Category: Communication

How to lose at the social media game

Neglected social media accounts can tarnish an organization’s reputation.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

I’m afraid that was the sound of my head hitting my desk. I’ve been dealing with people who have ambitious social media plans. They want to blog, start Twitter streams and Facebook pages, and run a Kickstarter campaign. They want to put forums on their organizations’ websites so their followers (what followers?) can have discussions with one another.

I go to their Twitter accounts and discover that they do, indeed, have 100 followers. However, they’ve never bothered to follow most of them back.

“Oh. Is that important?” they ask me.

Perhaps it’s just as well. Five of the followers turn out to be come-ons for porn sites.

“Oh, you mean I can block those?”

photo of a loserOn the one hand, I have to admire people who fearlessly wade in to Twitter and Facebook and never bother to figure out what any of the settings or tools can do. On the other hand, social media is not a game where you get points just for showing up. You have to learn how to play the game, as well.

Twitter streams overrun by spammers, Facebook pages full of leaderless followers, or social media accounts of any kind neglected by their administrators speak louder than a dozen clever posts or tweets. And, unfortunately, what they say can tarnish an organization’s reputation.

The good news is that there are solutions: Hundreds of online resources on how to do social media, most of them pretty good. The bad news is that most organizations don’t seem to realize that they have a problem.

Thoughts on managing a CaringBridge site

Tom Whitmore’s experiences administering a CaringBridge site for a friend who suffered a stroke led him to reflect on the principles of effective crisis communication.

Tom Whitmore has been administering a CaringBridge site for our friend Stu, who suffered a serious stroke in June. Tom works with Stu’s life partner to craft the web updates. After he posts the news, he monitors comments from the friends and family who read the site.

Listening to Tom talk about this work made me realize that he is discovering many of the principles of good crisis communications — something that very few people are trained in. I asked him to share his observations.

Tom writes:

It is my sincere hope that you will never need to use CaringBridge. It’s a web-based service that helps the families of people who’ve suffered a medical crisis set up a simple website and blog to keep friends up-to-date. While many people are on Facebook these days, there are still quite a few who don’t care to join. Having a single place like CaringBridge where everyone can check to see the latest news about an ailing friend or family member is really useful.

I’ve recently been serving as the administrator of a CaringBridge site for my friend Stu, who had a severe stroke in mid-June. While the system is technically quite easy to use, it turns out that the communications work itself requires some thought. On one hand, I’m serving an audience that has lots of questions and comments. On the other hand, I’m assisting Stu’s partner and need to be attuned to her perceptions and honor what she wants to communicate and when.

After three months of working with CaringBridge, I’ve come up with a five tips that I believe can make the service slightly easier for other people to use. Karen asked me to share them here at WriterWay.

  1. Have a CaringBridge account set up quickly after a medical catastrophe.
  2. Have someone other than the primary caregiver administer and manage the site.
  3. Update the site’s journal regularly and honestly.
  4. Update the original information (on the main story page) to reflect major changes.
  5. Keep your audience in mind.

For those of you interested in more, I’ll expand a bit on each of the five points:

1. Set up a CaringBridge account quickly after a medical catastrophe.

Speed is important. People want to know where to go for information, and having a CaringBridge site ready quickly makes a big difference in whether people will go there for information. I’d guess the window for getting a site started is between an hour and 72 hours after the event. Don’t wait to be certain whether you’ll need it: if the person is going to be in the hospital overnight or longer after an emergency, that’s a pretty clear indicator that people will want to know about it. And if the condition is imminently life-threatening (certain types of cancer, for example), you’ll want to start rallying support.

2. Have someone other than the primary caregiver administer and manage the site.

The primary caregiver is going to have his/her hands full dealing with the medical situation, and perhaps insurance issues and visiting relatives. Friends will ask what they can do to help. Someone with a combination of computer skills and people skills is the ideal person to ask to set up a CaringBridge site. CaringBridge is pretty easy to use for anyone experienced with online groups. In fact, if you’re reading this, you probably have the necessary skills to set up an account.

