Why you should delete your Facebook account (and why I wish I could delete mine)
It may be piling on, but I can’t be quiet about Facebook anymore. I don’t want to be there and if I could, I’d have been gone ages ago. But if you can get out, I suggest you do so now…before it’s too late.
Let’s break it down:
Back in the beginning, Facebook seemed so…friendly. It was an exclusive club, open only to students. And it felt so much cleaner than the MySpace cesspool. Everyone was eager to join Facebook, and as soon as Zuckerberg opened the doors, millions streamed in. Now Facebook is the biggest, baddest social network on the block…a nation of 350 million unto itself. Problem is, this isn’t just a social network of your friends, and you aren’t just sharing your photos, antics, likes and dislikes and your bathroom habits with your buddies. You’re sharing them with Facebook itself. And Facebook isn’t laughing with you or consoling you; it’s making money off of you.
We knew that, didn’t we? I mean, Facebook is a business. But it really hasn’t been apparent to most of us just how Facebook was going to make money outside apps and ads. In plain English: Zuckerberg is selling access to your “private” information to other companies. There’s no “stupid” or “blind” ad network serving up ads. Facebook is a recon mission; you are the target. It’s a brilliantly executed social engineering plan, wherein Facebook earns your trust, gets you to tell all your dirty secrets, and then sells you out. So…basically the Linda Tripp of social media platforms.
That should scare the crap out of you. Especially given Zuckerberg’s track record with private information.
On Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, he lists his personal interests as “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.” That all sounds pretty good, right? But how open is Zuckerberg? Let’s just say his profile updates are generally about his company, and he has a total of 40 pictures uploaded on his account. He wants you to share things that he won’t. That says a lot to me.
I count myself lucky that I’ve never been a fan of oversharing. My own Facebook account has precious little on it…a couple of pictures, a few updates, a sparse bio…and that’s how I wanted it from the beginning. I can’t trust a service that wants too much access to my life and, frankly, neither to the hundreds of “friends” one can accumulate on Facebook in a short period of time. But it only takes five minutes browsing lamebook.com to realize there are a bajillion Facebook users who have no problem posting anything and everything they can think of. And as the entire web becomes a Facebook application, even more of your information is going to be stored in the Facebook brain.
Drop the Kool-Aid and run.
Facebook is like the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. That’s because the second you upload or post anything, Facebook owns it. And now Facebook’s Open Graph API means Facebook even owns your online habits. I’ve been stunned over the past few weeks to hear folks talk about leaving Facebook, deleting all their embarrassing pictures and disabling their accounts. But disabling and deleting are not the same thing. If you’ve disabled your account, you can still be tagged in photos and notes, you still get update e-mails and if you log back in at any time, it’s like you never left. If you want to delete your account, instructions are here.
The real zombie uprising is online (or, How you can get more out of Twitter)
By the time you read this, I’m hoping to have fewer Twitter followers.
A couple of weeks ago I pointed you over to Atomic Tango, and Freddy’s wonderful tongue-in-cheek post about scoring more Twitter followers. If you haven’t read it yet, do so. It’s one of the truest, funniest and most interesting things I’ve ever read about Twitter.
It was funny at the time, and it made sense, but I wanted to put Freddy to the test. See, his contention is that you score more Twitter followers by doing slimy little things…and really, you do them to accomplish one slimy big thing — amass scores of fake Twitter followers so you can, well, brag about how many Twitter followers you have. And then get more Twitter followers.
Step one, according to Freddy: Keywords. Use enough of the right ones, and you draw the attention of Twitter zombies and spammers. The right keywords? Things like “MLM,” “network marketing,” “downline,” and “wealth.” And you can throw in SEO, SMM, SEM and any other buzzword used by the slimiest spammers on the net.
So I tried it out. I posted one simple tweet, packing it with keywords. I was in my office at the time, it was the end of the day, and I was headed home. Between posting that tweet and getting into my car, I gained seven new followers. On the drive home, I gained three more. Over the next couple of days, I posted five more tweets, packing each with keywords. I’ll add here that none of the tweets could have been construed as serious. In fact, I was brazen about calling out “my zombie friends” to make sure the follow process was automated. In short order I picked up about 60 new followers. I say “about” because I screwed up at first, and didn’t follow the zombies back. Those I didn’t follow dumped me within 24 hours. Lesson learned.
Those I did follow sent me automated direct messages almost immediately, offering to sell something. Awesome.
Then I realized what I had done. I ruined Twitter.
