I’ve enjoyed spending much of my career learning and pushing myself as much as I possibly can. It’s the way I do things, I like to be in a fast paced environment, I like the adrenaline, and I hate feeling bored. A former manager once told me that I was better at what I did if I had 100 things going on, rather than only a couple. He also noted it was a bit freakish, but, none the less, I took it as a compliment. But, after trying to figure out why that was while talking to someone the other night, I realized the reason was momentum.

Having momentum is such an important part of business because it is what pushes us to be more productive, think on our feet, be a better decision maker, and achieve so much more. Leveraging the momentum you have to get shit done can be an unbelievably important. Also, that momentum will help your business through press, funding, or just building a better product. This holds true for all aspects of business: products, blogging, etc.

On the writing front I can crank out post after post when I have momentum going for me, but, when I lose that momentum, I tend to have a tough time getting anything down to blog about. I’ve even tried putting together an editorial calendar for blog, but, it never works. The only reason my last post wasn’t over a month and a half ago was that I stumbled on to the Facebook Like button update in the stream.

Another example of this comes when running a business. When you have momentum, you need to take full advantage because it can lead to press coverage, possible funding, and overall user interest. I’ve noticed it in the past and even as recent as a month ago. Watching meeting after meeting get cancelled, no clear direction being set, and feeling like the momentum was slipping. Admittedly, I was at fault for some of it, for once feeling like I had put too much on my plate and contradicting everything I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I was allowing prior commitments get in the way of making shit happen. So, I decided to change that and leverage the momentum I had previously been riding on and run with it. Maybe I needed time away at SMX West and SXSW to refresh and let that reality slap me right in the face. If that was the case, I’m glad it did, because now I am more motivated and ready to win than I have been in a few months.

On Thursday of last week, I had the opportunity to present at SMASH (Social Media Advanced Skills Huddle) at USC. What I was really excited most about was the fact that we had many of the Master in Human Behavior students in attendance at the conference and was great hearing their thoughts and insights around Social Media. I presented on Social Media ROI and while my presentation is below I thought I’d share a few highlights:

1. Create Goals and a Plan: I really do believe that before starting any campaigns and worrying about the tools to track ROI, you need to define what those goals are, what you’ll be measuring against, and have a plan to achieve those goals.

2. Value: When you set those goals, it’s also critical to understand what types of value Social Media Marketing is going to add to the overall campaign or your organization daily, monthly, or weekly. Some of those values can be increased engagement (e.g. mentions, blog comments, etc.), increased traffic, or increased brand recognition.

3. Platforms: While there are many Social Networks, Bookmarking, and news sites, it’s important to understand where your site should be represented on the Social Web. While the general Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are really important to have a presence in, if you participate in photography Flickr has a large community.

4. Use existing tools on Social Media Platforms: Facebook has their insights product for Facebook Page owners, StumbleUpon has domain stats (e.g. http://su.pr/domain/myspace.com), and Myspace has Artist Dashboards. These tools can take you a long way without having to pay for anything right off the bat, so, make sure to take full advantage of all the free tools you can.

5. Free and Paid Tools: Along that same note of taking advantage of all the free tools out there, bit.ly has good click tracking for URLs you tweet and I highly recommend to at least start there with tools. After that, it would be a good idea to start looking at tools like Alterian SM2, Radian6, Social Flow, CoTweet Enterprise, etc. that make the most sense for your organization.

Would love to get your thoughts around Social Media ROI and hear any tips you have for others out there that are learning and/or working on programs to track these metrics. Leave a comment and lets get the conversation rolling!

The most random thing happened to me last night and I am not sure how it happened. I went to login to my Facebook account last night and next thing I know I get the following message:

“Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.”

The thing that really gets me is not one piece of communication from Facebook to the user, in this case, me other than at the login screen. There was not one email sent from Facebook possibly stating: “Your account was disabled for the following reason…”

Furthermore, typically when someone violates a terms of services or anything of that nature, there should be a communication sent out to the individual. When you strip someone of any type of product, service, account, etc. there needs to be a valid reason for it and also what they can do to re-initiate their account. Going WAY back into the past with AOL, they use to do this if your account was reported, etc. I remember a specific occurrence where i called someone a name as a joke, in a chat room and I was reported by someone else (yes, I am a geek that lives online practically and I did at some point hang out in chat rooms with friends, insert one of many jokes <here>). AOL still sent an email to us, saying the account was disabled for the following XX number of reasons, the specific comment made, and furthermore, provided steps to getting our account back.

Moving back to Facebook, you can not strip someone of their means of communication and not provide reasoning for doing so. Disabling a users account without any explanation is like stripping a family of telephone and snail mail communication in the 1970′s, you just don’t do that!

So, I went on my way and tried to do a little digging to see if I could find a way to contact customer support or something along those lines. As you can see in the screenshot above there is a fancy little link to the FAQ page, “here”. (Side mistake by Facebook…right…because “here” describes what this beautiful little page is? Why not just link “disabled account FAQ page” to be a little more semantic…sigh)

What do we have here, on this fancy little FAQ page which provides absolutely no contact information? Ooops, I leaked it a bit to early…yes…you heard me right…the FAQ page does not provide ANY contact information to the user attempting to get in touch to find out why their account was disabled. Facebook, seriously? Are. You. Kidding. Me?!

Here is the fully open disabled user FAQ page, with…(yes I’m going to say it again)…NO CONTACT INFORMATION:

Let’s recap for a moment here on where Facebook had a FAIL of EPIC proportions:

• First and foremost, disabled a users account without any absolute reason
• Provided the user with no explanation, let alone a detailed explanation of the problem
• Did not provide any steps to re-enable or bring their account back online
• Worst of all, did not provide any contact information to the user for them to contact facebook.

A lot of the actions above can be easily handled by setting up triggers in your database or code. The disabling action should trigger an email, of which, should contain the reasons for disabling the user. The reasons can be linked to the users profile, provide that string of text in the email. Furthermore the contact details should be provided in the email template and/or a list of things the user can do in the meantime. Rather than getting frustrated and writing a blog post, like me.

Now, I have actually emailed facebook, the disabled email address is disabled@facebook.com. I found that address thanks to Steve Ganz doing a search for me. (Which I’ll admit, I should have thought of doing, but was so confused I didn’t) The url to that page is http://www.facebook.com/help.php?hq=account+disabled. We will see how this comedic drama of my account being disabled turns out. Hopefully Facebook can clean up their customer support and disabled account policies in the meantime as well.

Updates:

7/13 @ 4:05pm: It is a Sunday and typically not a “business day”…but 12 hours since my account was disabled and still no contact from facebook support or a reply to the disabled email address.

7/13 @ 4:30pm: Thanks to a tip from @carlayoung on twitter, I have fwd’ed my email to their appeals@facebook.com email address for yet another attempt at opening communication lines up.

7/14 @ 8:05am: It has been a full day since my first emails have been sent off to Facebook’s disabled support and I still have not received an email. My account is still disabled.

7/15 @ 4:55 pm: Facebook finally re-actived my account and said that I need to browse Facebook less…interestingly enough, they state there are rate limits, but refuse to state what those rate limits are.