3. Update the site’s journal regularly and honestly.

People will come to the CaringBridge because they want to know what’s going on. A regular schedule is very helpful. I posted daily during the period when my friend was in Intensive Care from the stroke; when he moved to rehab, I noted that the posts would get less frequent. When he had to go back into the hospital, I increased the frequency. And if something major happened, positive or negative, I’d stick in an extra post.

It’s also important to be honest. If you don’t know something, say so. Things are going to be uncertain more often than they’re going to be clear. People still want to hear. And if something bad happens, say so. Don’t hope it will go away if you ignore it. It may go away (which gives you good news to post), but your talking about it won’t hasten that or give it extra power.

4. Update the original information (on the site’s My Story section) to reflect major changes.

A CaringBridge site has a top section called “My Story” where you can write a very short summary of what’s going on. Remember to update this summary when something major changes. I posted that my friend had had a stroke: two weeks later, folks coming in to read what was happening thought that this meant he’d had another one. Oops. Adding the date took care of this problem. Saying when he moved to rehab also helped keep things clear. This section is limited in length to a few hundred characters. It’s not Twitter, but it’s a place to be very concise.

5. Keep your audiences in mind.

If you’re the designated manager of the site, you have two very important audiences. The first is the primary caregiver. Your goal is to help him/her get all the information into a small package, figure out what her/his friends will want to know, and write it down. There will be things that it’s not appropriate to talk about (reactions of some visitors, other people’s fears, and such). Talking things out with the primary caregiver also helps him/her gain some perspective on what’s going on. Don’t be afraid to ask “How do we want to present this?”

The other audience is the people who want to find out what’s going on. Tell them as much as you can without either writing too much (1000 words per update is Too Much Information unless there’s something complex and specific to say) or saying inappropriate things.  Sometimes you should push the primary caregiver to say a bit more, but don’t insist: S/he is the one who has the most to say about what happens on the CaringBridge site. Remember to appreciate people who give you feedback about how the site is going, and don’t reject ideas that might improve your site management. Sign your updates so people know who is making the updates. Be accessible. Read the Guestbook comments to make sure no one is misinterpreting your journal posts.

It takes a village to deal with a major illness. If you’re managing the CaringBridge account, you’re the village reporter. It’s a serious and rewarding job.

Let people see it all with Vizify

Vizify could become the new standard for professional online identity.

A problem

Website, blogs, LinkedIn bio…the list of online credentials I like to provide to potential clients keeps growing. Recently I’ve begun to view this as a problem. I find myself sending emails full of links, explaining each link with a little tagline, trying to anticipate what each prospect might want to see.

After I hit “Send,” I worry that I’m boring people with Too Much Information. And it certainly does make for ugly-looking emails.

The solution

Last week I received a Google alert about a client. The link in the alert was to something called “Vizify.” I clicked and gaped. There was a fabulous infographic about the client: His picture, quotes, and links to his webpages and blogs. It was colorful, it was fun, it was professional — and it beat my fussy linked-cluttered email by a mile.

Of course, I went right over to Vizify.com and signed up for my own Vizify page. I was impressed with how easy it is to use the online tool, and how great the result looks. You can link to any webpage you want, or let Vizify use algorithms to pull your content directly from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare or Instagram. Once published, my site was immediately picked up by search engines and appeared high in search results for my professional information.

The story behind Vizify

Shortly after publishing my page, I received an email from Vizify.com inviting me to phone one of the executive team with any questions.

I called, left a message, and got a call-back from CEO Todd Silverstein. We talked about how he, Eli Tucker and Jeff Cutler-Stamm developed the Vizify service and where they hope to go with it.

“Online identity is becoming increasingly important,” Todd said. “We felt that the tools for self-presentation that are available could be much better. Your LinkedIn profile looks the same as everyone else’s — we wanted to open it up, to help people express all facets of themselves.”

What Vizify offers is a striking graphic design, in a retro flavor, that the user can customize by choosing a color palette and then adding content — text, links, and photos. In essence it’s a slide show: The first page is a visual table of contents. A visitor can click through from any element on the contents page to read a quote, see academic history, see online profile links, or find out what you’ve been Tweeting about. Or a visitor can browse through your whole Vizify slide show.

