http://tnw.to/j4r4r

Sources: David Jacobs, consumer protection counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.; Brittany Darwell, lead writer for insidefacebook.com; Justin Lafferty, coeditor at allfacebook.com; Cameron Camp, cybersecurity expert at ESET in San Diego; and a former Facebook employee

1. Want to know how much Facebook knows about you?

Go to Account Settings in the Home menu and click “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”

2. You may not want to share your updates and other personal information with the whole world.

But Facebook has kept the default setting as Public. It’s better for us if you share more, and we’re assuming that most of you aren’t going to bother changing your privacy settings.

3. You may not see every post from your friends, and only a fraction of your friends may see all your updates.

Facebook wants users to see posts that will keep them on the site the longest, so it moves up the posts that are the most liked, shared, and commented on.

4. If you are signed in to Facebook, we track you while you surf the Internet.

Anytime you visit a page that has a Facebook Like or Share button, we log that information.

5. If your posts are set to be Public, burglars can see your status updates and figure out when you’re not in town.

Insurance companies may also use posted information to raise a premium or deny a claim.

6. Posting big news like your engagement, the birth of a baby, or your acceptance to grad school?

Facebook will know. We target those types of announcements by using something called natural language processing, and then we make sure they stick around in your friends’ news feeds until the next time they log on.

7. It may work to your benefit for us to know a lot about you.

For instance, if you Like the Gap Facebook page because you love to shop there, you’ll appreciate it when a coupon pops up.

8. Not seeing enough posts from friends you care about—and too many from those you don’t?

Set your news feed to sort by Most Recent, rather than Top News. Then add your favorite people to your Close Friends list and unsubscribe from any friends whose updates you’re not interesting in receiving.

9. We make money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach you.

They give us demographics—the desired location, career, education level—and we put their ads on the pages of those who meet the criteria.

10. Do you really want to make sure your friends see your important news (you’re having a garage sale, for example)?

You can pay a fee, around $7 to $10 a post, to move your update to the top of their news feeds.

11. Lots of users hate Timeline, but it’s not going away anytime soon.

It’s a more effective way for people to share, it’s visually appealing, and brands love it because it gives them a better platform to market their business and show people who they are.

12. You can limit your posts to Facebook friends who live in your city, those who went to your college, or those you work with.

You can even choose to allow everyone to view a post except your boss. Click the arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the status update box, and you’ll see all the options.

13. Never leave your computer while you’re logged on to Facebook, especially if your coworkers have a sense of humor.

For a while, whenever someone at our headquarters did that, we’d write something like “I love Justin Bieber” as his or her status update. When that happened to me, I’d get e-mails asking, “Are you OK?”

14. Be selective in choosing friends and Liking pages.

If you say yes to everyone, you’re going to see lots of things in your news feed you don’t care about, and you’ll have to take the extra time to filter them out.

15. Hide from all your friends on Facebook Chat by going to the chat box and clicking Go Offline.

If it’s just one particularly annoying friend that you want to avoid, click on his name in the chat window, hit the cog icon that’s in the top right, and choose Go Offline to [Name].

16. Some information can’t be made private on Facebook.

Your name, profile picture, cover picture, network, gender, and username are always publicly available.

17. Noticed fewer fans on your favorite Facebook pages?

That’s probably because the company has recently been cracking down on phony profiles created en masse by shady companies to boost a page’s Facebook popularity. In a recent filing, Facebook estimated that as many as 83 million of its profiles are fake, though some are duplicate pages set up by real people.

18. Here’s how to get the site to work faster and more efficiently:

Connect to a Wi-Fi network before using your phone to log on to Facebook.

19. Watch when you Like a company, or post about a product.

Your interaction might be shown to your friends as an ad for that company.

Why use Remote Administration?

This is a question we hear every time we face prospective clients. And it’s a good one!

Every business needs some form of office administration to keep things running smoothly. More than likely your business is NOT running a business. You may be a real estate agent, a contractor, a doctor. YOU know what makes you a success. And usually it’s not the day to day administrative tasks that keep you away from creating revenue.

