Folks are getting a bit worked up about the rolling out of the ‘mandatory’ Timeline feature on Facebook. Of course part of this is the ol’ “who moved my cheese’ phenomenon. Some folks have a hard time with change and sort of struggle with learning how to use an online medium like this super popular social network. People who didn’t grow up with this stuff can get a little intimidated by it.

Regardless of your familiarity with online interaction what we all have to remember is that – privacy settings aside –  what we post online is potentially public information.

What we post online is potentially public information.

So even though your Agreement with Facebook (did you read it?) might indicate that how you select your privacy settings will ultimately control exactly who you allow to see what you post – there’s nothing to say Facebook won’t come back later and make changes to how these settings work. Which they have done and are doing.

Permissions Change

Assume what you post is viewable to the general public at all times and post accordingly. It might not be today — but permissions might change and what you thought was viewable to only your sorority sisters might be accessible to your grandmother down the road, or your potential employer, or your kids.

If you want to post freely, cloak your identity. Create an alter ego and post your secret stuff with that if you must. It’s not like there are aren’t millions of such accounts on Facebook already. Me, I don’t want to have to work that hard for my personal posts – so I just figure every single thing I post can be seen by the public – even though my settings are limited to friends or friends of friends.

I bet Mark Zuckerburg has a couple of accounts.

I do have a snarky streak – so I invented a persona for my mini horse and created a Facebook Page for him where I do a little venting and get stuff that bugs me off my chest under his good name (sorry io). But my acquaintances on Facebook who expound their political agendas for all the world to see on their profiles might not be doing themselves any favors with those rants. It could swing some perceptions off kilter for them and eliminate opportunities. Especially if they have professional exposure of any kind through the same name they’re using on Facebook. Not everyone cares about such stuff. Some are quite content to wear their agendas on their sleeve so to speak. Heck they build fabulous careers out of doing so! Not everyone. Many of us don’t like our politics to get in the way of the rest of our lives – both in practice and in print.

Your Choice

So keep in mind this is your choice! You can choose to limit and control every single piece of information about you on Facebook in four easy ways:

• by paying attention to what you post in the first place,
• deleting your account or posts and photos you don’t want to have available
• setting up a new account that you’re more careful with,
• or creating a whole separate self that can’t exactly be traced back to you

That said, you can’t limit everything your friends and family post about you – though you are able to untag photos and posts they’ve tagged you in, and block certain people and the like. It behooves you to connect only with trustworthy people, and pay attention to what they post. Assume all this stuff is public!

A recent version of Iota's profile picture - shown actual size 540 x 180px

So, you’ve got a cute/amazing/talented/popular animal and you want to set up a Facebook presence for him/her. Here are some tips to make sure you get the most out of your experience!

1. Set him up as a proper Facebook Page.
2. Use the full pixel real estate for your Page’s profile picture!
3. Develop a distinct Personality (Horsenality, Doggenality, Cattenality, etc) for him.
4. Create a way of talking that helps define that ‘horsenality’.
5. Define what makes connecting with this animal an important experience to people’s Facebook day.
6. Define a Mission, the raison d’être – reason to be present — for your animal’s Facebook presence.
7. Be prepared to create related content for your animal, videos, photos, posts, comments, etc.
8. Be ready to interact regularly with your animal’s Page to maintain momentum in his/her popularity.
9. Be prepared to find and share related content that fits in with your animal’s Mission.
10. Don’t post too many asks, requests, downers or bad news – no matter what you decide your pet’s Mission is.

Now let’s look at each topic a little more in depth.

1. Proper Facebook Page

When you signed up with Facebook you were given a screen chock full of a whole lot of rules and regulations. You agreed to these. Among them was you said you would only set up a Facebook Profile for a real human being. Your animal does not qualify to be a Profile. If you break this rule and get caught – Facebook admins will simply remove that profile with no warning. All his friend connections and content will be lost forever. You are allowed to set up a Page for your animal though. I would recommend doing that.  Proceed with setting up a Profile at your own risk. I’ve written an entire post that goes into this topic in more depth.

