Facebook has a great photo album feature that lets you upload photos into as many albums as you like and integrates a very nice tagging system which is excellent for the viral marketing end of the equation. In fact, they even have a mobile upload feature that lets you take pictures with your MMS enabled phone and upload them in real time to your facebook page - nice! All you have to do is send a photo email to facebook mobile, receive an activation code back by email and voila, you have an active mobile photo account. I followed all the instructions over and over and constantly received the message that my phone or provider was not able to provide this function and that no photo was received. I have a brand new Palm Treo 700p and would be pretty surprised if it didn’t have the capacity to perform this function.

Long story short I had many conversations with Palm and with Telus who both blamed each other. I finally contacted facebook support and a great thing happened - I actually got to communicate with some real people who not only understood my problem and appreciated it, but ones who were able to and did fix it! Hooray for facebook customer support especially Carter, Lawrence and most notably, Mark Slee http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark_Slee/204686 .

Mark actually took a good look at the problem and wrote to me that:

1/ Your mobile email provider doesn’t send via a normal Telus MMS (multimedia messaging service) gateway. Rather, it seems to use a service provided by a 3rd party called VistoMobile, which we’ve just added support for.

2/ Email messages use MIME types to specify what type of data they are sending. Standard webpages have a MIME type of text/html, and normal pictures are sent with a MIME type of image/jpg or image/gif. However, my email provider (Telus) sends the image with a MIME type application/octet-stream. We modified our software to detect when there’s an image being sent as this type — but perhaps not surprisingly this MIME type wasn’t something we initially thought to add support for over the far more standard “image” MIME types.

Now that’s what I call service! Along the way I did try some third-party facebook apps to deal with my mobile photo uploads and they all worked but they didn’t enter the facebook news feed the way the native plugin does and they didn’t offer an option for me to pull those photos directly into my web page/blog.

So, now I have a facebook mobile photo album which can be seen on my personal profile and, thanks to the Fotobook Wordpress plugin (http://www.aaronharp.com/dev/wp-fotobook/) I can pull any or all of my photo albums onto my wordpress site (http://www.tellmama.net/blog/photos/mobile-uploads/)

Now all I need is the ability to also pull those photos onto my facebook band page (which is taking a long time to populate because, well, I don’t have any spare time) and the functionality for fotobook to automatically populate my blog site photo section with my mobile uploads. Apparently, facebook pages are unable to share photos with personal facebook sites automatically (I find this strange and hope that somebody will design a solution soon). Oh yes, one more thing, I would really like to be able to upload mobile photos to more than one photo album or site. At this time you can only register your cell number to one personal facebook mobile album.

I have to say that even though there are some gaps, the facebook mobile photo upload tool is a great addition to the facebook portfolio of tools and gizmos and the actual customer support by real people is a genuine welcome surprise. Tell your friends!

Together, Strategic Media Solutions and Breathe Productions make a powerhouse team that can guide your business through any marketing mystery and help you to get the job done on time and on budget!

A strong, flexible identity is crucial to launching and growing a business both on and off-line. Brian Dodo of BM Dodo Strategic Design in Kingston speaks with Shelley about why.

Brian Dodo, RGD - BIO

Brian is a strategic designer and co-owner of BmDodo Strategic Design, an award winning full service Strategic Design Company based in downtown Kingston Ontario.

Brian has more than a decade of international design and communication experience in the publishing, advertising, packaging and new media industries. He has worked with Hummingbird Ltd. within their Corporate Identity and Design group.

Brian worked as the Manager of Creative Services for Streampipe.com in Washington, DC. He has also worked on projects for the United Way KFL&A, Eastern Lake Ontario Regional Innovation Network (ELORIN), Queen’s University, Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations, World Vision International, Inter-America Development Bank, The Nature Conservancy, BET, Design Exchange in Toronto and recently for the United Way KFL&A Success by 6 campaign.

Brian is a professional member and an alumnus of the Design Management Institute (www.dmi.org). He is a Registered Graphic Designer (RGD). He currently sits on the Board of Directors for The Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario (www.rgdontario.com), is a mentor and member of the Membership Committee of the Association.

For more information visit www.bmdodo.com

Leesa Barnes - BIO

Working with management teams, entrepreneurs and businesses, Leesa Barnes teaches insider tips on how to open doors, generate leads and make money using a podcast. Leesa has been featured in national and international media and is recognized as an expert in podcasting and online media.

She speaks regularly about podcasting and receives rave reviews for helping audiences release their fear of technology through her use of relevant visuals, analogies and humourous stories.

She is President of Toronto-based Caprica Interactive Marketing and is author of Podcasting for Profit (Maxpress, September 2007) which shows individuals and businesses how to make money podcasting in seven simple steps. For more information about Leesa, visit www.leesabarnes.com.

In this interview with Leesa Barnes, we discuss:

static vs. dynamic sites
blog/podcast vs. html
search engine ranking
easy to update
build relationships
create rapport
engaging
potential
customer loyalty
community building
customers as ambassadors
RSS
feedburner.com
podcasting directories
itunes
ego search
Google
transparency
Technorati
Oprah
transparency
Podcasting for Profit