How Not to Be a Jerk in Facebook

Back in the Facebook hey-day of 2006 I remember reading an article on C|Net which laid out the data retention policies of Facebook, which essentially stated that if you wish to cancel your account you must contact Facebook directly.

I remember not paying this too much attention until a friend of mine who had deleted they profile months earlier to go traveling returned and signed up again. Instantly all their personal photos, friends, and wall comments returned – just as though they had never left. After hearing this, and stories from people that they were being befriended by strangers or people they just met once I decided that I wouldn’t open a Facebook account, since, as my thought process at the title would have determined “facebook is for idiots & jerks” – which was essentially social suicide seeing as at the time I was a 20 year old college student.

Fast forward to 2008. I still have never opened a Facebook account – partly to prove my friends wrong who said I would cave, haha – but because services like Friendfeed and Twitter have established themselves in the niche that I would have used Facebook for…communication, rather then putting your whole life on display. Which is fairly hypocritical of me to saying, seeing as all tweets (unless you make your profile private) are open to the general public. Unlike Facebook, which at least makes you sign up!

Signed up for Facebook a few weeks ago, and was genuinely surprised by its power and am loving it. Been on LinkedIn for a couple of years. I have taken the same approach as Julie Baker – Facebook for friends, no work colleagues or assoociations at all, and LinkedIn for the professional stuff. Can’t yet imagine having all this stuff in one place.

That said, I am feeling a distinct and increasing pressure to meld the two. Is it possible to keep your work life and your social life apart? It would be a lot easier…

Whilst it makes no sense to me that people reading my blog would want to see pictures of me diving, out in London or at my nephew’s birthday party, it would appear that those elements are humanising and people do want to see them. I guess I am only starting (3 months in!) to find my own voice online and explore what I’m comfortable with.

One guys dumb “seminar” is another guy’s bread and butter. i understand your stance on getting random invites to attend seminars as well as install apps, however, some people use FB as a social tool. others use FB as a biz tool. and then others use it as a combo. the happy medium is out there….somewhere….

good article!

@karim – but let me ask you this: if I had no prior business experience with that guy, do you think his cold pitch was a good one? Do you think he inspired me to attend just by dumping that in my inbox?

My point is that Facebook isn’t a direct marketing mass mailing campaign.

Chris,
I recently took over my company’s facebook account, and am in a quandry about how I should be utilizing it. I decided to friend request all my personal contacts, and many of them accepted, but I really want to use it for business, and my “friends” aren’t a part of that. I have no trouble with Myspace, having a business and personal page respectively, but fb seems a bit harder to manage. I have not joined a lot of business groups, maybe that should be my next step towards building business contacts. I don’t want to be a jerk, so thanks for your post.

Chris,
I recently took over my company’s facebook account, and am in a quandry about how I should be utilizing it. I decided to friend request all my personal contacts, and many of them accepted, but I really want to use it for business, and my “friends” aren’t a part of that. I have no trouble with Myspace, having a business and personal page respectively, but fb seems a bit harder to manage. I have not joined a lot of business groups, maybe that should be my next step towards building business contacts. I don’t want to be a jerk, so thanks for your post.

@Julie Baker: rock on! It is fine to have a dividing line between work and play. The alternative is Blackberries on the beach — some want to live like that but many do not. You can decide how to present yourself, and people who are “expecting” you to be more professional or conversely more friendly can be given the message that they are looking in the wrong place. If someone phones me at nine a.m. they are likely to get a different response than if they call at nine p.m.

Thank you Chris. As always, you are insightful + provocative (in a thoughtful way :) in your observations.

I have come to the same conclusion as @JulieBaker and have shut off my twitter stream flowing into Facebook. Many friends in FB don’t need to see my day long posts that mostly related to business.

However, I am very intrigued to see how the rollout of Facebook Connect identity authentication changes my thinking. I have set up a client’s blog to incorporate photos that are posted on Facebook as a first step to using this integration. The particular business will benefit from the communications / community building expected to be provided by FB Connect.