2. 180 x 540 Facebook Profile Pic Dimensions

Use the entire amount! Add information that links to your pet’s causes or blog or affiliates if he has some. Be mindful that you will choose a square portion of this image to be your Page’s thumbnail throughout Facebook. If you’re using your animal’s Page for professional or semi-professional purposes you should consider hiring a professional designer to create one for you.

3. Develop a distinct Personality

This is the fun part. This is where you figure out what your pet is like and how he or she is going to be presented in mostly written form (status updates, comments, etc). If you’re a Parelli Natural Horsemanship follower then you’ve already been exposed to their definition of the 4 main equine personality archetypes or “horsenalities”. For horses this is an excellent place to start figuring what they’re like in human terms.

4. Create a way of talking

Petey Pants

Literally how does your animal sound in human language? I’ll bet you’ve seen the “I can has cheezburger” cat images, yes? Wow – has this ever taken off! All from inventing a funny way of ‘talking’ overlaid on nutty cat photos. Another favorite of mine is Petey Pants, a mini horse on Facebook. Here’s a sample of how he ‘talks’:

Good mornin! Today I gotsta hang out in the riding ring wif Ellie becuz the fence isn’t wurking again…so maybe we’ll practice our jumpingness or our racehorseyness well we’re in there!

5. Why should people pay attention to your animal?

What does interacting with him bring to their personal Facebook experience?

• Humor?
• Joy?
• Information?
• Prestige?
• All of these?
• Reassurance?
• Something else?

Be clear in your defining what your pet brings to the table. Pay attention to how people start interacting with him and go with it if it goes along with your Mission.

 6. Define a Mission

It's dumb and weird and Iota thinks it's funny!

For my mini, Iota McHippus, I have set out several clear and distinct Missions for his Page.

• To entertain and amuse people
• to represent himself as a therapy horse
• and to establish the concept that horses really do think, have feelings and ‘horsenalities’.
• to help spread some awareness about equine advocacy and good projects in equine rescue
• Gives me a chance to say all those things I can’t say! I should also admit that I have a personal addiction to snarky 12 year olf boy interests and behaviors and things like the Annoying Orange actually do make me laugh.

I would like to say that’s the real order of importance of why I started Iota’s Page – but the reality is the last item on the list is probably the number one reason, lol.

7. Be Prepared to Create Some Quality Engaging Content

From his post: "how could something so delish be called an Ugg?"

Videos, photos, notes, stories, updates and comments should make a steady appearance down your animal’s wall. This is how your pet’s “fans” will come to know him and find reasons to interact with him personally. I have a friend with a very naughty dog who was driving her absolutely nuts. To help blow off some steam from all his shenanigans she set him up with his own Facebook page and now posts pictures of all the items he destroys in a week. He’s The Piebald Pilferer.

For Iota I keep a steady stream of:

• annotated links
• contest links
• drawings
• embedded + annotated videos
• witty quotes (some we steal, some we create)
• questions
• snarky comments (some we steal, some we create)
• and other entertaining flotsam

floating down his wall throughout the week.

8. Interact Regularly

No rest for the wicked....

I will confess to you now, it can sometimes be a grind. Iota’s fans will start up early on a holiday or a Sunday morning wondering if the little stinker is ok? Or what he had for dinner the night before, or where is he!!?? Unless I prepare them ahead of time for his absence - his fans pretty much expect him to make an appearance every. Single. Day.

Which is why I had to post on his page on Christmas day from a sailboat docked along the Florida coast.

NOTE: notice that I was supremely lucky enough to have found a tiny ‘stand in’ version of io that his fans have accepted as Him in posts from time to time.

9. Share Related Content

Take time to have your animal’s Page “like” others’ Pages:

• Other Animals
• Causes
• Associations
• Websites
• Entertainers, etc.

Beaseley The Wonder Horse or as io calls him: Geezly.

Then your Page can interact with their Pages! You can post related linkbacks to your page (not too much and not too often – or they and Facebook admin-robots will think you’re a spammer and shut you down!)