Now my stream is polluted with SEO experts, get-rich-quick schemes, automated tweets about blog posts from months ago and lots of ways I can use the Law of Attraction to make my life better. I don’t need Twitter for that; I already have an e-mail account.
Before this little experiment, Twitter was a pretty good news feed. I follow news outlets, tech journalists, local people and folks I consider experts (not people who call themselves experts) in fields that interest me. Sure, I’ve built a couple of lists to pull them from the haystack I created, but that just didn’t work for me.
So now I’m going to tell you the real secret of Twitter: Follower counts don’t mean anything. Nothing.?The only folks who have a lot of followers are celebrities and liars. That’s it. Why? Because everyone on Twitter believes they’re a leader; nobody wants to be a follower. We’re obsessed with our own follower counts because, well, what’s the sense in posting anything at all if there are only three people listening?
The sense is here: If you use the methods above and score 97 more followers than the three you used to have, there are still only three people listening. Zombies can’t hear you and won’t respond.
Want to get the most out of Twitter? Stop thinking about who’s following you and start concentrating on who you follow. There are brilliant people (like Freddy) posting brilliant things. And don’t worry about whether they’re following you back; follow them because you’re interested.
You get the most out of Twitter not by talking, but by listening. And if you’ve got engaging content to put up, do it. Talk to your followers. Respond to those you follow. Have a conversation. But don’t do any of it for the numbers. That’s the secret.
So…
I’m headed over to my Twitter account. And I’m unfollowing all the spammers, zombies and slimeballs.
I’m better company than that.
Twitter: Where nobody is really *just* a follower
In a matter of a couple of weeks, Conan O’Brien has managed to cause a huge stir, just by signing up for a Twitter account. He’s already up to 670,000 followers, and doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
I can understand why he’s got so many followers; the guy’s already got fans, and they’re dying to know where he’s going to end up. The question is, does Conan actually use Twitter? I’m gonna go ahead and say no. Why? Because he only follows one person. Just one. I find it doubtful that Conan takes a look at his Twitter feed just to see updates from Sarah Killen (no offense, Sarah).
Perhaps he logs in and takes a look at trending topics. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that he searches for Conan references. But he’s certainly not using Twitter to discuss anything. He’s not engaged in it; he’s just posting little nuggets when he feels like it.
That’s fine, if you’re Conan O’Brien. Or Oprah. Or even Kevin Rose. But what about the rest of us?
Do you feel like you’re tweeting into a void? Do you post questions that don’t get answers? Do you respond to people and never hear back?
That’s okay. Me too.
I’m by no means a Twitter rock star. I have a couple hundred followers, and generally I follow back. That’s just my MO. I’m always hopeful that if you’re following me, we’ll share some common interests, so I’ll give you a shot. Sometimes I look at your timeline first. If it’s filled with porn or inane comments about your lunch, I’m probably going to take a pass. I try to be “social.” I’ll respond when I’m inclined. Unless I get super busy I skim my entire timeline every day. But what I’ve noticed is there are literally a handful of people who will actually “converse” with me. Some of them I know in real life; some only through Twitter. And here’s the thing: The more followers/followees a person has, the less likely they are to respond to you.
Duh, right? Of course, they just might not see your response. They’re popular! They follow a lot of people! They probably have so many responses they couldn’t possibly get to yours too!
Nah. Look, it’s easy enough to get all your @s. And if you aren’t responding, what are you doing?
Fake following. It’s impossible to follow 10,000 people on Twitter. Impossible. It’s not only impossible, but impractical. If you were to try it wouldn’t be fun.
The biggest perpetrators of fake following are “social media experts” and salespeople (sometimes — often — they’re the same). They’re the ones telling you how to get 10,000 followers in two weeks. They’re the ones telling you to hire them to boost your social media presence, because hey!, they’ve got a LOT of followers!
What they count on is that you won’t see how many people they’re following. And that number is usually astronomical, because they’re the types who randomly follow 100 or 1000 people at a time and just see how many followbacks they get. And then they mistake their follower numbers as “authority” or “influence,” which means they can spam you to death with their blog posts — or just use your status as a follower to prove their own popularity.
Here’s my advice: Be careful out there. Don’t ruin your own Twitter experience by getting caught up in the numbers game. It’s not really about how many people are following you, but about how many people care about what you have to say. It’s not about how many people you follow, but how many people say things that interest you. Keep it legit, and everything will fall into place.
Some great articles on this point:
Hypocritical Mass: The Big Lie About Twitter
Twitter Zombies
Words of, uh wisdom: How to score more Twitter followers
And to keep up with me, subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter. Lol.
