Five for Friday

Friday has just got to stop it. It keeps creeping up on me and before I know it, I’m behind in getting my Friday Five post up.

So let’s just pretend that it’s morning now, OK? I mean, it’s morning somewhere. Don’t make me Google it. Ooh! It’s still morning in Hawaii, right? So just pretend you’re on a tropical beach, sipping a fruity drink and relaxing. Unless you live there, in which case you’re probably at work in a cubicle. But the view from your office is of Hawaii, so you win.

Sorry, got a bit off track there, so let’s just launch out of the insanity and into the five links you should have read this week but may not have.

• The first post came to my attention today and is hugely important to anyone who uses Facebook, particularly if you use Facebook for business (yours or a client’s). The Next Web reported out the story of The Cool Hunter, whose Facebook page vanished about two months ago. It turns out, they’d been warned at least a couple times about images it was using being in violation of copyright. Their primary defense seems to be “but everyone else does it!” The upshot? They lost 788K fans, 5 years of posts and will never be allowed to have a page on Facebook again. Read this.
• Is Klout (or any similar service) a good starting point to find influencers, particularly in the nonprofit field? Heidi Massey (friend of your humble author) says no, and I’m inclined to agree with her. It’s no secret I’m not a huge fan and have been known to give my friends +K in topics such as “magic” and “Hey Ma! There’s a Goat on the Roof (game)” (note: I did not know such a game existed before searching for “goats,” which you cannot be a Klout influencer in, apparently). But Heidi spoke at a nonprofit industry conference recently and a fellow speaker extolled the virtues of Klout and they did a pair of pro-con posts. Heidi was con.
• Our friends at PivotCon had a great post this week that included interviews from several startup CEOs and/or founders, including resident of #TheLabNYC, Overblog’s Frederic Montagnon. Social is in everything now and isn’t a separate silo (or shouldn’t be, at least). In addition to Montagnon, Pivot spoke with John Ferrara of Nimble, Greg Shove of Social Chorus and Joe Doran of Rallyverse and they had some pretty interesting perspectives on how social has permeated all that is digital.
• I saw John Havens tweet about something called Happathon earlier this week and was intrigued. I clicked through and found a project that, quite simply, fascinates me. It’s an effort to use big data and our app-happy social nature to measure happiness. We have all these measures about mental health and how depressed we may or may not be, but no one ever measures happiness. It may be because it’s more difficult, it may be because no one’s ever bothered trying (not as much money in happiness as in depression, I opined). His Slideshare on the project is fascinating. Give it a look.
• Writing well isn’t hard, but it’s not simple. We loved this piece from Carla Young in momeo magazine on how to take a humdrum blog post and turn it into something that will draw in the readers. Simple, to the point. It’s always good to take a step back and remind yourself of these basic steps.

Whew! That’s it! What did you like this week?

Photo by woodleywonderworks via Flickr Creative Commons.