Visit your animal’s Page newsfeed and comment on items of interest to his cause, Mission, and interests. Iota has a horse friend named Beaseley the Wonder Horse who visits the Facebook Page of the equestrian magazine Practical Horseman and makes hilarious comments on their current questions and posts from his own unique point of view. He does this to demonstrate to their fans how funny he is – and thus garners new “likes” from such efforts. ANd that matters because his human runs a bumper sticker business and some of Beaseley’s quotes get used on them! See? It’s a truly connected network with some commercial aspects that get presented with a personalized and entertaining twist!

10. Don’t Post Too Many “Asks” or Too Many Downer Anythings

The Magic of Cute: 89 "likes" 15 shares in 24 hours

Don’t badger your pet’s fans! Even if it’s for a good cause. Even if it’s for a Very Good Cause. People will shut you out. Almost without fail – when Iota posts about something particularly snarky or particularly cute he will gather the most “likes” and comments. When he posts something sad or negative – the comments and “likes” go way down. That tells me all I need to know about what he needs to post the most.

I could say a lot more about mine and Iota’s experiences with his Page but that should get you started with yours. Iota has an amazing array of some of the most motivated and fun fans ever. He’s not swimming in them – it takes time to build a fan base. But his fans are so connected to him and to each other! Last summer two fans from each end of the country made a pilgrimage to come and meet him in ‘horsen’ here at the farm all based on our interactions online. One from Washington state and the other from Massachusetts. I am not kidding.

We are leveraging his connective power carefully with some equine advocacy projects as this whole experience unfolds for us.

Read more on his blog! LittleHorseBIGtrip.com

A Page on Facebook is: a public profile specifically created for businesses, brands, celebrities, causes, and other organizations. Unlike personal profiles, pages do not gain “friends,” but “fans” – which are people who choose to “like” a page. Pages can gain an unlimited number of fans, differing from personal profiles, which has had a 5,000 friend maximum put on it by Facebook.

Page vs Profile: Which is Right for my Animal?

For starters make sure you set up your friend’s presence on Facebook within the parameters of your Agreement with Facebook. This means set him up as a Page. You agreed to many things when you signed up for your Facebook account – among them was you would only set up Profile for humans. This is a bit of a bummer because it is far easier to connect with people with a Profile than it is with a Page.

If you're running the profile named Rin Tin Tin - anyone your privacy settings give access to his wall can go through this two click process and alert Facebook to your fake account.

No Pets Allowed

There are thousands of folks who have ignored this policy and are running profiles for their pets – but they do so at their own peril. Facebook can delete it at any time, with no warning! Under the Tools tab on every Profile is this menu where anyone can “Block or Report This Person”. There is a button for “This person is pretending to be someone” with the selection: “A pet, cartoon or character…”. If you’ve got a profile for your animal Facebook can delete it for this violation. For most people this is a “Who cares?” situation. But for pets with a ton of friends they’ve come to communicate with for a variety of reasons – this is a real risk. His whole presence and with it all his connections could be deleted in an instant.

Facebook says it’s important to maintain the perceived integrity of their service by holding strict standards for qualified humans only to be allowed to have Profiles.

Facebook says it’s important to maintain the perceived integrity of their service by holding strict standards for qualified humans only to be allowed to have Profiles. This means: No pets allowed as Profile, But, it’s a lot tougher to build and maintain an interactive network for your pet as a Page for a variety of reasons

Profiles can:

• reach out and “friend” whomever they like
• comment on friends wall if the wall allows it
• send friends messages

among other things.

Pages can NOT:

• reach out and “friend” others
• comment on friends wall
• send friends messages

But, it’s not all bad! Your animal can have a Page instead!

Pages can:

• make events
• post photos
• upload videos
• ask Questions
• and share a limited (non spammy) amount of links with other Pages from time to time. (Not sure exactly how many this is, but I had a Page be put on Full Probation for two solid weeks after posting an informative link on other equine rescue Pages one evening.)
• “like” other pages and comment on their walls if the admin setting there allow it comment and @mention on fan in comments after that fan has made a comment on your wall

Facebook can shut an account down any time they feel like it with no warning if they determine you’re breaking their rules. Happened to me with a Facebook Profile I had set up for an equine advocate. I went to log in one day and the Profile was gone. No warning. Nothing. Just — gone. But it had been a Profile set up for a fictional character. A no-no. I knew better. But I risked it because it was more of an experiment to see what might happen. Guess I got my answer!

