Facebook Throws off iFart Creator: Am I Next?

The following thought process began as a comment on Scoble’s blog, where I got to thinking about the fact that I have 800 Facebook friends and actually have met them all either virtually or in person, or know of them through a friend and can tell you something about them. And since I’m not a college kid, many of my “real” friends haven’t gotten to FB yet, but are coming to it every day. Just yesterday I helped my neighbor across the street open an account, and I started off by telling her “go ahead and friend me, and I’ll friend you back.” This was just the neighborly thing to do for a woman I’ve known for about 35 years. But eventually I will get to the friend limit, and I may be accused, like Joel, of being a spammer.

There is a thin line between “getting the word out,” “networking,”
“online marketing,” and “spam.” One person’s online marketing may be another person’s spam, and that’s the problem with Facebook. But it’s the problem with every social networking site as we figure out how to re-live our lives in this new era of transparency. Some people on LinkedIn have 30,000 contacts, and LinkedIn finally decided to cap them where they are.

Even if you are careful to offer only useful information to people who have opted to be your “friend,” it’s easy to violate unwritten conventions. It’s worse if you follow back the people who follow you on Twitter, or friend people on Facebook. I like to meet new people online, so I am always having the problem of inadvertently friending a spammer whom I later have to block or delete. One day that spammer may be me, however unintentionally.

This new world is going to be tricky for journalists, who want to do a better job by making themselves available to sources, or who want a personal life in addition to their professional life. It is also going to be tricky for incubators like me, who communicate things their companies are doing for a variety of reasons. In my other role, advocate for social change, it’s also tricky. And It will certainly be tricky for PR people, and for internet marketers.

We are in an age of transition, and the rules are hard to know and even harder to follow. Although those of us who were early into social media keep advising people to listen before they jump in, so they can at least sense what the boundaries are, people on various platforms (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube) are always violating conventions they didn’t know existed.

A while back, Social Media Club tried to do a “best practices” initiative, but I think the proliferation of platforms and the inability of the members to agree on what the best practices might be, defeated us. It is going to take a while for those practices to evolve, and in the mean time, I think Facebook should just answer its emails individually and quickly, take each one seriously, and act on a case-by-case basis. I refer you back to Robert’s idea of the jail for Facebook offenders, in which your account isn’t disabled, but everyone knows you have done SOMETHING wrong. It’s a pretty good solution for now.

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