Shortly after I sent the missive, my boss – the CEO of the 80-person-strong startup I was at – called me.  It was strange that he used the phone rather than replying to the email.  It was stranger that he didn’t just walk the three doors that separated our offices; but no… he called me.

“Do you have a minute?” he asked. “Can you come see me in my office?”

I was suddenly nervous and wondered if it had to do with the email I’d just sent out.  I was pretty sure my job was safe, but… one never knows.

When I arrived at his office moments later, his back was to the door while my email was splayed (in very large text) across his screen.

“Adam,” he began timidly, slowly turning in his chair Bond-villain-style. “I know you’ve been a consultant for a long time, and aren’t yet accustomed to working in a group setting.  That’s why this is a really important thing for you to know now… before it becomes a problem.”

I was ashen.  OK – I was ashen-er than I usually appear.  I had really screwed up – big.  Lecture from the CEO big.  Then he made one statement to me – a question, really… almost rhetorical, but somehow pointed.  A dull sort of sharp, like the edge of a letter-opener.

“Before you send an email like this, ask yourself: Would you say this aloud – in person – to the people you’re sending it to?”

I rethought the email in my mind and realized that no… I most certainly wouldn’t ‘have the [guts]‘ (as he would later say to me) to say this in person to any of the recipients of the email.

I think this same rule applies, perhaps more-so, to social media vehicles like Twitter, Facebook and even comments on blogs and YouTube. All the time, it seems, I see short barbs carried across the tubes that would have no place in casual conversation with a group where there are contrary views, or even intimate chat between two individuals who are at odds.  People have no problem, for instance, twittering about politician X’s latest misstep, whereas they would have no ability to speak their displeasure in the presence of that party.

Far too frequently I see Tweets or Facebook Fan Page posts flung indiscriminately as bait that is clearly designed to entice a contrarian response (as with Mr. Clement’s most recent Twitter spars with those for and against the census issue).  Much of the time, the subject of such attacks are derided for “not getting the two-way” of social media when, in fact, such a comment wouldn’t merit a response in TRL.

In one particular circumstance, a Social Media aficionado declared that (paraphrasing) they were going to ‘unfollow’ a particular local politician because they were too one-way: Highlighting the notion that this politician was using social media to broadcast their achievements but bemoaning the fact that they weren’t listening to the other people in the social media space.  To this I say the following:

I would do exactly the same… as the politician.

Social media is not a private conversation; indeed, on the contrary, it’s a super public, archived forum.  I wouldn’t expect a politician to candidly go on record regarding a hot topic in a private conversation with me, and were I a political advisor, I wouldn’t suggest that anyone, ever, express an opinion on a hot issue in < 140 chars that hadn’t been carefully crafted and considered by about 20 politically-minded copywriters (and if you think that Obama is actually writing even 1/140th of any Tweet, well… I’ve got ocean-front property in in Calgary to sell you).

If you take issue with a politician – especially a local one – or even if you take issue with a politician’s party’s policy… make an appointment and go see them.  If you’re a constituent, it’s almost unheard of for them to refuse you an audience.  It may take a week (or five), but they will see you, and they will listen, and they will respond.

If you want more out of a brand… write a letter, or speak to a manager, or stop doing business with them.  Heck, I’ve been seriously guilty of slapping a brand via Twitter (http://twitter.com/adamcaplan/status/18934536560), and I’ve even considered “Liking” an Anti-[Insert hated company here] page on Facebook, but it’s rare that I do something about it (other than boycott Bell and McDonalds – my favourite brand hate-ons), so I’m certainly guilty of using my online persona as a passive-aggressive shield as well…

The argument I often hear back is “These companies/politicians/public figures should communicate with me the way I want to be communicated with”, to which I reply “Horsepucky” (to borrow a phrase from M*A*S*H).  Organizations of any size have finite resources, and can’t respond to every single social media meme that starts getting press.  E-Mail, snail-mail and phone support still work – as does walking into a store or an office and making one’s case.  Just because you send 2000 tweets a day and @yourleastlikedbiz has a Twitter handle doesn’t make them fair game.

And that’s the point.  If you want a two-way conversation – especially one that’s controvercial with ANYONE, politician, your favourite brand, or band, or (again) anyone — don’t hide behind an avatar (even if it is a reasonably well-represented likeness) ask yourself if you’d have the [guts] to say it to their face… the same litmus test you’d use with e-mail.

If you have a problem with this post, give me a call, and we’ll discuss it over a beer or a coffee.  I’ll even buy it for you.

Whenever anyone is scrutinized at high resolution, it seems, all their flaws are revealed. Take, for instance the recent story of the lawsuit plantif who claimed his car accident injuries were so bad that it was dramatically diminishing his lifestyle. An in-court examination of his Facebook page revealed current photos of the very activities (pool playing in his case) that he claimed were lost to him due to whiplash from the accidents.