ANY of your connections can report your “fake” profile and jeopardize your pet project at any time. It’s gamble of your effort if you’ve built up an awesome, but unsupported, following this way.

Oh No! I have a Profile Not a Page!

No worries! Facebook lets you convert your pet’s ‘illegal’ profile into a totally acceptable Page! Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=116067818477568

Every former ‘friend’ will now become an instant ‘fan’! Be sure to copy any photos, notes and other content because none of that will transfer over.

Mind you, their design work may have been brilliant (though usually it’s only been competent or worse) but that doesn’t excuse the bad treatment. I wish I could pass it all off by saying something glib like “You get what you pay for.” to help warn people off of inept assistance, but it doesn’t always work that way. These folks are usually professionally priced so until you’re actually experiencing their improper work ethic for yourself you haven’t got much in the of warning. Until now.

I’ll describe what constitutes correct professional behavior in a design professional and some blatant warning signs for you to see if it’s time for you to bail!

Traits of the Professional Designer
(Graphic, Web, Etc)

1. Has a portfolio that’s:

• Accessible so you can actually see it – probably online, though print or originals are fine too in a face-to-face meeting, especially if you’re looking for print design.
• High Quality showing the type of work you’re looking for.
• Their own work – oh yes, it happens, if there’s something that’s included that stands out or somehow looks way beyond the standards of what else is included – ask questions about it. You’re looking to ascertain if they’re comfortable talking about how the piece was constructed, the challenges overcome, etc so authorship is established.

2. Has recommendations

or testimonials from satisfied, even delighted clients. If they offer references, check them!

3. Is Willing to Work Contractually

Professionals don’t fear contracts, in fact we love well written ones because they’re beneficial to both sides of the deal especially if something goes wrong. I almost always work with a contract for any initial job – though I have been to known to get lax about this once we’ve established a nice comfortable work relationship.

4. Gets the job done…

to specifications and on time. Aside: If your deadline is unreasonable a professional will recognize that and mention it upfront. Pros will have a standard way to cope with last minute must-do deadlines, many of us offer a more expensive compensation option for such occasions. It’s not because we don’t love you, it’s because many of us are self-employed and will have other commitments for the time your last minute project needs. We may use the extra money to pay for childcare, or cancel events or some such. 

A Professional Also:

• Listens well to your wants, needs and goals.
• Asks a lot of questions about your wants, needs and goals – as well as your expectations, budget and other concerns.
• Offers Options particularly in the early stages of the design process.
• Gives you full access to the finished designs you pay for.
• Doesn’t bully you.

Click on each topic above for a separate pop out post on each these hugely important traits.

Final Thoughts

A professional designer isn’t a Master and we’re not meant to be moody artistes either. We’re meant to be a cooperative member of your project’s team that bring special skills with us.

A professional designer takes into account your whole project, your goals with it and your budget. She may hold private space for her own creative process but allows full access to her share of the project as things progress firm up.

Secrecy is Probably Masking Incompetency.

A professional designer likely has invested in and uses professional tools. When requested he provides a Master file and converted multi-use files (pdfs, jpgs, gifs, etc) upon completion of a graphic or similar project.

A good designer checks her Ego at the door providing her creative solutions and suggestions with minimal baggage. Her ‘artistic license’ will serve you best the clearer you can be in the initial stages of your project with what challenges her work is meant to overcome. With these things in mind on both sides of the professional creative process any detrimental effect of Ego is minimized.

Finally, a good Contract is a great steward in a new business relationship. It helps establish:

• Trust
• Competency
• Expectations and
• Project Milestones.

Don’t let incompetency or inexperience bully your project!

A Professional Designer Listens Well.

