The only rule of online privacy you need to know.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Facebook’s privacy settings lately.  Facebook, which started as a network where people could share their information privately, has loosened their privacy options/settings/system/whatever over the past few years to be everything but private.

Yada, yada, yada . . . I’ve done enough research about this to make my head spin.

However, when it all comes down to it, I’m not sure if the public is freaking out about privacy settings as much as the media says it is.

Regardless, whether we agree with Facebook’s ethics (or lack thereof) in this situation, there’s only one rule you need to know when it comes to online privacy, and this is the rule that I live by:

Don’t put anything online you wouldn’t want your mom to see.

Period.

It’s common sense, people. The internet is a very public place. Clamp down on privacy settings all you want, but if you have stuff online that you would rather your mom not see, you probably shouldn’t have put it there in the first place.

Now, I know there are situations where people will upload not-so-flattering pictures of you and tag you on Facebook. Guess what? You have the option to not let people see tagged photos and videos of you. Look in the privacy settings. Guess what else? You can also remove tags. These were always options, even way before the recent Facebook privacy debacle.

No, this doesn’t mean that incriminating stuff of you won’t be seen by others, there are always the friends of the people that uploaded it in the first place, but still — you’ve got a better chance of covering your own hide this way than fussing over what Facebook is deciding to do with your information this week.

Are there some embarrassing pics on Facebook of me that I didn’t upload? You betcha. But my mom is my friend on Facebook, and she can’t see them. Nor can my dentist, my former college professor, or Jerrod Niemann. There’s nothing my mom can’t see that anybody else can.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t comment things like “Please don’t get any more tattoos…” when I post pictures of my friends’ new tattoos, but hey . . . shes my mom! She’s supposed to be worried about that kind of stuff! (And since a good friend of mine owns a tattoo parlor, she’s got every reason to.)

So I’m wondering, are you freaking out about Facebook’s privacy flip-flopping lately? Why or why not? Or is this being overblown by the media?

Facebook changes again, this time users can’t figure out how to protest

In the meandering, ever-changing saga that is Facebook’s user experience, once again the mammoth social network made some abrupt changes without warning to its community.

On April 1st, Facebook changed their rules again and unleashed “community pages,” in an asinine attempt to “simplify” the already confusing issue of Pages vs. Groups.

This was not an April Fool’s joke, either.

The goal of this new “feature” is to weed out the unofficial brand pages from all the “official” ones on the network, and retain fan pages specifically for businesses, brands, public figures and official spokespeople for any of them. For example, if one wanted to make a page for a random cause or to make a statement, it would fall into the “community pages” category. Once the community page hit a certain amount of users, Facebook would hand admin privileges over to the community, thus creating a Wiki-like platform.

In every past instance of Facebook making big changes, users have protested within the network by creating hundreds of “Bring Back the Old Facebook” groups and even a few pages. However, this time there appears to be very little protesting in the social network by the addition of “community pages.”

Not because users don’t want to, but because they can’t figure out how.

“I don’t like it at all. I wish they’d bring back the old Facebook, and so do all my friends,” said Sarah Jones, a die-hard “Bring Back the Old Facebook” online protester who admins several groups. “I’d start another protest on Facebook but I can’t figure out if I should make a page, a group, or now one of these new community pages!”

Others are more suspicious of Facebook’s motives.

“I think it’s a conspiracy, Facebook is trying to confuse us so that we can’t protest all the change,” said one Facebook user and avid Obama supporter who declined to be named.

Indeed, as of this writing there are a few anti-community pages fan pages, but none have any more than three fans.

To make matters worse, Facebook also decided they are soon going to replace the “Become a Fan” button on fan pages with a “Like” button, citing better conversion on the “Like” feature within the network and increasing engagement without implication of commitment.

“I’m not a fan of removing the ‘become a fan’ button, and I don’t like the idea of just having a ‘Like’ button. Would fan pages become ‘Like’ pages?” asked one concerned Facebook protester, “I was going to make an anti-Like Button page but it wouldn’t even have ‘fans’ anyway… now I can’t figure out if it should be an anti-Like button group or page or community page to protest removing the ‘become a fan’ button AND the addition of the community pages!”

Many users have said they’re giving up and going back to MySpace, but are wary, as they got lost on the way to Facebook the last time.

It is uncertain what Facebook will decide to change next, but one thing is certain: They’ve finally found a way to quiet all the noise of whiny protesters within their network.

Image via Blackrage.org.

If you are not a public figure, you do not need a fan page. Period.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 17

I’ve been noticing something on Facebook lately that absolutely irks me – regular people who are neither celebrities, nor an otherwise public figure, are deciding they need fan pages. I don’t understand why, and I finally tweeted about it last night after I had had enough.

