The Hatcher Group

Ted Talks:

In a funny, rapid-fire 4 minutes, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale’s rise to Web stardom. The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age.

To embed a widget featuring info from your Facebook page, follow these instructions:

- Login to Facebook with the account you used to create the page.
- Go to: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/pagebadges.php
- Click the image that says ‘other.’ Copy the HTML code that appears in the box below.
- Paste the code in the appropriate place on your website.

Note: Facebook offers several customization options for your widget, including three layouts and inclusion of your organizations’s name, status, picture and fans.

To embed a widget featuring your latest Twitter updates, follow these instructions:

- Go to http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_profile
- Type your username in the box
- Click the image that says ‘Finish and Grab Code.’ Copy the HTML code that appears in the box below.

Note: Twitter offers several customization options for your widget, including appearance, dimensions and other preferences.

Colin Delany of Epolitics.com has just released his much anticipated report: How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010. While it was designed with political candidates in mind, much of the advice can be applied to the work of foundations and nonprofits.

Facebook announces New Tools to Control Your Experience:

Today, we’re launching new tools to give you even greater control over the information you share. Mark Zuckerberg, our founder and CEO, talked about these changes in his post last week. They include a simpler privacy settings page and a tool to control the audience for each and every post you create. We’re also taking this opportunity to require all 350 million people who use Facebook to review and update their settings.

Here is ReadWriteWeb’s take on Facebook’s big announcement:

Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It’s a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from “old settings” to becoming visible to “everyone.”

This is not what Facebook users signed up for. It’s not about privacy at all, it’s about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site.

Information like your email address is recommended to remain limited to friends, but make no mistake about it - Facebook wants you to make the status messages you post visible to the entire internet.

Mashable has some new data that underscores the importance of crafting compelling and concise messages:

According to a University of California, San Diego, study highlighted by The New York Times, the average American consumes 34 GB worth of content a day, including a whopping 100,000 words of information.

The report clarifies that we don’t necessarily parse a full 100,000 words per day, but that that rather astounding figure does cross our eyes and ears each 24-hour interval via multiple channels: the Web, TV, text messaging, radio, video games and more.

What are you reading today?

Mashable:

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day, and companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are joining the (RED) campaign, raising awareness about AIDS in Africa.You may have noticed that the Twitter () homepage has turned red in honor of the occasion, but you can also help out by adding the hashtag #red to the end of your tweets, which will turn them red as well. It also works with the hashtag #laceupsavelives, which is a part of Nike’s campaign to promote their new product: RED laces, designed to fight AIDS in Africa. Follow twitter.com/joinred/ to learn more and support the cause.

There’s also a campaign on Facebook () over at www.facebook.com/joinred; share the (RED) video and make your profile picture (RED) if you’d like to raise awareness about AIDS. You can also shop for various prdocuts that are part of the (RED) campaign, including the red iPod Nano and the red Dell Inspiron Mini 10v.

Google () has added a link to its homepage with information on how you can help and join the various movements related to the World AIDS day. Finally, Mashable () is a media supporter of the campaign, and we’ve added a bit of red to our site, too, in the banner above this article.

It is great to see these companies getting involved in such a worthwhile cause.

Some fantastic news came out of Facebook last week:

Now you can publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on location and language. A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. All other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.

This feature has been frequently requested by Page admins who have fans spread out over multiple cities, states, and countries. Now you can now tailor your communication to be more relevant. This means your fans will be more interested in what you have to say and more likely to take action or share your posts with friends.

This feature looks to be very straightforward and easy-to-use:

Facebook offers some suggestions for how this could be useful:

Global brands: Starbucks, who has over 5MM Fans across the world, may want to talk about a new drink currently only available in the U.K.Musicians & Celebrities: The Foo Fighters may want to announce to fans in California that new tour dates have been added across the state.

Local: Red Mango may want to let fans in Palo Alto, California know that a new frozen yogurt shop is opening locally.

Celebrities: Roger Federer may want to separately thank his English-speaking and French-speaking fans in their respective languages.

Here are a few ideas we’ve come up with on how this could be used by nonprofits working on the state level:

1. News stories and updates should be targeted to relevant parts of the state. This should increase click-through rates and help to avoid the sharing of information that fans won’t find to be useful. For a group working in California for example, stories about Sacramento won’t be of much interest to residents of San Diego.

2.  Likewise, announcements of events should now be targeted by city.  Statewide nonprofits are likely to host events throughout the state.  They can now avoid unnecessarily bothering individuals from other cities with events they aren’t likely to attend.

Can you think of other practical applications of this new feature?