Part II: Why HR can’t fix your crappy employees, either
You may have seen my post on why blocking access to social networking sites (or even the Internet as a whole) won’t make your employees more productive. But every company attacks its fear of social media with the same two swords: IT and HR.
If there are reasons why IT can’t wholesale ban certain sites or block Internet access for employees (because, say, the company actually uses Twitter and Facebook, or Internet access is an essential part of the job), the next move is always the Human Resources department. Cuz you need a policy.
You need a policy to keep your employees from tarnishing your good name on Facebook. You need to keep them from Twittering the company’s dirty little secrets — like your habit of counting every minute they waste while you take 90-minute lunches and chat on the phone to your aunt in Idaho. You need to keep them from embarrassing the company with pictures of the boss’s drunken antics at the office mixer, or embarrassing the company by posting pictures of themselves in private but unbecoming situations.
You do need that policy, don’t you?
Drop the task force and back away from the case law.
You don’t really need a policy. In fact, a policy probably doesn’t make all that much sense. If you’ve got an ethics policy or a code of conduct, anything an employee can do on Twitter is likely covered. Giving away trade secrets, bad-mouthing company policies or execs, engaging in illegal activity…those things should already be covered. If they aren’t, you’ve got bigger problems than Twitter.
If an employee ran down the street in a drunken stupor cursing out your CEO, would he have a job the next day? Probably not. Same rule applies to behavior on social media sites.
So how do you keep employees from bad-mouthing the company on their blogs or Facebook? Short answer? You can’t. The truth is, rules almost never stop a person from doing what they’re set on doing — especially if they’re worked up enough about an issue. Murder is illegal, but people get killed every day. You can make a policy against complaining about the company online, but all that policy allows you to do is fire the employee. And you know what? They’ve already said what they were going to say, and they’ll say a lot more when they don’t work for you anymore.
Instead of a policy prohibiting certain behaviors, consider educating your employees about why certain activities aren’t just bad for the company, but bad for them as individuals as well. Show them how hiring decisions are made and how many employers now search through Twitter and Facebook for profiles of job applicants. Make sure they know that oversharing is dangerous for their well-being — not just yours.
It’s a scary world out there. And it’s certainly scary to think a disgruntled employee could spew hate about your company to thousands of people at any given time. But as I’ve said before, hire people you trust. Treat them like adults. Give them the trust they deserve. Instead of bashing you publicly, they’re likely to start praising you. And there’s no better endorsement than one that’s sincere.
Why IT can’t solve your employee problem
We’ve got to keep our employees from Facebooking and Twittering all day, don’t we? They waste valuable work time on social networking sites — and we are paying them for it, dammit! Somebody better call IT. Have them block Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube…and throw in Pandora while you’re at it; nobody needs music at work.
These sentiments are floating around in office buildings all across our fair land.
Stop. Take a breath.
I’m going to let you in on a couple of secrets — secrets that will save you valuable time and money you’re about to spend drafting policies, convening committees and, ultimately, seeking out new employees. The secret?
You have a management problem — not an Internet problem.
Do your employees spend too much time online? Are they tweeting when they should be working? Are they posting pictures from last weekend’s drunken binge on Facebook instead of filing TPS reports? That’s not the Internet’s fault; it’s their fault. And it’s your fault.
Management loves that IT departments can use magic to block certain websites because it solves the problem immediately, right? If the employee can’t get to Facebook, they won’t waste all their time on Facebook. But I’ve been on two sides of the issue — as a manager and an IT professional — and I can tell you that blocking websites or restricting employee access to the Internet will not make them more productive. It will, however, make them find more creative ways to waste their time and your money.
Maybe they’ll chat with coworkers. Maybe they’ll make personal phone calls or text message their friends. Maybe they’ll read magazines or take excessively long lunch breaks. If they’re poor employees, the lack of Internet won’t make them any better.
Even worse, an overly restrictive Internet policy could make your better employees less productive. Some studies suggest that employees who take regular breaks to surf the net or check their e-mail are more productive than those who don’t. Why? Because they get a mental break and can come back to their work refreshed and ready to take on the task at full speed. Taking breaks helps alleviate mental fatigue, and your best workers will still get the job done.
So what do you do about the bad eggs? How do you keep them off Facebook?
Fire them.
If they’ll waste your time one way, they’ll waste it another. You don’t need a social media policy or a restrictive IT policy. You shouldn’t have to force your employees to work hard. Just hire the right people, keep them busy and happy, and the rest will take care of itself.
Treat your employees like adults. Trust them to make the right choices. If you don’t trust them, why do they work for you in the first place?