While the choices are, on first glance, limited, Todd said that creative users are already stretching the boundaries of what can be done. They hide types of pages they don’t need, and they make multiples of other types of pages, such as interesting statistics.

“People are hacking the design,” he said. “We’ve had people put up, instead of photos, QR codes. People are using screen captures of longer pieces of text.”

While working on the Vizify design, the team discovered the people like seeing bits of information, each representing key areas about an individual. Todd calls it “the cocktail party effect.”

“At a party, you go from topic to topic until you find something, some shared interest that activates a conversation,” he said. “Part of what we’re trying to do with the Vizify design is bring those interesting aspects to the top to promote that moment of interaction.”

Less than a month old, Vizify has attracted notice from Mashable, TechCrunch, and from mainstream media such as CBS MoneyWatch. It’s been called a “personal landing page,” an “online business card,” and a “graphical bio.”

The next steps, according to Todd, include the rollout of tools to enable the display of more complex portfolios of content — capabilities that will enable Vizify to sell premium plans (the current service is free).

If less is more, will bigger be better?

I’m a big fan of Vizify and look forward to experimenting with the current capabilities. It will be interesting to see how it fares as it adds more features.

What makes it particularly wonderful now is that it pretty much forces people to lead with interesting high points (facts, quotes, hot topics) while discouraging the sort of jargon-clogged, mission-statement banalities that deaden so many online resumes and Linkedin profiles.

If given the chance to use more features, will people be able to resist the temptation to turn their Vizify profiles from intriguing introductions to boring brag books? I sure hope so. Vizify is solving a lot of communications problems for me, and I’m hoping it will become the new standard for professional online identity.

Tweets that make me want to scream

On Twitter there’s just no excuse for mind-numbing teasers, drive-by rants, and self-congratulatory re-runs.

Subject + Verb (+ Object) + Hyperlink

Is it really that hard to write a decent tweet?

The way I look at it, tweets follow the same basic communications rules that journalism does:

1. Since they’re public, tweets are written in language most people can understand. If they aren’t, they read like a private Twitter message that the author, for some reason, decided to foist on a head-scratching public. When those people stop scratching their heads, they’ll tap the Unfollow button.

2. Effective tweets are usually either a news story, a reaction story, or a provocative question.

News story: “Man bites LOLcat” or “Gingrich supporters keep fundraising.”

Reaction story: “Seattle LOLcat owner bites back with $2 million lawsuit” or “Gingrich loss paves the way for a secret right-wing candidate.”

Question: “So, how many people will be lining up to buy the heavily hyped new [name of gadget]?” or “Am I the only one stuck waiting at a Metro bus stop this morning in .025 inches of snow?”

A big “thank you” to folks like Chris Pirillo, Joe Hage, Steve Sorbo, Green Ronin, and others who follow these rules and whose tweets frequently get me to click through.

A loud hiss to people whose tweets make me want to scream, cry, kick, and give up on Twitter. For example:

  • The clueless teaser: “I thought my updated and interesting blog post was worth sharing with you guys.” (Blog post about what? A tweet that sounds exactly like a spam blog comment.)
  • The spam teaser: “Whoa! Sneak peek at the specs for the iPhone 5.” (This one has a link to a site that sells off-brand iPhone cases.)
  • The stoned hipster chime-in retweet: “Really? Just sayin’, dudes.”
  • The self-congratulatory resume tweet: “So excited about getting the Dingbat Award just a month after my Zapf Award and a year after my Helvetica Prize. Thanks, guys!” (No link. Note that the news portion, sans re-runs, could have been perfectly tasteful as a retweet from the Dingbat Society’s original Twitter announcement.)
  • The drive-by rant, without link: “Stupid idiots! They. Have. No. Effing. Idea.” (And, boy, neither do we.)

If you write or send marketing emails, read this

Joe Hage dissects and analyzes an email blast from a conference organizer to prospective attendees.

