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Why We Converted a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

On Saturday, I made the decision to convert my personal Facebook account into a Business page.  It was not a difficult choice to make because, even though I had over 5,000 friends and 200 followers — when your friends queue is full, Facebook forces them into “following” you — I was really only posting Boles Blogs updates to my timeline.

Even though I don’t make any money from Boles Blogs, creating a Facebook business page offers some unification of thought and clarity of purpose on the social network.  I would “lose” my friends and their updates, as well as my own timeline since 2006, but I would also gain thousands of “Likes” — “friends” get converted into “Likes” when you convert a page — and my “followers” would also, magically, become “Likes” on the new page, too.  I would only have to update one Facebook page instead of two.

Here’s what the new Boles Business page looks like now on Facebook:

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Preventing Avatar Spam and Gaming Facebook LIKEs

If you live on social media networks, or if you write a blog, or manage a Facebook page, you’ve certainly seen a rise in efforts to game the networks for profit.  Way back on September 11, 2006, I predicted right here on this blog that people would begin to use Avatars — their online identity — to make money by selling their craven image to the highest bidder:

What’s to stop active — or better yet, INactive — blog commenters from getting hired by companies to change their Avatar to promote a website or a phone number or some other advertising blitz? Can you imagine being a new beer company and going out and finding the top 1,000 blog commenters and having them all change their Avatars to the logo for your beer?

Why it’s sheer viral genius! You could buy hundreds of thousands of page views on the cheap that could reach for years back into the history of Avatar-enabled blog pages on thousands of blogs — and the beauty part is this: No one would be the wiser.

The Search Engines already indexed and tagged the old content as safe and sufficient and your Avatar Ads would be silently served up when a search return is clicked through to the blog. The Blogmaster would never know — especially if you were not posting recent comments.

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Louis Armstrong and the Great Swiss Kriss Evacuation

Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest musicians in the short history of human entertainment.  What few people know, though, is Louis was also a great advertising pitchman.  His favorite product to shill was Swiss Kriss — a laxative he used daily.  He would give Swiss Kriss to friends and new acquaintances as hello gifts.

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Faking Diabetes Amputation to Scare Healthy People

This month, the Bloomberg mayoralty took a stumble on a massive morality blunder with the release of an absolutely incredible public health campaign aimed at the heart of healthy people; and it was perpetuated in a fake amputation of a man’s leg in order to make some sort of warped point in print advertising about the perils if Type 2 Diabetes:

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