photo blogs, there are many options.

Here’s how to get started.

1. Pick a Platform

Determine if you are the creator, curator or ringleader?

If your motivation is simply to showcase your own photographs, then social functionality is probably low on the list while the ability to control use of your images is high. If you are curating images from around the web under an entertaining theme, then shareability is top of mind. If you’re crowdsourcing submissions, then of course, your blog will benefit from a highly social, share-oriented platform.

Let’s look at the top three free web-based, free platforms:

• Blogger: Think: basic. Blogger is Google’s blog platform, and it has a fast and painless set-up, easily editable templates and basic photo sharing utility.
• WordPress: Think: high scalability, low social. WordPress is highly customizable and scalable, and it happens to feature lots of nifty photo blog plug-ins.
• Tumblr: Think: simplified, ultra-social. Unlike Blogger or WordPress, Tumblr is a microblogging platform — it is a short-form blogging tool built on top of a social network. Tumblr offers a simple set-up, intuitive interface, customizable templates and, most importantly, a lot of social functionality. Users can follow each other, “reblog” or share content on their own blogs, like, comment or ask questions on Tumblr. The platform’s emphasis on frequent, image-heavy posts is ideal for a photo blog, and its social functionality helps build an audience quickly. The downside is that with greater spread, comes less control over use or attribution.

2. Customize

Ask yourself what you want your viewers’ experience to be.

Consistency is key –- whether it is the font for your captions or your overall design. Users should know what to expect when they visit your blog. A few key things to consider:

• Always resize photos to the same dimensions (if possible).
• Make any credits or captions as consistent as possible, both in language and appearance.
• Be consistent with your posting schedule. Your fans may love you, but no one loves feeling spammed. Devise a schedule that can accommodate your influx of content and is appropriate for your viewers, even down to the time of day you post.
• Ask yourself if your blog will benefit from functions like comments or question buttons. These things will alter the look and feel of your blog and can sometimes muddy a blog’s tone.
• If you are committed to making a photo blog, avoid posts of other media: video, text, audio. This not only changes the look and user experience, but can take away from your blog’s narrative.

3. Promote

How do you want people to find you? Here are some tips:

• Involve your audience. If your goal is to get people sharing and talking about your blog, try opening the lines of communication –- involve your audience. People are far more likely to share content they had a hand in creating. Consider opening contributions, comments, questions and opportunities for increased engagement.
• Share the love. It sounds simple, but a little love can go a long way. Be a participant in your own world: feature fellow photo bloggers on your blogroll, or if you use Tumblr, you can “reblog” content or feature work from bloggers you like. They will likely to return the favor.
• Pay attention! Above all, monitor your blog. Learn what your audience likes and make changes accordingly. Pay attention to how your content affects your traffic. Note which kinds of pics are getting reblogged or shared, and which have best responses.

And finally, here are a few examples of great photo blogs.

The Sartorialist

Platform: Blogger
What it is: The Sartorialist is a notable ‘street fashion’ blog showcasing photos taken by former fashion photographer Scott Schuman.
Why we like it: Simple, consistent image size and captions, clean format.

Sea Of Shoes

Platform: WordPress
What it is: Sea of Shoes is teen Jane Aldridge’s ‘personal style’ blog, her blog has gained such a strong following in the fashion world, she has been called one of the most influential personal style bloggers.
Why we like it: Relatively clean layout, individual posts are sharable via Facebook and Twitter.

My Parents Were Awesome

Platform: Tumblr
What it is: Comedian/writer Eliot Glazer curates photos of ‘awesome’ parents submitted by their children.
Why we like it: Consistent image size and captions, crowdsourced, theme with strong audience appeal (personalized and thus tailored for sharing).

By now you’re probably more than ready to take a break from reading about starting a photo blog and actually do it. If you have a photo blog, let us know in the comments.

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The Digital Photo and Film Series is supported by the Adobe® Photoshop® Elements product team. Adobe’s® photo-editing software delivers powerful options that make it easy to create extraordinary photos, unique print creations, quickly share memories in online albums, and automatically organize and help protect your photos. Download a free trial of Adobe® Photoshop® Elements® 9 to try it out!