That’s where partnering with BRAVO Services can give you back your most valuable asset. YOU!  You and your time. Time that is better spent doing what you do best. BRAVO Services has the experience, resources, and personnel to compliment you and your business. And you incur no additional employee costs in the process. No work space allocations. No computer or workstation costs. No employee related taxes or benefits. Remote Administration is just that. We perform the work at our offices with our associates, meeting with you when you need us to. BRAVO Services also has the latest tools to perform your office duties. And WE upgrade our software and hardware packages so that you don’t have to. No lost productivity time moving to a new software or hardware platform.

Severe weather problems? Not with BRAVO Services. Because we use remote associates as well, we are able to serve your needs from multiple locations and your clients will be impressed that you are up and running servicing their needs.

Need special presentations?  BRAVO Services offers a wide array of presentation services. From PowerPoint to Webinars, we’ll create a portfolio to dazzle your customers and coworkers.

How about a web page? BRAVO Services will build you a web page that will present your business to the world!  AND, we’ll optimize your website for the ever growing mobile market as well.

Need a little Social Media Marketing to enhance your products? BRAVO Services has the best resources to get you started reaching clients that you never realized needed you.

How about adding a video to your existing marketing campaigns? BRAVO Services has produced several videos from Real Estate to Weddings to music videos to personal resumes. You can add these to your website, burn a DVD, or present it online at a meeting, expo, or to your NEXT customer!

Would you like to enhance your office structure to include policies and procedures? BRAVO Services has extensive experience in providing office policy documentation that can firmly establish what YOU expect out of your current and future employees.

This is just a short list of the services that BRAVO Services can provide your growing business. We would truly like to discuss your current and future business needs.

Check us out at      WWW.BRAVOREMOTE.COM

Or contact us:

Cathi Dailey

President

BRAVO Services – Business Remote & Virtual Office Services

https://bravoremote.com

Isn’t it amazing as entrepreneurs and small business owners how many hats we must wear to run our business?  We become the manager, marketer, creative director and financial wizard and then suddenly, another hat makes its way into the mix.  At some point, we need to refocus our energy back to what it is that we do best in our business venture.  After all, this is why and how we are in business, whether it’s for personal enjoyment or monetary gain.

To refocus, you can ask yourself which of the hats you could hire an employee for or better yet, to outsource.  As an entrepreneur or small business, it is difficult to create new space for an employee, give up control over every detail, build trust with someone new, set aside time to train, tackle government regulations for payroll and HR, and incur new costs for equipment, software and furniture.  There just comes a time when you’ll need to take the leap to delegate some of your work flow to another source.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find someone who understands the fears, time constraints and costs of hiring an employee?  At BRAVO Services, we do just that.  Because we are a “remote” business support service we already use and own the latest technology and software tools at our location.  This means greater mobility and less cost for you.  We understand that it takes time to build trust and develop a long-term relationship, so we make sure that each and every time we do business, we exceed your expectations.

Selecting the right remote workforce is crucial to building the trust you want and establishing a long-term relationship with someone who can learn your business inside out.  To do this, it is wise to seek a remote business partner who is locally or nationally based within your work area.  It is also important that they have a competent understanding and pronunciation of your language, grammar, and dialect.  Costs may be lower in overseas operations, but you’ll end up wearing another hat to recover lost time or even worse, lost clients.

It’s time for a new way to conduct your business!  Consider giving up one of those hats and visit us at www.bravoremote.com.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/09/25/ricky-gervais-just-sayin-app/1591323/

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

* Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

“Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
* No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
* Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.

Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.
* You should never have to link to an SEO.

Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
* Choose wisely.

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn’t comment on specific companies, we’ve encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
* Be sure to understand where the money goes.

While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
* What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.
* What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
o owns shadow domains
o puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
o offers to sell keywords in the address bar
o doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
o guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
o operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
o gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
o has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on “File a Complaint Online,” call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.