I’ve taken 10 key learnings from a number explosions that I’ve observed and been involved in over the past few months and wanted to share them with you.

1. Predict

If at all possible, thorough preparation for a big online news event can be priceless. Creating a set of frequently asked questions can be a extremely valuable resource when composing blog comments, Facebook replies or Twitter tweets. If you have the luxury of a PR team then these guys can be invaluable at helping prepare.

2. Prepare

Can your blog cope with a traffic spike or do you need to use a plug-in like WordPress’s Super Cache to take the strain? If you have a good relationship with your host, let them know before that traffic is coming so that they can have support available if your hosting does start to slow down.

3. Plan

Big announcements usually have a time that they go live. Make sure that everything you need to be is in place before the event. This allows you to totally focus on dealing with the positive feedback and/or negative fallout that the announcement may bring.

4. Filter

If you are expecting feedback from your announcement/release then carefully prepare your feedback channels. Make sure comments are enabled on blog posts, create a Facebook Note that all of your comments can accumulate in and consider setting up a dedicated e-mail address for feedback to be sent to. Setting the channels up effectively means you have less places to monitor and messages can be communicated quickly across fewer places.

5. Observe

You don’t always need to rush in and react to the fallout from an announcement. More often than not there will be positive and negative messages – look for trends and themes, especially in the negative comments.This will help when composing replies.

6. Respond

Preparing a reponse that answers a number of concerns is more efficient that addressing each one seperately. That said, your reply strategy should be dictated by the volume of responses, ideally you would reply to each and every piece of feedback individually, but sometimes that just is not possible.

7. Trust

This one involves a leap of faith that some people may not be willing to take. If you are confident in your brand (and your customers) then have faith that the loyal and passionate customers will see the positive side and hopefully they will make up a large volume of the social media buzz.

8. Listen

Even if you aren’t planning to respond to tweets on Twitter, still listen to what people are saying. You might find it useful for coming up with answers or even predicting the questions that haven’t been asked in other channels.

9. Rotate

Dealing with an onslaught of feedback via Twitter, Facebook, the Blog is tough going. Creating unique, well crafted responses quickly and efficiently is time consuming and mentally tiring. Make sure you have more than one person fire-fighting otherwise the quality of responses may drop over time.

10. Evaluate

Don’t wait until the explosion has passed before you begin to evaluate. Keep notes of lessons learnt during quiet periods. There can be a huge amount of activity in a short period of time and this stop-start nature will mean that recalling all the occurrences in detail will be challenging.

Now you know what to do, find out what not to do…

TechCrunch has released details of a project codenamed ‘Titan’ that may well change the face of e-mail marketing. Facebook are planning to launch a full functional email solution much akin to Gmail or Hotmail in the coming months. So what will it include?

• Access from the walled garden of Facebook or via POP/IMAP (Outlook/Express/Live Mail can be used to read your email.)
• A unique @facebook.com email address. Probably based on your Vanity URL

The quick win could be for Facebook to utilise it’s Microsoft connections and base their email solution on Hotmail, but knowing Facebook they are going to develop this themselves.

If they do develop something unique to themselves from the ground-up then we could have a whole new email client to deal with – more testing of e-mail rendering and spam scoring is guaranteed…

So where does this fit in the webmail landscape? I think Gmail has a hardcore, committed following that love the labelling, organisation and simplicity of the conversation based layout. The big threat ironically could be to Microsoft and it’s Hotmail solution. This has become a spam filled webmail system that people are using as a rubbish bin for unwanted email. If a new solution was introduced that offered better spam control, a great user-interface and was hosted on a website you visited almost daily then I think the winner is clear to see.

This project is one that all digital marketers will have to watch closely.

Read more about this at AllFacebook in their 5 Features Facebook Should Add To Their New Email Product

Please also be aware that developing content and keeping on top of your fans questions and queries can become a full-time job, build in management and review time in your work schedule. There are some great resources below that make essential reading before you click the ‘Publish’ button…

Facebook’s very own guide – giving you background information, how to prepare and a step-by-step guide.

A handy 10 page Facebook Pages PDF (updated March 2009) also from the Facebook team that gives you an extra level of information, from Page publishing through to looking at user statistics.

Following Facebook’s recent overhaul Mashable pulled together a superb Guide for Social Media Marketers – highlighting the opportunities and challenges of setting up your first Facebook Page.

Mashable is a superb social media resource and their 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page post really supported that position.

If you are seeking inspiration Peter Kim setup a very useful Wiki packed full of social media examples. Sort by type, find Facebook Pages and there are some good examples there.

Probably the best way of researching is to dive into Facebook itself and search for brands, most of the big boys have pages, with varying examples of how to and how not to setup a Fan Page on Facebook – Skittles, Maltesers and Innocent all offer good, simple examples.

The first one I thought about was Facebook’s Login screen which they are constantly tweaking (it’s been changing over the few days I’ve been thinking about it). The login itself is a simple combination of e-mail/password, but with the addition of an optional Remember Me tick box. Recently I ticked the box and an additional option titled ‘Make Facebook my homepage’ appeared – genius I thought, they’ve detected I’m engaged by Facebook and they want to see how far they can take me. Then I thought what about people that don’t trust the Remember Me feature, but would like Facebook as their homepage? Are they missing a trick by not showing both options to everyone? Quite possibly… Or is it a case of saving homepage real estate? If it is the later, then maybe overtime they change Remember Me, for the people that don’t use it to Make Facebook my homepage?

The key point from this suggested tweak, as with the £300 Million Button article, is that on such a well used part of any site, a small change could offer a potential benefit for both you and your visitor – keep tweaking! See what works (analytics are vital here) and keep striving to improve the key parts of your website.

Facebook is without doubt changing the way a generation of users use the internet. A vast number of users begin their online journey on Facebook and explore from there, so the simple tweak suggested above could convert an even larger number of people to get instant Facebook gratification when they fire-up their web browser. Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook to get a slice of the Facebook action, for a period of time the Facebook search option had two options – search Facebook or the web (with Microsoft). That second option has now disappeared, was this causing session times to drop as people left Facebook to explore the web? We can’t know for sure, but we do know it’s not there any more.

Although this change of internet entry-point is taking place for some, people still love Google, their share of search is continuing to rise (recently reported up to over 80%). Maybe Microsoft’s investment in Facebook was purely to avoid Google acquiring them? After all if Facebook and Google were to collaborate that would be a fatal blow for anyone else trying to gain market share in an environment that’s so enamoured with social media.