My colleague Joe Hage dissects and analyzes an email blast from a conference organizer to prospective attendees:

  • Subject line
  • Sender address
  • Recipient address
  • What happens when the recipient replies
  • The email content itself

Everything was wrong.

Read Joe’s analysis so this mess won’t happen to you. (Fortunately, it won’t happen to the conference organizer again, either. He’s getting advice from Joe.)

When corporate blogging makes no sense

Once you start treating a company blog like a PR vehicle (posting twice a month, filling it with self-congratulatory press release material, and saving time by ignoring the SEO tools) it quickly becomes ineffective as a marketing tool.

Corporate blogging makes no sense — from the viewpoint of traditional corporate public relations. In fact, if you look at blogging through a traditional PR lens, it’s absolutely counter intuitive.

I raise this point because I frequently talk with public relations professionals who are getting ready to scuttle or let die a corporate blogging program that was established by a previous communications executive or outside consulting firm. To many traditional PR folks, devoting resources to blogging makes absolutely no sense and they can’t imagine why the company started doing it in the first place. They point out that there are much better ways to get out your story to the media and investors — such as the traditional press release or media placement, Twitter, or the company’s Facebook page.

And they are completely right.

However, they are also missing a key point. Corporate blogging is not good PR. It’s good marketing.

Odd as it may seem from the PR viewpoint, business blogs are only secondarily about telling the story. They are primarily tools for helping potential customers locate a company online. Done right, over time, a corporate blog can be as effective at attracting website visitors as paid online advertising. A skillfully done corporate blog lets potential customers know that a company can provide the products and service they’re searching for.

So, here’s a quick guide for my public relations friends who are puzzled by corporate blogging, focusing on why it’s done differently than PR communications:

• Frequency. Unlike press releases, which go out when there’s news about the company, blog posts need to go out on a regular basis. Google’s search ranking algorithms continue to reward fresh content. Blogging frequently (a least twice a week) is a great way to get links to a website to appear near the top of search results.

• Keywords. Unlike public relations, which is all about getting your own name out there, marketing blogs are all about getting the generic keywords out there — on the web, you already “own” your company name. Suppose a company called Thompson Metalworks sells bakeware to large bakeries. The important keyword phrase is not “Thompson Metalworks” — it’s “bakeware” — or perhaps “baking sheets” “industrial baking pans,” or “non-stick bakeware.” (NOTE: Keywording is not intuitive, even if it looks as though it should be. A good SEO firm can run analyses that show what keywords and keyword phrases people are using when the look for a company in the context of its industry, its region, and its competitors.)

• Timeliness. The best way to get a blog post — with its links to a your website — high in the search results is to post about a breaking news story that’s related to your products or services. This does not mean issuing a full corporate analysis, vetted by experts and attorneys, a week after the news event occurs and people have stopped talking about it. It means issuing a simple, innocuous blog post (without any need to insert a corporate spin or go through legal review) within 24 hours of the event occurring. A great example (for our friends at Thompson Metalworks) would be a blog post about music fans baking a 6-foot-wide cake and delivering it to a pop star’s hotel. Or a quick mention of a Wall Street Journal article about an industry trend, such grocery stores expanding their bakery sections.

• Use of sophisticated SEO tools. Notice how in the PR world, online press release services have begun including SEO tools in their packaged services? They learned this from marketing. Effective corporate blogs make use of SEO keywording tools (such as excerpts, titles, edited permalinks, tags, and image names) and social media tools (such as links to and from partner sites, and publishing to Twitter and Facebook). This is why crafting a blog post involves more than simply writing and copy editing it. Learning these tools, and using them correctly, takes time.

• Basic common sense. Only a small percentage of the visitors attracted to a corporate website by a blog post actually read the blog post itself. Many click quickly through to a product page. Of course, the post still needs to be well written and informative. But, unlike news releases, the ideal blog post is as much about the reader’s interests as it is about the company writing it. Again using our friends at Thompson Metalworks as an example: A post could cover the benefits of registering products, provide information about a sale on a discontinued product line, walk readers through a how-to for upgrading a company product, or simply point out some interesting bit of industry news (such as the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above).

