Tag Archives: communication

Finding The URL Of A Facebook Post

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If you are a multimodal user of social media you may wish at times to alert your audience in one area of your activity on another area, e.g., post a link to your new blog article on your Facebook page. There are various tools that make this easier – usually “share” buttons allow you to repost to another social media site, e.g., sharing your Instagram photo to your Twitter feed.

But sometimes you want to share in a way for which a handy button does not exist, such as embedding a link (URL) to a specific Facebook post and its comments in your email newsletter. How do you find the URL of that post? Facebook just wants you to use their “share” button to stay inside their site so that doesn’t tell you the link.

Here’s how:

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Opting Out From Twitter Using Your Offsite Activities To Select Ads

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Twitter just announced that they will now allow advertisers to target ads to you based on information about you from places other than Twitter, such as what you do on other websites and with personal email addresses.

If you don’t like the sound of that, here’s how to opt out:

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General Business Gig Booking Considerations – Weddings

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Some time ago I posted a tip about how to determine the going rate to charge for a GB (general business) gig, such as a wedding, party, etc. But there is more to being a successful GB musician than setting a price. Here are some questions to ask and elements to consider when requested to perform for a wedding or other ceremony – this is based on my reply to a recent wedding inquiry, but much of it is applicable to other events:

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Mailing List Management

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It happened again this week: an event producer to whom I had given my email address sent out an announcement of their next event. But instead of using a mailing list management tool they copied and pasted all 100-odd mailing list addresses… into the TO: field of their Gmail message rather than BCC:. So I and every other person on their mailing list now have those 100-odd addresses in our email client!

Asided from having to scroll through them to reach the actual message, why is this anything other than mildly annoying?

– If anyone who received the message hits “reply all” (and may do that by default) can all end up in a looping flamewar as others reply all “Stop sending!” “Take me off this list!!” etc.

– All recipients whose inbox resides on their computer (i.e., they don’t only ever access email via a web browser) now have all of our addresses on their hard drive… which means if any of them get a computer virus that looks for email addresses to “harvest” (most viruses do not want to destroy your computer, but to take it over and use your data and internet connection to spam others) we all get even more spam as our addresses are added to lists for sale to spammers.

It’s particularly easy to forget to use BCC when using a Gmail account because the default Compose window now doesn’t give you a BCC field by default – you must click on a small link to open it. The event people use Gmail and did successfully use BCC previously.

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