More Photography Resources from Mashable:

- iPhotography: 10 Pro Tips for Snapping Perfect iPhone Photos
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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alynst

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David Spark is a veteran tech journalist reporting for the branding firm Liquid Agency. Read more on branding at Liquid Agency’s blog. Follow Spark on Twitter @dspark.

On Twitter, a well-known chef recommends a restaurant in your town. You trust the chef. You trust his advice. What’s more, he gave you a local recommendation. As a result, your esteem of the chef increases. You begin following him. You retweet his review. Others may as well. You may not remember the restaurant he recommended, but you do value the chef’s opinion, and it was just strengthened thanks to his latest review.

This phenomenon of brand value coming back to the recommender is a behavior we see time and again, according to James Buckhouse, head of corporate marketing for Twitter.

Every connection in the Twitter message chain — following, @replying and retweeting — is a reputation statement, explained Randy Farmer, co-author of Building Web Reputation Systems.

In the statement “Chef X recommends Restaurant Y,” the primary effect is the value of the chef recommending a restaurant. The transitive effect is the restaurant being recommended. “Sometimes we don’t get to the transitive effect,” Farmer said.

Are we consciously aware of it? Are we sharing just to boost our own brand?

Can You Build a Brand Just By Sharing Links?

AddToAny, a social media sharing tool, ran a study this year on the social and personal brand effects of just sharing links.

The study showed that for the average sharer, they won’t receive any significant recognition just sending out blind links, but “established influencers can sometimes ‘get away’ with blindly sharing headlines,” said AddToAny’s founder, Pat Diven II.

A blind share, according to Diven, is a link accompanied with a headline and no commentary. Since we can’t determine if they were blindly sent or not, we’ll refer to them as “plain” links. When established influencers share plain links, they receive on average a 400% higher clickthrough rate than a plain link from an average user. If that influencer provides thoughtful commentary, that clickthrough rate jumps to 500%, or a 20% increase from those links without commentary.

The most famous plain link tweeter is Guy Kawasaki. He and the others who manage his feed are unabashed about just tweeting links from his curated news service Alltop.

In general, it’s difficult to tell if a person sharing a plain link actually read the content. But, in some cases, Diven could see that a few established influencers spent little to no time consuming the content they were sharing.

That doesn’t mean the influencer would never consume the content, Diven said. They sometimes send out links and hope for responses.

“To those influencers, thoughtful responses to a thoughtless share are indicators that the content is worthy of further consumption,” Diven continued.

AddToAny’s data goes on to show that after receiving thoughtful responses, the influencers returned to the shared content and spent more time with it.

“People can increase their brand value solely through sharing,” said Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout, an online influencer rating service focused predominantly on Twitter.

Twitalyzer, another influence measuring service has noticed the same effect with their Twitter-based “impact” scores. “What we’ve discovered is people may retweet content just to increase their own scores,” said Eric Peterson, the service’s CEO.

According to Twitalyzer’s data, the top 500 link sharers have a 21% higher “impact” score than a random sample of 500 users. Twitalyzer’s “impact” is a function of Twitter followers, retweets, @replies, and post frequency.

Plain link sharing, or as Diven calls it, “blind sharing,” doesn’t work in all cases.

“For those who lack influence, blind sharing is particularly ineffective — rarely producing engagement — much like shouting into a vacuum,” said Diven.

In the case of Kawasaki’s link-tweeting activity, he’s been dubbed a top “curator” by Klout with a score of 82. Klout defines a “curator” as someone who is a mega sharer. Curators add no particular editorial on the content they share, said Fernandez. They just share.

In AddToAny’s study, the clickthrough data shows that a plain link share from influencers is transferring some value to the sites they’re recommending. But is this always the case? It would make sense to assume that consumption of content would be a positive multiple of all the social sharing. What can we deduce when we have evidence of consumption of content being a fraction of the people who are sharing?

When Sharing Exceeds Consumption

In all my interviews, everyone admitted at some level to sharing content without actually consuming it. They would send out a consumption-free share for the following reasons:

• They trust the source of the content.
• They like the title of the content.
• They want to help a friend promote something.

In the last scenario, one developer I spoke to admitted he got hundreds of friends to pre-agree he could retweet his content via their Twitter accounts. Whenever he publishes an article, he hits a button and hundreds of automated retweets are sent through his friends’ pre-approved accounts.