The irony of PR’s disconnect with corporate blogging is that once the corporate communications department starts treating a company’s blog like a PR vehicle (posting twice a month, filling it with self-congratulatory press release material, and saving time by ignoring or misusing the SEO tools) the blog quickly becomes ineffective not just for PR but for marketing as well. At that point, of course, devoting company resources to it…makes absolutely no sense.

5 essentials for an effective event homepage

Why do websites for major community and commercial events fail the basic effectiveness criteria set by the flyer for a community center rummage sale?

I sit down to write this blog post in a mood that fluctuates between righteous indignation and profound discouragement.

We’re well into the second decade of online communication and yet we still have homepages for major community and commercial events that fail the basic effectiveness criteria established by a paper flyer for a community center rummage sale.

Unless yours is a limited-attendance, exclusive event that wants to discourage inquiries from the riff-raff, it’s essential that the homepage of your event website contain some basic information to assist potential attendees. That’s because your online visitor is busy, busy, busy and his or her decision to attend your event may well be made based on a 10-second scan of your homepage. Why do so many event homepages make that 10-second visit an exercise in hair-ripping frustration?

If you want to be kind to your potential attendees, here are five things your homepage needs to tell them:

Who?

People need to know who is hosting your event because they want to know if it’s being put together by a reputable organization or some fly-by-night franchise.

What?

They need to know what it is (beyond the cutesy, artsy, or edgy name you’ve given it, such as “Frolic in the Park”). It’s tough for event organizers, who’ve been up to their ears in planning for months, to grasp that not everyone knows the event is “all-day” or “for kids and their parents” or “free.” Yet descriptors like these are essential for the homepage, particularly if you want people to be able to describe it to third parties (aka, “word of mouth advertising”). So is cost. I’ve come to the conclusion that an organization that puts the admission price of the event on their homepage instead of burying it somewhere on a “Registration” page deserves the sainthood.

When?

People need to know when your event is. You might think that putting the dates on the homepage (“December 8 and 9”) is enough, but that’s barely a “2” on the scale of effective communication. That’s because it doesn’t include the year, and think how many times you’ve reached an event’s homepage only to discover it’s for last year’s event. How about “Thursday, Dec. 8, and Friday, Dec. 9, 2011”? You’re getting warmer.

Times are important, too. Can people go there with kids after school? Is it a late-evening event? Does it include dinner? Give the potential attendee a break, right there on the homepage. Get rid of some blathering marketing copy they aren’t going to read anyway and put in the times: “Thursday, Dec. 8, 3 – 10 p.m. and Friday, Dec. 9, noon to 11 p.m.” Whew! That wasn’t so hard to do, was it?

Where?

Particularly when people are trying to decide if they are going to attend your event, they need to know where it is. Is it convenient? Is it familiar? Or are they going to spend 30 minutes driving up and down some main drag peering at address numbers? Oddly, the “where” is the area in which most event websites rate a big zero.

Amazingly — astonishingly — many of them give no indication on the homepage of where they are — not just in town, but in the world. No, they think they are the only “Frolic in the Park” in the universe. Is your event in Vancouver? In Everett? In Portland? Do people have to hunt around for your Contact page to find out? (And then discover it consists of somebody’s email address?) If you are having an event, you need to put the location right up there on the homepage.

And just the address (including the city) is not sufficient. There needs to be lots of additional information, including the name of the building (“Town Hall” or “Mary Foster’s house”), the neighborhood (“in North Cedar Heights”), and some landmark directions (“just around the corner from Safeway” or “five minutes north of the fairgrounds”).

A picture of your location is surprising helpful if people need to identify a building when they arrive. If your location is obscure, it’s just about essential to have a link to an interactive map, such as Google Maps. If you’ve checked out maps on other websites, you’ll know that some mapping services are pretty much useless while others are helpful. Take the extra time to figure out how to link to a helpful one.

Why?

You’re all excited about your event, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is. And that’s generally because they don’t know what the benefits of attending your event are. Is it relaxing? Educational? Useful? Will they be able to meet people they couldn’t meet other places? It can’t hurt to put in a sentence to let them know. Right there on the homepage.