Waiting for it to come out of beta.

Timely & helpful for me as I get ready to set up the FB account for my campus, after having one for myself for a while first. I’m wrestling with how broadly I invite people to join it so we don’t come across as a jerk while still reaching people who will welcome an invitation they wouldn’t have sought out. That’s the balance everyone struggles with, seminar presenters included.

First, though, I have to find out who set up a page already and ask FB nicely to give it to the communications dept, since we’re responsible for this kind of thing. (I understand they’ll do that; tell me if I’m going to have a problem!)

For myself, I have my Twitter stream set to update FB because there’s no way I’d have the time to keep both current, and if you don’t there’s no point in using either. I’ll do the same for the campus group page. In Twitter I’m going to search with roughly the same criteria I use for FB, follow people who have my campus or my city in their profile so they become aware of our account, and tweet regularly so our personality gets out there.

Interesting effect of the Twitter feed is that a professional communications colleague/friend who’s on my FB page noticed on the day that I was tweeting highlights from an event–she thought it was great. She never would have seen them in Twitter because she’s not there yet.

I thought about keeping parts of my life separate as does JulieBaker, but I just can’t. A lot of my volunteer and civic efforts build on my community relations role for my employer. I figure as long as I’m authentic and honest, I yam who I yam.

I don’t friend anyone I don’t want to have reading something about taking my kids to see the pumpkin cannon, or knowing about my politics. (For that matter, my PR colleague who liked the tweets is the only one posting pro-Sarah Palin stuff–a touch of vertigo-inducing cognitive dissonance when I look at her update on my page, and she must feel the same.)

Recognizing that it’s far too late, I just wish they hadn’t Al Haig-ed the language by making “friend” into a verb…

@BarbChamberlain

I agree with the person who said that poking is creepy. There is a guy on facebook who keeps poking me. What does that mean? Is he virtually poking me like the Pillsbury dough boy? Seriously? Why?! Does he think that poking me will make me want to join his facebook group or buy his product?!

Amen to this! I just posted a blog over the weekend about the five no-no’s for marketing through online communities. You may not believe this, but a guy joined the community I managed and uploaded 750 images of wristwatches. I kid you not!
It was his entire catalog, and he posted it very shortly after creating a profile. Needless to say what happened to him. Can you say, Scarlet letter “S?” S-P-A-M. I am all about telling people NOT to do that. this guy branded himself for life, and not in a very good way.

Great tips, Chris. I have debated with changing my Facebook photo (it is my headshot I use for business!) as I have both business and personal contacts that I interact with through this site. I don’t appreciate the “application spamming”, as I don’t want to install all those apps on my account.

I do encourage my social media marketing students to create a Facebook account and use it for class. I set up a discussion group for the class to use, which is slowly picking up pace but is a great place for dialog!

The main reason I have them create a profile there is so they can understand how it works. How can we think about building relationships with our customers via social networking sites if we don’t use them ourselves? I believe it is important to be part of the customer conversation wherever they are. If it is Facebook, great! Bring it on. :)

I agree, I hate the spamming and usually delete the person as a friend. I love the birthday tool cause I never remember birthdays and this helps save me. I don’t like or understand the poking function and it’s usually a creepy process.

Craig
http://www.budgetpulse.com

I try not to totally indiscriminately join groups so I won’t have to unjoin them, but the vast vast majority I don’t participate in – they’re more a way for me to say hey I belong to this group. Even one group I made for my college choir’s alumni functions in this way most of the time (though we’ve put up some pictures we all found to share amongst our selves) its simply a way to easily say “I’m a member of this group or this interest outside of Facebook” For that matter the only groups I’ve posted on at ALL are closed groups of people I know from real life.