No one admitted to sharing just to build their own brand. It would be a rather brash statement to say so. Although there seems to be a fluid unconscious-to-conscious behavioral process that sharing someone else’s content will improve one’s brand.

None of this “sharing without consumption” behavior surprised me, but I thought these users were in the minority, and that it would never be pronounced enough t
o be noticeable. That was until I saw one of my own posted videos receive more shares than views. It was a low discrepancy, 52 shares and 48 views, and I didn’t see any bot-like behavior. Still, it was clear to me that sharers were more interested in being seen as someone sharing my video, entitled “How do you get everyone to watch your video,” rather than actually watching it.

My situation is not an anomaly. SocMetrics, an influencer identification service, was able to uncover 100 more similar cases of shares exceeding views. Similarly, most of these shares didn’t show any bot-like behavior, although there were a handful of standouts that did.

Here are five with the greatest discrepancy (more shares than views).

Indeed, even this article, by virtue of the Mashable brand, will likely fall victim to shares without consumption. I’ve watched hundreds of shares appear within minutes of my previous Mashable posts — far less time than it takes to read the article.

But given Mashable’s stature, views will inevitably exceed shares. For others that don’t have Mashable’s strong brand, it’s possible your clever title may only benefit the person sharing, and not transfer to your content.

Is it too easy to share?

“We’ve created a situation where sharing of information is rapidly becoming devalued because it’s so easy to click the retweet button,” said Twitalyzer’s Peterson.

Farmer agrees and argues that we’ve made reviewing and sharing far too easy and frictionless. In the earliest states of any reputation system Farmer understands that developers want to make it as easy as possible for people to participate, share, rate, and review. You desperately need users. Any type of roadblock seems antithetical to building success.

“Long-term, the success of your reputation system will depend on quality, honest and unbiased opinions,” Farmer said, “Don’t ask your users to provide opinions on things they haven’t experienced.”

This seems rational, although many successful rating services allow you to review things you haven’t experienced. No one on Yelp is checking to see if you’ve actually patronized a restaurant. Anyone can leave a review on Amazon, and YouTube lets you “Like” a video without even hitting the play button. All of these low-barrier sharing and rating systems have succeeded grandly, although the quality of their reviews are highly debatable.

Increase Your Brand by Being More Critical of Other Brands

AddToAny’s research shows that adding commentary to a link increases personal brand, as measured by clickthroughs. What happens when that commentary is more selective and critical?

Holaba is a brand recommendation service based in China. People sign up for the service, create an account, rate and sometimes write reviews of brands. With 150,000 subscribers and 5,000 brands to rate and review, Holaba users develop their own personal brand by giving their opinions about other brands.

According to Holaba, the top 500 users, as determined by number of followers, are the most critical and selective about giving love/hate reviews in both quantity and severity, as compared to a randomly chosen group of 500 average users.

Top users write 139 more reviews than average users. On a scale from 1 to 10, the average users rate 56% of the brands a 9 or 10, while the top users only rate 19% of the brands a 9 or 10. In addition, the average user rates fewer brands negatively (only 16% rate 0 to 6) vs. the top users (30% rate 0 to 6).

“Only praise might give the potential followers the impression that this person is just like an ad,” said Jan Van der Bergh, Holaba’s founder. “Adding critical/negative notes seems to help to be considered as a trustworthy recommender.”

The Brand Rich Continue to Get Richer Off of Others

From all these results, one assumption that can be made is that if you already have a brand (e.g., you’re a well known chef) you can continue to build your brand solely by making recommendations. The ease of being able to share content with your entire audience affords you the luxury of sharing without consuming.

When we see evidence of limited time on site before sharing, or when sharing exceeds consumption, we can make a strong assumption that people have limited the only interaction with the content to be the act of sharing. This could be an unconscious or conscious attempt to build one’s own brand.

So what? Does it matter if someone shares without consuming? Your message is getting out there.

The danger of sharing without consuming is that those following the sharers can continue the cycle, with more people sharing without consuming. When this continues, the meat of the dialogue soon becomes the act of the share, rather than the conversation that can come from viewing and interpreting the recommendation.

More About: klout, personal brand, sharing, social media, twitter

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