This story is repeated time and again… I was recently asked to take down some pictures I’d posted on Facebook. The images themselves, while reasonably tame, were taken at a birthday party and consequently generated unwelcome questions and comments for the guest of honour by some co-workers. There are still more stories about lost job opportunities as potential employers find unflattering posts and pics of prospects through routine Googling. In one case of which I have personal knowledge, a job applicant negotiating a salary unknowingly lost thousands of dollars in yearly income when a manager read of the prospective employee’s enthusiasm for the job opportunity… On the applicant’s personal blog, no less.

This high resolution look at our second selves, the images and thoughts expressed of our ‘private’ lives are increasingly being publicized, logged, catalogued and recorded for our digital posterity (blog, by the way, is short for ‘Web log’).

This publicity of our other lives has had an unintended consequence… It is shifting and blurring our sense of what is deemed appropriate behavior. As a rather macro example, the past two and current sitting Presidents of the United States have all been shown to have engaged in some form of drug use, from a President that ‘didn’t inhale‘ a joint, to a President that very much inhaled cocaine, to the current President who reportedly continues to engage in one of today’s most heinous taboos: smoking cigarettes.

The high resolution images of who we are, while at times unflattering, seems to be making us more tolerant of our individual flaws and blemishes as society’s taboos are revealed as more and more common facts of today’s lifestyles.

With a single snap of a web-connected celphone camera, society’s closet-bound skeletons – and we’re all said to have them – are shown the light of day, and we’re being forced to reconcile them against our own, equally exposed pasts under the harsh, indiscriminate lens of today’s pervasive paparazzi.

There’s been a lot made of the Facebook TOS update that came out a few days ago, specifically the exclusion of a line that had assured users that all content they’d posted to their profile would be deleted if they chose to cancel their account with the service. The idea is that if I leave Facebook, all my personal information would be deleted forever, and to the service, it would be as though I’d never existed. This TOS change has new been retracted, and, one would assume, any technical changes have been rolled back.

What’s at issue is that comments on photos and statuses, messages, links and even “Likes” that are ascribed to other profiles would then be deleted, and those – while trivial – are still “User Generated Content” (strictly speaking) with all the rights and affordances that entails. Indeed, that’s been what Facebook is claiming is the reason for the omission of the line that grants them the right to hang on to those materials, but I think there’s something else going on…

User-Generated Content must be “Future Proof” in order to have continuing value to the medium that carries it. In the past few months, YouTube has added a HD option to many videos. I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the video shown on my iPhone, and I’m told that those watching YouTube on AppleTV have seen similar improvements. This is all due to the fact that YouTube has retained the ‘original’ video files that were uploaded by users, even going back to the first ones. Thus, when they made the partnership with Apple (for example), they could re-encode all the videos as assets in a format iPhones and Apple TV’s could handle (i.e. not flash).

FlickR does the same thing, and one would presume that MySpace and Facebook are doing the same with all the content that is contributed into their systems.

Here’s the question: If I link to a video to share it with my friends (who presumably enjoy it) and they share it with their friends (assuming the privacy setting is appropriate), and I delete my account, shouldn’t that link to the video survive? It’s essentially ‘content’ that I’ve generated, even though I may not be the author of the original content, it’s link and the associated context I place it in, plus any comments I’ve made on it are effectively my content.

Facebook’s next big challenge will be how to distribute all this user-generated content into new devices and applications. Already, I can’t watch Facebook videos on my iPhone or someone else’s blackberry, and moreover, accessing any of the existing social networking features through the set-top devices (Walled gardens like XBOX360, PS3, AppleTV, Tivo, etc) is impossible.

Being able to access social networks through off-web devices is a fundamental and critical strategic consideration if social networks are to continue to have relevance in the next 5000 days of the Internet, and in order to do that, ensuring content can survive into each of these other mediums in perpetuity is a critical legal hurdle.

The ratio between the amount they spend and the number of people who see each ad
The ratio between the number of people who see each ad and the number of people that take action based on the ad’s content

So far, the bottom-feeders have thus far stuck to malware, spam spim (instant and text messages), sporge and other nefarious but cheap shotgun approaches to marketing.

So perhaps I naively wanted to believe that my precious Facebook addiction would be immune to the unpleasantness of viral hoaxes and spam. I deleted my Friendster account for no greater reason than I despised the marked uptick in people I didn’t know who suddenly wanted to become my ‘friend’ because they ‘liked my pic.’ Myspace has had its share too, but for some reason, it seemed I had remarkably fewer ‘drive-by requests’ there than on Friendster.

