Bad Things About Social Networking

Hook ups and old lovers

Talk to just about anyone these days and they have an opinion about social networking. This past summer my mother came to visit me and I mentioned that I was on Facebook and she said she would never join Facebook because she was afraid of the ramifications. She had heard that some marriages had been ruined because a spouse had re-aquainted with a former lover. I am sure that it can and does happen, but in my opinion, that is only when the two people involved make it so. It is not any different than running into an old lover at the local grocery store. It takes two people to promulgate a relationship, and one of those two people can always say, I am not interested in anything more than being a platonic friend on Facebook.

Sometimes there are good things that happen. For example, one couple I know met through an AOL chat room. She was dissatisfied with her marriage and he was single and looking for a future wife. He went to meet her after she agreed to divorce her husband, and the two of them packed her stuff in his truck while the ex waved them off and wished them well. They are now married about ten years and have four children.

Relationship bullying

I know of another hateful situation where a man put disturbing photos of a sexual nature on his wife's webpage after she had died. The deceased teenager's niece found the photos on her MySpace social network page and it was devastating to her and the entire family. It took several painful days to get the website publisher/owner to remove the material. It was a terrible case of cyber-bullying. But bullying happens in real life too. Here is one East Longmeadow School's way of teaching kids bullying is not acceptable.

Plagarism

Do you remember writing a book or a paper for school and using note cards to develop an outline and details for your work? Today it is very easy to steal someone else's work on the internet but it is illegal and immoral. For those fighting the propriety rights battle, you may find Yahoo writer Angie Mohr's blog site helpful, particularly her post Waging Wars against plagiarism.

Target Marketing

If you have a business account on Twitter, automatically friending someone who friends who, and then who puts up porn, will do your business site no favors. Better to carefully select those that you follow when your image is imperative to your business branding. However, there are a million and one tools you can use to find new potential contacts. One tool I find useful is GoTwitr http://bit.ly/d03ZGn Grow your Twitter Community with the Twitter Referral Service

Be careful what you post to a social network site because it may come back to haunt you, as someone in my hometown recently learned. Inside Business reports the Superintendent of the Windsor Locks Public Schools decided to send a private message to his friends and family on Face book about a disciplinary situation he was faced with at work. I bet he didn't think he would lose his $150K job. His postings contained the following:

• He explained that his first day on the job involved "counseling an administrator to retire or face termination," attaching a smiley face emoticon to the end of his post; and
• He boasted that he slept until 10 a.m. on his first day, and it would be "the best job ever" if that happened every day. (Inside Business Reports)

This past weekend, my uncle was in town and we were talking about some of the data analysis that is going on behind the scenes. Uncle (who is a semi-retired software engineer) was upset that marketing companies were taking in all kinds of information about a user and targeting marketing campaigns based upon their usage, and other demographics.

As someone who has hated watching television ads that have no interest to me, or skimmed over ads in magazines, journals and newspapers, I personally don't mind targeted advertising. If you have to sell to me, might as well pitch me on something I care about.

From a business person's perspective, the new targeting campaigns offered by sites such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads mark the beginnings of a new era in managing and analyzing marketing leads and being able to track in detail to capital and overhead costs.

For those that want to expand their social media and business networks, there are many good things about joining social media but there are some risks as well. Remember to stay informed and educated as if you were out on the streets. Feel free to use the comment section to suggest other helpful tools to stay secure on the net.

Resources:

http://www.insidebiz.com/blogs/kaufman-canoles/social-networking-strikes-again

If you want the holy grail of privacy setting suggestions for Facebook, see here

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