So no I don’t think you need to unjoin groups you’re not active in unless you don’t see any point to it at all…

Great post, Chris. Love the fact that you mention that people should actually put up a human picture! I’d take it one step further — don’t put up a stinkin’ URL next to your human picture. Facebook is supposed to be a networking tool foremost. Adding URLs to your profile is just in poor taste. Sadly, I know some marketers who do that, and it makes me wonder if they’re really “marketers” or spammers.

One issue I have with facebook is that it has so many features that most people don’t know how to use it. For instance, you find an old friend, make Friends, send a note or say something on their Wall. Then you hear nothing back from them. Why? Because the interface is so confusing. Are you looking at your page or someone else’s? They really need to get page customization up to speed there, so we can tell the pages apart. But the interface will still be confusing.

I HOPE facebook does NOT become a haven for business marketing. How insipid and annoying is that? That’ll kill it faster than you can type myspace. What is it with marketers that they think such things will work for them? The ads on facebook are bad enough. They’ve already ruined cable. Back when Pay TV was first touted, it was supposed to be commercial free. Now they cram it with commercials AND you pay for it, plus they track everything you watch, commercials included. That plus all the snooping that goes on with your credit/debit cards and at the supermarket. Marketers are their own worse enemy, they annoy the heck out of people, but we civilians are losing the battle against them.

I just wrote a giant comment here relating to this but then realized that I went off on my own tangent and decided it was better left for a blog post of my own in the near future.

Instead, I’m bringing myself back to the original questions at hand. I agree with @Lolly, who said “if you’re going to invite me to an event, at least make sure it’s in my own country.”

This past week I got the same invite 5+ times from a former college classmate who now lives in England, and he’s in some drama group there. Good for him, I thought, but 1) I’m across the pond, and 2) He barely said a word to me in the classes we had together, I sincerely doubt he wants me to support his acting club THAT much. If I get the invite again, I’m deleting him and telling him good luck and break a leg with the spamming.

In general, I only add people on Facebook that I either know in real life, have met online via Twitter, or know are in the same online “circles” as me. I got a friend request yesterday from a 17 y/o girl I had never heard of that lived in a local metropolis, went to her profile looking for clues as to know I might know her, and saw that she had 2000+ “friends.” Obviously, I denied her request and am not going to be another number in her popularity collection. I graduated from high school longer ago than I’d like to admit, and I’m not about to jump back into that arena.

Personal v. professional? Like it or not, the line will always be blurred no matter how hard you try to separate them. Knowing this, I don’t bother trying. I’m just myself and that’s all I know how to be. If people in my personal circle don’t want to know about what I’m doing say, in the local chamber of commerce, they can still enjoy looking at pictures of my cats. If chamber members don’t want to look at my cats, tough. They don’t have to, and I’m still active in their circles doing things with them online and off.

I think the bottom line is that people need to stop trying to separate their two “lives” and just accept the fact that the two will always overlap in some capacity. Instead of separating personal/professional, think about how you can use the tool (and yes, Facebook is a tool) to propagate both.

(Okay, so that ended up being a giant comment probably better suited for its own post, too. Whoops.)

Hi Chris

you information is very helpful as usually. But the funniest thing is that FB spammer guy has been spamming me too. I am think about un friend him. What do think?

Giovanna Garcia

Not sure how much I can add after 50 very thoughtful comments, but here’s my take on the spammy Facebook activity that I’ve been the victim of.

Social networking is like a cocktail party. Think about it: you’re at a party, quietly talking with a circle of 5 friends or so, when suddenly, the door bursts open, a loud guy comes in and skirts around the room handing out his business card to everyone, and then leaves.

Not much of a meaningful interaction, is it? Have you created an impression? You bet. But is it a lasting and valuable impression. No way.

Social networks are no different. Use some common sense.

Thank you for echoing my sentiments! I’ve got a lot of classmates there dating up to preschool, bu if we don’t chat regularly, don’t start hitting me up for special online favors and don’t invite me to every application you want to try just for the heck of it.