But Facebook seems to have dodged the dodgy friend request bullet.Perhaps it IS widespread, but we never hear about it because invisible Facebook thought police nip it in the bud before most people get harassed. Whatever the reason there have been three incidents in the last week that make me think that Facebook’s spam-free gravy train is over.

First, a former co-worker posted a note to my wall that went something like this:

SOMEONE HAS A CRSH ON YOU!

WANNA FIND OUT WHO IT IS?

http://****************.blogspot.com

THIS IS A GREAT, ITS SO ACCURATE!

Despite early indications that I was being targeted for a set-up by my friend, a quick peek at her profile shows that I wasn’t the only one to get this message. Instead, virtually her entire contact list got their respective walls sprayed with this advert (for a dating site) and each one carried with it a unique address (for tracking purposes, I’m sure). Perhaps the most understanding and gracious response to these spam-posts was “looks like something’s got a hold of your account, huh?” indicating a (likely) application that is running wild (and violating their Facebook ToS, I’m sure).

A few days later, this arrived in my inbox from my teen-aged cousin:

Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record (sic) shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And (sic) on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages (sic) around to see if the
Members (sic) are active or not,If (sic) you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The (sic) user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then
send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerber (sic)

Obviously this didn’t come from Mark Zukerber, or even Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not dissimilar to the (relatively) harmless hoaxes I get in my inbox every so often incenting people to get their share of Microsoft’s billions, or participating in an experiment for Yahoo!. Meant as cruel, viral jokes on the uniformed, these juvenile excursions into social engineering are really just that – trivial exploits that are more time-wasting annoyances than actual threats.

But then something else happened. I got a friend request from someone I’d been to school with 20 years ago. We knew each other moderately well, had a few friends in common and I certainly recognized his name when the friend request popped up; So, I accepted. Within 12 hours (12!) This newly-found-again friend had posted an offer for free ringtones on my wall. I explored the possibilities in my mind: Could this be the real guy, or perhaps someone masquerading as a friend to gain entry to a social network so that he could spam it? Are people really that desperate, or am I really that paranoid?

In any case, I quickly un-friended him in order to stop any possible future wall posts.

Social networking is simply an optimization of our collective communities, and it is this optimization that the so-called social networking sites are taking most advantage of. As that optimization becomes increasingly automated, it’s only natural that the liquid-like nature of advertising media will find similar optimizations and efficiencies by capitalizing on the platform’s automation.

Facebook needs to quickly look at how this is happening and close off the trickle before it becomes a torrent. If there’s one thing that could really kill that user experience, it’s spam.

“A lot of our exposure to services and products is now going to be socially mediated. It’s going to be very hard to create a centralized broadcasting message about a brand or product… That’s where mass interpersonal persuasion comes in. Through the newsfeed and my social network, interesting stuff now comes to me; I don’t have to go searching for it.”

Fast Company then (rightly) asks if this will flow into the Long Tail philosophies that are popular right now. Fogg’s response is fundamentally correct, although perhaps not how he means it:

“As a brand, you can worry about all these micro niches and micro markets and the long tail, but I think at the end of the day you’re not going to have enough resources to do that. You have to focus on creating a spectacular product or service, and your market will find you.”

Whoa, wait a second… did I just read that in the future (according to Fogg), marketers are going to be out of a job? That if you build it (really, really well) they will come? Fortunately, not exactly:

“You don’t have to pre-define your market right out of the gate. As long as you watch what’s going on, you can adjust and go with what’s working.”

Phew. For a minute there, I saw long lines of well-manicured homeless folks trying to explain why the street is now REALLY where it’s at.

The really interesting piece to Fogg’s argument is that Facebook, or rather social networking in a broader sense, is going to democratize marketing. Thing is, I know a lot of young people for whom Facebook is yesterday’s news, and they are looking for a place that they can call their own (the early appeal of Facebook). Facebook has responded with “lists,” or the ability to create mini virtual Facebooks so you can keep your friends separate from uh, your parents. It’s too soon to tell if this is going to play out, but I suspect it won’t.

Here’s the thing. People (the necessary component to the social networking eco-sphere), don’t change that fast. Fogg is describing a wholesale shift from push to pull marketing. Anybody else remember Pointcast? How about lesser-known Backweb & Marimba (check out this 1999 Forbes article for some good irony).

At the end of the day, Google ads get closer to what Fogg is describing… While I agree that SaaS (Software as a Service) and grid computing are changing the landscape, and that products are, by their nature becoming iterative (think iPod, salesforce.com, and the still-in-beta GMail), I think that’s a far cry from the marketing paradigm shifting so dramatically. Besides, the concept of engagement is just catching on…

Why Facebook Is Even Bigger than You Think | Fast Company