Looks aren’t everything

One final remark. The design of your homepage — its aesthetic — tells people quite a bit about your event. Most organizations put a lot of time any money into graphic design — beautiful backgrounds, distinctive typefaces, and eye-catching photography. Oddly, this often detracts profoundly from how well the homepage communicates vital information — the sort of information that enables visitors to decide if they are going to attend. Perhaps the most fatal design mistake is a dark or black background with all the information in white type. Many visitors like to copy and paste information (particularly that address information) into their calendars or into an email to friends they’d like to attend with. If your website type is white, and people paste it into an application, it’s going to be invisible. Sure, they could go to all the trouble of figuring out what on earth went wrong and then figuring out how to apply color in that app. But they’re not going to bother. Oops.

If you simply must have white-on-dark design, make sure you have widgets at the top of your homepage that will allow visitors to email a link to your site, post a link to it on Facebook, or tweet it on Twitter.

Bless their hearts

Here are a few links to events whose plain, simple homepages are doin’ it right when it comes to communication:

Corporate bloggers: Stop competing against Perez Hilton

Stop competing against Perez Hilton. Instead, start using the power of a corporate blog to compete against your actual competition.

There’s blogging…and there’s corporate blogging. Today I’m going to talk about the difference.

Individuals, news organizations, and political groups blog for blogging’s sake. And those blogs live and die by their content: Quality of writing; freshness of information; originality (or outrageousness) of ideas.

Quick — name three individual blogs, news blogs, or political blogs.

Easy: Huffington Post. Robert Scoble. The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Perez Hilton. Gizmodo.

Now name three corporate blogs.

?

Not so easy.

Just because they aren’t wildly popular doesn’t mean that corporate blogs don’t have their place. Done properly, they can be extremely powerful tools to drive traffic, drive sales, and enhance recognition of a brand, products, or services.

What’s difficult to grasp is that, unlike non-corporate blogs, corporate blogs don’t accomplish these things through great writing, fresh information, or original or outrageous ideas.  They accomplish these results through hard work and smart SEO. Here’s how:

1. They consistently put fresh content on the top tier of the company’s website (which improves search rank for the whole site).

2. They use carefully researched keywords and keyword phrases in headlines, blog text, links, and excerpts. This eventually positions the company near the top of search results for those frequently searched keywords.

3. They link appropriately to other highly ranked websites.

4. They harness WordPress or other user-friendly blogging software to automatically send (keyworded) excerpts with links (think of them as teasers) to the company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. This makes the resources invested in the blog post go much further.

For reasons too complex and varied to go into here, few companies are willing to admit that their blogs are simply a tool. And, as a result, they miss out on the powerful results that tool can accomplish.

There’s no way that the carefully screened, days-old corporate information or flattering customer stories that make up corporate blog posts can compete with Perez Hilton or Engadget for readership. Few people read them; all people will ever see of those posts is excerpts on Twitter or on a page of Google search results. (And yet, properly written and keyworded, those excerpts can be very effective in conveying a company’s branding to thousands of viewers.)

To make the situation even worse, many companies fail to invest in the sort of professional SEO analyses that would tell them which keywords to use in their blogs (and on their websites). Instead, they guess about keywords — and often end up emphasizing keywords they already “own” via Google (such as the unique names of their products) rather than the phrases prospective customers are using to try to find their products and services. In the non-intuitive world of keywording, it can even be beneficial to violate the old taboo against mentioning the competition. By mentioning your competition or a competing product on a webpage or blog, you can end up with visitors who started off looking for the competitor’s product but got search results that lured them into viewing your product, on your site, instead. (Chances are your competition is already doing this.)

Bottom line: Stop trying to compete against Perez Hilton! Instead, start using the power of a corporate blog to compete — against your actual competition.

“We can’t say that!” Why not?

Rand Fishkin’s public postings about the process of seeking investment capital for his company SEOMoz may represent a trend toward transparency in business communications.