I got a lot of interesting conversation out of it, mainly with Juanita Chronowski, who maintains a fan page for her writing as a way to separate the personal from the professional. OK, that I can understand. Ari Herzog does the same thing. But people who are NOT public figures in any way, shape, or form? Unless somebody else made the page out of appreciation or as a joke – my friend Jen had it right when she said, “that’s flippin’ weird.

Facebook allows personal profiles up to 5,000 friends, and if you actually have more than 5,000 friends then perhaps you do need one. Perhaps you are somewhat of a public figure, and if that is the case, then go ahead and make yourself one.

Call me a purist, folks, but if you are not famous except in your own mind, YOU DO NOT NEED A FAN PAGE. Regular people having a fan page for themselves screams of an ego problem and “look how self-important I am!” — and frankly, makes me question why I would be friends with that person in the first place.

I’m tired of regular people thinking they’re special, unique snowflakes and deserve their own fan page just to boost their own egos. Non-public figure fan pages cheapens the value of fan pages for those who actually are public figures. Don’t believe me? Fan my cat. She’s more of a celebrity than most of these conceited people.

What do you think? Am I wrong here? Am I missing something? Is there a reason regular people who have not exceeded the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook and are NOT public figures should have their own fan pages? This is such a turnoff!

Be careful whom you “unfriend”

Something happened earlier that made me almost feel bad for somebody. Almost.

By now we know that “unfriend” was the official word of 2009. (I’m going to just set my Grammar Goddess cringing aside and go with it for this post.)

I’m in the process of (re)developing a brand for a client of mine, and while I know a lot of people in various disciplines of web design, graphic design, or any other kind of design in between, I had a certain former colleague in mind whom I knew would be able to conceptualize the perfect new logo for said client. I had worked with her in the past, had been impressed with her work, and she had expressed interest in working with me after the start of the new year.

I kept that in mind, and decided to take her up on it. I went to Facebook and tried to search for her in my friends, but to no avail. I remembered that she recently got married and her last name was different, so I searched again. No dice. So I searched one of our real-life mutual friends’ friends, and sure enough, she was in there.

Former colleague had unfriended me. To my knowledge I did nothing to offend her, and I’m left a little confuzzled.

No matter, I’ve got myriad contacts that would gladly take this referral, as it has the potential to be pretty lucrative and would be a great addition to any portfolio. But I can’t help but wonder why the heck this former colleague “unfriended” me. No, we don’t see each other every day, and no, we were never BFFs by any measure, but she was the perfect person for this assignment, and now … well, as my dad likes to say, “You snooze, you lose.”

The lesson to be learned from this?

Be careful whom you unfriend — it could cost you!

Image by robotclaw.

What to do when “you’re doing it wrong” goes wrong

Let’s face it — social media consultants/strategists/ninjas/experts/jedis/gurus/swamis/mavens/ringmasters/highpriestesses/whatevers are know-it-alls, even when, as I and many others have pointed out, nobody can possibly know it all. Yet deep down, we (and I say “we” because I admit that yes, I do fall into that sweeping category of “social media people”) really just want to help people who aren’t necessarily the nerds that we are.

Many times, we’re successful and people are glad that we were there to help them out, answer questions, and give them some guidance.

Other times, not so much.

Sometimes, you can reach out to an organization that you care deeply about and offer your help, and give them your time and help, and they won’t acknowledge it. If they acknowledge it, they won’t appreciate it, or they won’t understand why what you’re trying to help them with is important, until their peers are suddenly moving in on the game.

When that happens, it becomes an issue of “keeping up with the Joneses,” and said organization will decide that they have to have all the same tools that they hear about on TV, that their competitors are using, that they feel like they should be using because well, everybody else is and ooh — shiny objects! Never will they stop to assess what their overall goals are, who their audience is, if their target market is even using said tools — they’ll have no sense of strategy whatsoever.

Sometimes, no matter what you say to people, it’s not going to resonate.

No matter if you tell them that there are only 5 people in the entire region active on Twitter (and you know because you’ve met all of them), they’re still going to think they need a Twitter account to “reach out to their local audience.”

It’s not going to matter that you know they need a Facebook page and not a Facebook group to accomplish what they want to do — if they won’t listen to you, if they insist on “doing it wrong,” you can try to convince them that they’re “doing it wrong” until you’re blue in the face.

Sometimes, people aren’t going to listen. And you know what?

You’ve got to let it go.

Walk away. You tried. That’s all you can do.

If people insist on “doing it wrong” — it won’t do you any good to kick and scream.

Sometimes, you have to let people do things “the hard way,” otherwise they’ll never learn.

I’ve learned to do more things “the hard way” in my life than I’d like to admit, but my stubbornness has subsided in recent years. I’ve learned that it’s much easier to keep your mouth shut and ears open if you want to learn something the “easy way.”

But you know what?

Not everybody knows that.

So you have to just walk away and hold your head high knowing that you tried.

(Ever had that kind of situation?)

Next Page »