Bilal Jaffrey makes my teeth grind with his use of the phrase “in the online space” in his opening sentence, but his heart is in the right place in this Social Media Today post.

In the mad rush to be on Facebook, to leverage the latest Facebook enhancements, to get more people to like your Facebook page, to implement all the Facebook tips for small business that can be found … in all of that, marketers and businesses are forgetting that they’re building on someone else’s platform, not their own.

When all is said and done, don’t you want your online traffic coming to you, not to them?

Because as much as the web isn’t about control, you can nevertheless control the platforms on which your content is disseminated.

Then, when Facebook does something that messes up your communications strategy — like yesterday’s announcement that Facebook pages can no longer send updates — you won’t be as affected by the news.

And let’s face it — especially with something of a social media features war taking place between Facebook and Google+, this won’t be the last major feature overhaul that takes place on Facebook. The last thing you want is for your online communications strategy to get chewed up by all the shrapnel.

(Hat tip to Barbara for bringing the SMT post to my attention.)

The social media section of the Ragan site is not just food, it’s a veritable smorgasbord.  I mean, how can you not love articles like 10 Signs You’re A Social Media Jerk and 6 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. You’ll want to bookmark this one (if you haven’t already) for future reference and check it often.

With Borders bookstores closing, everything that’s left is being liquidated for 70 to 90 percent off. It’s a great deal if you’re looking for Twilight books or anything by or about Sarah Palin, but with the stores pretty well picked over you’ll have to sift through the rubble with a fine-toothed comb to find anything worthwhile.

One of my finds this past weekend was James P. Othmer’s Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet. Othmer writes about his big-agency experiences with honesty and humor.

I’m only about halfway through the book as I write this, but this bit is well worth sharing. It stems from a conversation Othmer has with Rick Webb and Benjamin Palmer, founders of The Barbarian Group, creators of the legendary subservient chicken. Webb is talking about branding and online gaming and Zipcar and such, and Othmer reports Webb saying this:

“When I think of ‘engagement’ and when I hear a CMO use it, I generally hear it in terms of time someone is thinking about my brand. I don’t hear it in the context of dialogue. We’re going to have to accept that this dialogue is more important than anything else. The dialogue is, in fact, the new brand. The way you converse and communicate with your consumers is your brand positioning.”

That last sentence may go a bit too far (there’s still a place for the product or service itself), but it’s also a fundamental truth about business today that speaks precisely to the pithy core of The Cluetrain Manifesto: markets are conversations.

How many companies pay close attention to every tiny aspect of their advertising … then virtually ignore the content of the email responses that customer service (or autoresponders) is sending out?

Companies are getting smarter about social media, but is that intelligence about using social media platforms as a broadcast channel or as a way to facilitate conversation?

Takeaway for marketers: We can never remind ourselves often enough that we’re not living in a broadcast economy anymore, we’re living in a conversation economy. Don’t stop listening.

Stuart Elliott reports on the painfully obvious in yesterday’s New York Times. Ironically, as of this writing there are no comments on his post.

Here’s a nifty little trick regarding thumbnail images on Facebook you may find interesting.

Let’s say you’re adding a link to a message you’re posting on someone’s wall. In the case above, I’m adding www.brucespringsteen.net to my status. Facebook gives me the option of choosing 1 of 9 thumbnails to go with the link. The thumbnails correspond to images that appear on that page.

Pretty simple, right? But let’s say you’re the owner of the page in question and, for whatever reason, you want to give me 10 choices and not 9 … and you want to do so without adding another image to the page.

Here’s what you do: Add the extra photo to the page, but program it to display at 0 x 0 pixels. The image won’t appear on your page, but it will appear as a thumbnail option on Facebook.

What’s the practical application for such a trick? I can’t think of many, but I can imagine some sort of “share this page on Facebook and use the secret thumbnail” activity that, if properly presented, could be interesting. There are probably a few others, but I haven’t thought about it all that deeply.

It would be cool, though, if Facebook would allow page owners to specify one thumbnail to go with the page in question; you can do that with thumbnails relative to the Like button (this page explains how), but as far as I know not with pasting a URL into a message.