What is Facebook Recommendations Bar & Why is it Cool?

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We just installed the Facebook Recommendations Bar on the Skadeedle blog and it’s super awesome. What does it do for your visitors? It pops up a Facebook window recommending a few other blog posts your readers might find useful.

What will it do for you? Two things:

Enables your content on your blog to be “Liked” so friends of the people who like it might see it.
Now you have the potential to have more of your blog stuff read instead of just one article.
Facebook Recommendations Bar

Our Facebook Reco Bar pops up after 5 seconds when you’re on the page.

We used the WordPress plug-in to make this happen. Install it and tell us what you think!
A few weeks ago, a little event took place in San Francisco that you may have heard of called Dreamforce, thrown by a little boutique CRM company by the name of Salesforce. Tongue in cheek aside, VerticalResponse team members were on deck for this year’s annual SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) event. In addition to the usual schmooz… er, networking, I personally got the chance to attend informative and instructive keynotes, featuring some of the brightest minds in our industry. The keynote that left the most lasting impression, however, would be the conversation between Gen. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State (2000-2004); Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE); and keynote moderator, Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff. Regardless of your political views or the size of your uganda whatsapp number database business, there were great nuggets of information distilled by these three heavyweights. Here are some of the fascinating insights:

Social: The Best Thing to Happen to the Internet since… the Internet?

Let’s sit back for a second and consider: ever since the army flipped the switch on the world wide web back in the ’70s (“I am proud to say that it was the U.S. Armed Forces that developed the Internet,” beamed Gen. Powell, “We gotta get a little credit for that.”), has anything revolutionized the way we connect with other people until the likes of Facebook or Twitter?

For Jeff Immelt, the biggest challenges he’s currently facing at GE are fighting size and bureaucracy, but social media gives him direct access to customers and employees, allowing him to conquer barriers that previously existed. For instance, using Salesforce Chatter, Immelt can now chime in on sales issues whenever he sees fit. In addition, for the past two years he has maintained his own corporate blog, in which he speaks frankly to employees, bypassing GE’s general counsel review before posting. “Today organizations move too slowly,” he said. “By using technology, I think you can move faster. You get more transparency. You get more access.”

Colin Powell has also wholeheartedly embraced the use of social media, posting regularly on Facebook and interacting with his 68,000+ followers (at time of writing). Based on the skill sets younger generations bring into either the military or the State Department, Powell believes social networks have allowed us to speed up the way we work.

“We’re moving so fast that we have to respond to every bit of data that comes in,” which has to be acted on immediately. “You better keep up with them,” he advised, “they’re not going to keep up with you.”

But even though we want to be literate in our use of new technologies, Powell cautioned that we need to be very protective of them as well. “There are dangers with this revolution, where we are so interconnected that perhaps we are too interconnected […] You have to have channels in place to distribute the information in a safe and secure way, but make sure it is usable without overwhelming the whole system.”