I’ve been doing communications, in-house and as a consultant, for more years than I like to admit.

With nearly every client, and certainly with every in-house gig, I remember the meetings in which we’d sit with senior leaders and map out a plan to distract attention from what was really going on in the company.

Occasionally one of us on the communications team would suggest: “Why don’t we just tell people some of what’s going on?”

“We can’t say that!” was always the answer. There would be a general round of patronizing chuckles, gasps of terror, or snorts of scorn (the reaction depended on the organization) before everyone got back to the business of obfuscation.

Curt Woodward, writing today for Xconomy Seattle, describes how SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin is breaking that tradition by writing publicly about what he’s doing and thinking as he seeks investment capital for his company. Fishkin’s observations are interesting, and Woodward has made them even more so by consolidating all of Fishkin’s blog posts and other communications using Storify, an online tool for stitching together web-based information.

I don’t think that every company or organization is ready for transparency about its plans, nor are certain issues (such as personnel changes or litigation) appropriate to discuss publicly. But I do think transparency is a trend, and, increasingly, something business partners and consumers will come to expect.

The Serial Kveller and 11 other Facebook stereotypes

Isn’t it odd how many people (thought not, of course, us!) default into one of the 12 Facebook stereotypes?

According to the latest statistics, more than 500 million people use Facebook. Half of them log on in any given day, and the average person has 130 Facebook friends.

I use Facebook, and chances are most of you do, too. When I log in and check the posts on my Wall, I find myself musing: All these people, but isn’t it odd how many of them (though not, of course, any of us!) default into one of the 12 Facebook stereotypes? Surely you know…

The News Anchor
Everything this woman posts is genuine news to you, and much of it’s pretty interesting. But you start to wonder, does she do anything other than surf the net and post links to Facebook?

Mr. Cryptic
His one-phrase posts sound like intriguing snippets overheard on the sidewalk. In person, Mr. Cryptic makes sense, but on Facebook you have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. And after a while, you start wondering if he does.

The Relentless Advertiser
Most of her pitches (er, posts) are links to her latest blog post or to events being put on by one of the 200 or more organizations she belongs to.

The Entertainer
Delightful, but dangerous. You find yourself clicking right to his Profile to make sure you haven’t missed any bon mots or clever anecdotes in the past 24 hours. He’s the one they’re referring to when they call Facebook a time suck.

The Facebitch
Everyday she posts a new tale of woe about what’s inconveniencing her. Everyone is to blame except, of course, you-know-who.

The Proselytizer
His short, sanctimonious posts are always paired with a link to a politically correct or religiously correct web page. This is the friendship for which Facebook designed its little-known “Hide” feature. Just click the little X at the upper right of one of his posts and select “Hide all by [Name].” Then you can go back to enjoying your sinful ways without guilt — or damage to the friendship.

The Status-Conscious Status Updater
His concise snippets let you know where he ate, where he works out, and where he’s jetting to on what airline. You couldn’t afford any of it if you made three times your current salary. Sigh.

The Serial Kveller
The Kveller’s status updates are about what fascinating things someone else is doing, or what recognition someone else has just received. News, information, and good vibes — is this generous soul for real? Click on the Kveller’s Profile to find out if he or she is still single and available! Or even real.

The Facebook Handbiter
His constant complaints are about big government, big technology, big business, and, of course, the evils of Facebook itself. He keeps threatening to get even with Facebook by closing his account. But somehow that never happens.

The Stressed Puppy
He posts on Facebook at 11 p.m. and on weekends, and it’s always about how he’s still at the office. Yawn.

The Fitness Gods
They’re at the gym while you’re sneaking Oreos and watching “Nurse Jackie.”

The Facebook Foodies
Facebook Foodies come in two flavors: DIY chefs versed in Larousse Gastronome and restaurant reviewers quoting the Gault-Millau guide, in French. They both carry smartphones with 5 megapixel cameras. Watch out! If it’s on a plate, they’ll shoot it.

Of course the rich conversation on Facebook can’t really be reduced to 12 stereotypes. I’m sure they’re several more I missed. Please feel free to add them in the comments.