Many of us use facebook today for business. One problem, however, is that the unavoidable mixing of business and personal posts can add a lot of noise to your facebook feed.

For example, applications like FarmVille generate automated posts that can become quite annoying when all you really want to do is keep up with your friends' activities.

Fortunately, there's a simple answer:

• Mouse over an offending post in your facebook feed. In the upper right corner of the post, the word "Hide" appears.
• Click "Hide" and you get an option to hide all posts from the person (which you don't want in this instance) and an option to hide all posts from the application itself.
• Click on the option to hide the application, and you're all set.

One of the problems with facebook, of course, is that you don't know about this option until you happen upon it. Hope this is helpful.

I did a guest post today for Linda VandeVrede's PR Strategy Blog about the value podcasting can bring to social networking.

Linda, as you may recall, was my guest on Episode 20 of Talking Communications with Farrell Kramer. She's an accomplished author and expert on modern-day PR.

In the post, I talk about the way podcasting can fill the need for content created by the social media channels that link us all together today.

The explosion in Twitter and Facebook by communicators of all types has created a desperate need for compelling content. In today’s world, you’re only as exciting as your last tweet or status update. But a steady diet of retweets and promotional items can put your audience to sleep.

More than 9 of 10 companies in the Inc. 500 (91%) now use at least one social media tool.

That's up from 77% in 2008.

Think about the implications of this, which comes to us from a new study cited in Inc. magazine.

While experts have been vigorously debating the value of social media to business, major companies have been flocking to it.

Of the six social media categories covered in the survey, the one that continues to be the most familiar to Inc. 500 companies is social networking, with 75 percent saying that they are "very familiar with it."

Of those sites that currently comprise social networking, the top choice among the Inc. 500 was Twitter, which is used by 52% of respondents.

Reposted from Unpolished Thoughts

Absurd. Ridiculous. Totally nuts.

How on Earth, you might ask, can a Tweet be too long? By definition, Tweets are limited to 140 characters. Isn't that about the length of a single, longish sentence?

Well ... yes. Tweets are limited to 140 characters. But my point is this: 140 is too long!

At issue is the sought-after RT, or retweet, through which an individual Tweet can begin to go viral in the Twitter community. A retweet can bring fame to an account with just a handful of followers. It can bestow prestige and credibility. It is Nirvana for Tweets.

Folks sometimes ask me how frequently businesses should tweet per day for optimal results.

The answer, according to one expert interviewed on {grow}, is either every 31-60 minutes or every 2-3 hours.

Again looking at the clicks per tweet, the optimal space between business tweets to attract the most clicks is either 31-60 minutes or 2-3 hours. Tightly packed tweets just don’t appear to attract as much attention as tweets with more space between them. I’m not certain what causes the dip in click activity for tweets between 61 and 120 minutes but I suspect it has to do with missing prime Twitter activity time on the East and West coasts (we may look into this in a later post).

I recommend checking out the entire post if you're interested. There are some great bits of information.

Just a quick post to let everyone know I've created a separate Twitter account for my PR/marketing posts.

Please follow me at @farrellkramer.

Separate Twitter accounts are a pretty good idea if you tweet with friends, or you tweet on a non-business topics, and want to keep your business conversations separate.

Several Twitter apps let you monitor multiple accounts at once. My favorite is TweetDeck, which also has a nice app for the iPhone. With TweetDeck, you can update multiple Twitter accounts by simply choosing the "from" account. You can also do this with Facebook updates via TweetDeck.

Importantly, you can view your followers in separate columns. Thus, you are able to separate conversations by topic. This is very useful to reduce the noise in your Twitter streams.

Just a quick note to mention that I'll be speaking at the Social Media 2007 conference in Chicago this week.

My topic: How To Pod-ergize Your PR! I'll be presenting on Friday afternoon.

I spoke at this event in Atlanta in January, and can say that for any organization interested in getting into blogging and/or podcasting it should be quite useful. I'll try to do a blog post or podcast episode based on new ideas from the conference once I get back.

USATODAY has relaunched its website in the form of a social media community. It is not only sporting a more Web 2.0 look, but the site is chock full of community features that push it far beyond what I've seen other major publications doing online.

There is voting on every article in the style of digg, driving story lists based on popularity. The more votes, the higher a story rises. In addition, readers can comment on every story -- something washingtonpost.com rolled out late last year -- and each reader gets a personal page that aggregates his or her comments, a personal blog and other community-based features.

The newspaper explains in a post of its own:

I just wanted to let you all know I'll be speaking at the Social Media 2007 conference in Atlanta on January 31st.

My presentation is titled POD-ERGIZE YOUR PR!. Here's a link to the agenda and a short excerpt from the write-up on my talk:

Clearly, podcasting lives on the cutting edge of new media technology. Far more than just a vehicle for listening to music, it is as powerful a tool for public relations as has come by in a long time and can be used to complement and energize any PR program.

But how?

I've been trying to think of what to say about TIME's choice of "You" -- as in Web 2.0/social media -- as its Person of the Year.

The magazine wrote:

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.