Their capabilities to listen to how you describe your project is a very telling aspect of the seasoned designer. Lip service is easy, but really listening means the designer is able to integrate your information with their own design knowledge. This takes brain power and non-professionals get overwhelmed.

A design pro has mastered the tools of the trade in a way she’s able to be flexible enough to come up with solutions to the challenges you pose that aren’t necessarily boilerplate knock-offs from the formulae created for other clients. She knows each client – though there may be similarities - is different.

Every client’s needs and wants are unique. Good design isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. Mind you, there may be indistinguishable aspects between your project and a competitors’ but a design pro will find ways to get the necessary information from you so she understands fully what sets you apart. Therein is the alchemy of professionalism.

The experienced designer really shines in this regard – much better than any high school hack with a laptop and inadequate allowance. Unless, of course, that hack’s been designing since he was a Cub Scout. But if that’s the case he’s a pro too!

A Design Professional Asks a Lot of Questions About Your Projects Wants, Needs and Goals.

If they don’t seem too interested in your project one of two things might be happening:

• They’re confused
• They don’t care

Either way this isn’t good news for your project. A good designer asks all sorts of questions about what your wants, needs and goals are with the proposed project. Heck a good designer may even seem like they’re asking too many questions or unrelated ones – because this person is trying to understand your project from multiple points of view.

Example:

While you may see your web site as a selling point for your products, a great designer will also take deeply into account how that project is going to function and be perceived by your potential audiences and customers.

A design pro (image, graphic, web, etc) knows it’s part of our responsibility to consider all sides of a project when we’re allowed to (and you should always encourage us in this) because our fresh eyes may discover aspects you’ve simply overlooked due to your daily proximity.

The questions we ask help us help you identify your projects wants, needs and goals in ways you may very well haven’t thought of. That is part of the esoteric value we can bring to your business. That’s a true ‘no extra charge’ bonus you get when you work with a pro.

A Design Professional Offers Multiple Solutions to a Challenge.

With any design project there are always multiple ways to solve the challenges at hand. In many cases this is why rough sketches can be such a great way to start the process!

Some designers are handy enough with their tools that their ‘initial sketches’ look more like actual finished mock-ups of your web site, magazine, book or ad. But because they know what they’re doing these gorgeous outlines have been created in ways that are fully flexible so they can try out all sorts of changes for you to review.

It’s reasonable for you to ask for choices. A professional designer will have included approriate compensation for this in your initial Contract or Agreement. Don’t skip over this or you’re tightrope walking without a net.

You’ll be delighted at how the design will ultimately improve as you process the changes with successive iterations. Happens all the time. It’s the proof that 1+1=2+ This is the synergy magic of the design process. Oh it can get a little dicey during this phase of your working relationship – egos can come to bear here and there – but professionals will stick with it and trust the process. Your perseverance at this stage will pay off with something exponentially better than what you started with and a design pro knows this. Almost never fails.

A Design Pro Gives You Access to the Work You Paid For.

When a new client hires me to do a design job it never fails to shock me afresh when I ask for the files of something as basic as their company logo and their answer ultimately is they haven’t got it. Oh sure, it’s on their website, their business card, their letterhead, but they don’t seem to own a final version of it in any editable format!

Professional conduct in the field of design doesn’t include hoarding the paid work! As a ranking member of the Graphic Artists Guild in the 1990′s, I was honored to meet and work with designers whose work has influenced far reaching trends throughout all of our consumer lives. From this august collective I learned how to value, sell and properly protect my work. I also learned the terms typical of the sale of design work. Basically what it comes down to is:

1. You hire me.
2. I do the work
3. You pay for the work.
4. I give you a final copy of the work.

Access to the designs you accept and have paid for is standard, especially if that’s how you all wrote out your Contract or Agreement; but really it shouldn’t even have to be written. An ethical design pro is going to naturally offer that. What this means is sending a copy of the final version of a project you create once it’s fully accepted and paid for is the right thing to do.

