“Elf Yourself” is back with a social media kick

In 2006, OfficeMax jumped into the viral scene with the Elf Yourself virtual greeting cards. Last year, 35 million cards were sent out all over the world.

The site lets you stick your head, your kid’s head, your friend’s head, anyone’s head, onto a dancing elf body. You manipulate the photo until it fits perfectly in the space and voila…a viral phenomena.

This year they’ve taken the social media route. You can now tweet a link to your Dancing Elf on Twitter, post it to your Facebook wall, or embed the video in your website/blog. There’s also an option to sign-in with Facebook Connect and use your Facebook photos in the “Elfing” process.

And, as if that’s not enough, you can pay $4.99 to download the video and save it for years to come…my kid’s gonna hate me for this some day.

Building your brand on Facebook

Once again, we are gaining valuable insight from the social media gurus at Mashable. They posted a great 10-step guide to building your personal Facebook brand…here’s a recap:

1. Know your audience. Too many people are sharing information to the wrong audiences. Remember, you can limit what select users can see on your profile, just by changing your settings.
2. Decide on your branding strategy. It should be based not only on the audience you’re targeting, but your overall life goals.
3. Set your privacy settings. Depending on your Facebook goals, you may set your entire account to private or grant certain individuals permission to view sections of your profile. You can also make your profile public for the world to see, which could be beneficial to you if you’re looking to become more visible in your industry and will result in your profile ranking high for your name in search.
4. Fill out your profile completely. Paint a picture of who you are. When filling out the information fields, be sure to focus on the education and work section, where you can reconnect with fellow alumni from college, or past colleagues that might be able to help you get a job. Also, in the contact information field, be sure to list your blog, any websites you might own and links to your profiles on other social networks. Since hiring managers use Facebook’s search engine to find candidates, it pays to load up your profile with keywords that they can search against.
5. Import contacts and grow your network. Each month, you should go through the process of importing your contacts from your email accounts and your instant messenger screen name accounts. This will help you continue to grow your Facebook network as you’re meeting new people through your other channels. If you have a blog, it’s also a smart idea to use Facebook Connect.
6. Update your status. Based on your branding strategy, you’ll want to update your status to either keep people informed about what you’re up to, push them to your content or both.
7. Start a group or a page.
8. Join or start an event in your area.
9. Link out to your Facebook profile. If your Facebook strategy is to promote yourself and remain public, then placing a link (and possibly a Facebook icon) on other sites to your Facebook profile is a great idea. As the chief marketing officer for your personal brand, you want to build your friend list, so that you have more people to market to now and in the future. Think of your Facebook profile as a digital asset and grow the equity in that asset over the rest of your life.
10. Feed your social networks. By using Ping.fm, you can update your status on Facebook, as well as many other social networks in an instant, without duplicating your efforts. Also, you can import your blog titles in Facebook using notes or by using an application called Simple RSS. Not only does this make you more productive, but it appears as though you’re contributing to your community, without you having to think about it. Since Facebook is all about sharing, those that share more will be remembered more, which is great for personal branding.

With over 200 million active users, and 600,000+ joining every day, Facebook is a tool worth mastering. It could be just the thing you need to get your business or career booming, so get on board!

Check out Blue Media Boutique’s Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/blue.media.boutique