Social Media Goals for the New Year

Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it's really not much different from what we've done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong.

Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a New Year Resolution for it to take effect. So here's my attempt at guidance.

Background

When I got to college, few people had heard of email and even fewer used it. Usenet was a foreign concept to nearly everyone I knew in meat-space, but with so much traffic I knew it wasn't hurting for users. Before there was a web, I understood the notion of choosing my words carefully. Archives of all my posts would surely stick around for many years, I thought, and so they have. I can still find stuff I posted back in 1992.

As the web happened and it became easier for anyone to share anything, and as email flourished (back when we had time to read it instead of filtering it), I adopted a variation on an old idea of how to behave in email — never write something in an email you wouldn't want to be posted on the front page of The New York Times. Nowadays maybe it's a tweet on the front page of the Fail Blog.

I think we should all accept that with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, let alone all the surveillance cameras, web cams, and soon airborne drones made by 12-year-olds, everything you do runs the risk of being scrutinized and posted online for the world to judge. By posting your own contributions to social media sites, you (and I) continue to drive it.

When Facebook's co-founder's sister (who is also Facebook's former marketing director) posted a photo to Facebook and was surprised to see it tweeted by someone she didn't know, claiming it as an invasion of privacy, the collective web laughed at her. She became the holiday poster child for how confusing Facebook's privacy settings are to understand and implement — and she's the sister of the face of the company.

It also makes her follow-up tweet all the more laughable, partly because I doubt she asked the permission of her family members before posting their photos online:

Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 26, 2012

What You Can Do as a Social Media User

Most importantly, don't think that just because you have locked down your social media accounts, no one that you haven't authorized can see it. An errant retweet or a misunderstood setting are all it takes to make that notion come crashing down. Just look at Zuckerberg's sister — she clearly doesn't understand either of the platforms she uses despite what she thinks.

I have my own set of rules I follow and I try to lead by example. That doesn't mean all mine are right, but I had to start somewhere.

• For the most part, I do not post photos of people without their permission. Exceptions include crowd shots.
• I don't post photos of children, though when there are exceptions I do not post names with the photos.
• When I do take general place or crowd photos, I avoid posting ones with the faces of children visible.
• I avoid posting photos with faces visible when I am making fun of a particular fashion choice.
• I don't create venues for homes.
• I don't post photos with street addresses visible.
• I don't embed GPS information when tweeting from someone's home.
• I don't retweet tweets from a protected account (unless I have permission or it's a particularly good insult to me).
• I don't tag people in photos without permission or prior experience that it will be fine.
• I don't tag friends in places when I am out, which is also why I don't auto-tweet my Foursquare check-ins (on top of the fact that it's annoying).
• I don't include information about friend or family schedules in posts, especially when they are travelling.
• I do not sync my phone with any cloud service or allow any auto-posting. I'd rather pick and choose than run the risk of the wrong image making it to the wrong place.

It's worth noting that I have violated all of these at least once, sometimes by accident and sometimes by stupidity. In a handful of cases I have been rightly chastised.

When it comes to kids (anyone's kids), I work to make sure I don't put enough information out there that a motivated offender couldn't just drive up to a kid on the street and spout enough information to make the kid think it's safe to get into his car. I wish more parents on Facebook made that effort.

What You Should Do as a Person in the World

Accept that everyone has a camera and can post photos and videos of you at any time. Accept that you may appear unintentionally in crowd photos that appear on everything from locked-down Facebook pages to the local news to band fliers and so on.

When you have a friend who keeps posting photos of you that you don't want posted, you should confront him or her. At some point you'll have to decide between how cautious or uptight you want to be versus how much that friendship means to you.

If you are a Facebook user, you can control whether or not you get tagged in photos (as a link to your Facebook page only) and you can even un-tag yourself.

Either behave or own your pile of crazy.

Related

• Facebook security hole allows anyone to view private New Year's Midnight Delivery messages and photos, December 30, 2012.
• How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages of data in 57 categories, December 28, 2012
• Zuckerberg's Etiquette Sham, December 28, 2012.
• Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Complains Of Facebook Privacy Breach, December 26, 2012.
• Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency', December 26, 2012

Followers, Likes and +1s as Meaningless as Hits

One of my un-fondest memories from my early days of web development was the constant client request for web site counters at the bottom of a new web site. Trying to explain to clients that showing a rather low number of visitors might not be something they want to brag about. And then I got the inevitable request to, like the sketchy used car dealer behind the warehouse, adjust the site counter ahead a few hundred thousand miles.

Today on the web services like Google Analytics, preceded by products like WebTrends, allow site owners to see the number of users visiting their sites without embarrassing themselves by displaying low numbers. These services have also allowed site owners to, for the most part, move past the goal of just getting hits on their sites and instead setting up better methods to track conversions — how many visits result in sales, or downloaded product, or filled out forms, or whatever the goal of the site is. Smart businesses aren't enticed by a count, they want to see numbers of qualified visitors.

So how do we not get this with social media?

I read an article earlier this week about a local firm doing good by helping local businesses to increase their Facebook "likes" (Buffalo Social Media Firm Focuses on Educating Local Clients). To be fair to the company being profiled, it's possible the writer just doesn't understand the business goals or what "educating clients" really means and did not provide sufficient context. When I see quotes like this I am more than a little surprised, given the boast of the article title:

"The key thing that a lot of people don't understand is it costs money if you want a 10,000 fan page. You've got to invest. You've got to run ads,” said Evanetski. Likes for the page have grown from around 450 before the ads launched to more than 1,700 by Sunday morning.

Nowhere does the article discuss just what those 1,700 fans actually mean for that business. Is the campaign over now, or are those fans being approached for more information, as sales opportunities, just for mining demographic data, or for something else? Educated clients should ultimately know that an increase in the number of people who follow / like / +1 them on a social media service in itself does not translate to anything. An educated client has a goal in mind and uses social media as one method to achieve that goal. If the goal is simply to garner fans and followers, then an opportunity is being missed.

I wrote about this very thing just a few days into 2010 — almost two years ago — and thought folks might catch on. It's worth a re-read: Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing. Seeing the reasons behind Newt Gingrich's absurdly high Twitter follower count (EXCLUSIVE: Twitter Analysis Vindicates Gingrich in Followers Scandal) should remind us all that such a high follower count is essentially meaningless, particularly if you've only cultivated followers who aren't prospects for your product or service.

If you are a business owner and are approached by firms offering to increase your Twitter follower count or Facebook likes (or other service-of-the-day verb-to-indicate-attention), just ask them, "Why?" The answer should include a tangible reference to your final goals for any marketing campaign. If it doesn't, then send them away.