Images/Graphics

So if your designer has made a logo you love and use – and paid for – you should expect her to get to you the properly composed component file she created the thing with! Not just the flattened jpgs or pdfs – but the editable master Photoshop or Illustrator file. (NOTE: here’s a shorthand way to determine if you’re working with a design pro or not – if they’re using something other than programs from Adobe’s Creative Suite of software programs to create their work. These include: Photoshop, Illustrator, FlashPro, InDesign, and maybe even DreamWeaver and Fireworks – though for web site development these days open source CMS – content management systems –  like the WordPress and Joomla engines have begun to reign supreme.)

Web Sites

If it’s a web site, it should be registered using your company’s information and account. It should not be registered under your designer unless you absolutely do not want access and are willing to lose it should anything happen to your relationship with the designer – or should they cease operations for whatever reason.

Your web site should be in your company’s name with you or a position within your organization named as the main administrator. Your designer can be assigned as a technical or otherwise defined expert administrator. But you should maintain full control and ownership at the highest level of access, not your designer. This way you can never be locked out of your own site. I’ve seen that happen. It’s not nice.

Additionally, you should expect to end up with a FINAL master file of everything you pay to have produced. Designers get busy and changes and tweaks are many – and in this new flexible world of production options it’s hard to know for sure when something has really attained its full final form…but if your request for a Master copy of one of these Final forms of a project you’ve paid for goes unheeded or gets flat-out refused, something’s wrong.

And now for the final installment in this series – the Designer Bully.

A Professional Designer Doesn’t Bully You.

Oh yes, it happens. Embarrassingly often by non-professional designers. I don’t know for sure what their underlying motivation is for such behavior but I suspect it’s to hide some sort of lack in competency. I figure the only reason a designer wouldn’t want to send a Master file or allow access to the back-end of a web site is because they have something to hide. Maybe they don’t want to show how they made it.

Hey, we’ve all run up against needing to make some shorthand ‘fudges’ from time to time that allow us to fix a shortfall in a design in a ‘down and dirty’ manner that gets the job done but is probably pretty clunky looking to another design pro. I’m not talking about these situations. After all, deadlines come to play and sometimes that’s the expedient, if inelegant, solution that brings the job in on time, within budget.

A design professional will make sure you get the final editable copy of a Master document used to create the project you’ve asked for. It’s reasonable for them to provide a version in several usable forms too (pdfs, eps, jogs, etc). I’ve inserted the word editable and bolded it so you understand creative documents these days are often composed in many layers and for you to be able to interact with or change individual components you need the layered version of the piece. Ok, you may not need it, but the designer you’ve lined up to help out with it does.

So what about the the webmaster who really believes he is some sort of Master of your web sit?. He’s the one who may well be in over his head in promises, behind in his car payments and underbid your project. A guy like this has a whole lot of reasons to keep you and anyone else who might be representing you from back-end access to your site. Mostly the reasons are going to be he’s muffed it up somehow and doesn’t want anyone dinking around back there. He’ll get caught with his pants down. Never pretty.

A professional webmaster understands there are all sorts of ways to legitimately protect a website from accidental mayhem and can assign admin access accordingly. And just to reiterate – you get to maintain supreme admin power in case all hell breaks loose and you have to fire a certain ego-inflated you-know-who. You may not know what you’re doing – but at least he won’t be able to hold your online presence ransom like I’ve witnessed others suffer and pay for!

I subscribe to several blogs written by new media experts and experimenters so I can keep abreast of new developments as they come down the pike. Ana Hoffman has a blog I really like. It’s linked below. You may want to check her out – or you may want to let me continue filtering out the good stuff for you here. In any case – I’m considering adding the theme to this blog that she’s recommending below – and by pasting tat blurb into this post I have a chance to win it for free!

And you know what? That’s how a good bit of this online networking business gets done – by people sharing information and helping each other generate more targeted traffic to their posts and content. It’s a win win win situation and totally circumvents some of the ubiquitous spam tactics the lazier or less informed resort to.

There is a great giveaway going on at the Traffic Generation Cafe Blog where you can win your own copy of Thesis Theme, as well as a 30-minute consultation with Ana Hoffman. Participating is very easy! Visit Thesis Theme giveaway page for more information.