If Alexander Graham Bell were alive today, do you suppose he’d call himself a Telephone Guru? Probably not. In fact, no one does. Except maybe this guy.

Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone certainly don’t call themselves Social Media Gurus (though, they probably could without much resistance).

How many years of analyzing different forms of media does it take to become a Media Expert? How long do you need to study people and social situations before you become a Social Expert? So why does it only take a Twitter account and a merging of those two words to earn people’s trust and the ability to steal their money?

I’ve never met a Social Media Expert, though I’ve met several people who claim to be. I’ve certainly met people who are knowledgeable about certain platforms. But only rarely someone who was so knowledgeable on a specific platform that they should be called “an expert”.

Having taught weekly classes on social media tools, I can safely say that I am not an expert, either. What I can say is this: beware the Guru. Challenge their credentials at every turn, because it takes some serious effort to learn enough to even *teach* these tools.

Clear results speak for themselves; truly talented social media practitioners rarely have to (their audience does it for them).

Person A is passionate about Widgets and spends a few years making contacts and friends in the Widget industry.

Person B joins Facebook in College and makes a ton of casual friends over a few years.

Both become Social Media Experts and start selling their services (and their friends’ attention) to the highest bidder. Person A does so with social bookmarking, promoting Widget- or Widget-service-businesses to their contacts/friends in their network. Person B promotes every client Facebook page to their Facebook friends (some who, out of some perverted sense of loyalty may become fans).

Who is the bigger douchebag? Are either really using social media as intended?

My answer: BOTH are equally douchebaggish and BOTH are abusing social media.

You can’t assume your friends (business or otherwise) have opted-in to your marketing jackassery. Do you really want your friendship to be self-selecting and end as easy as an unsubscribe? Is your friends’ attention to your client’s BS marketing techniques all that matters to you? Is that why you’re using social media?

Douchebag marketing tactics are ultimately self-defeating and short-lived.

I’ve been guilty of them, but I think there’s hope. You can recover. I’ve done it by separating out WTF!? Marketing’s client endeavors to WTF!? Marketing’s Facebook page (a work in progress). But you won’t see stuff about clients in my Facebook stream (an error so grievous it occurred only once).

Why would you trust a “social media expert” who is willing to sell out their friends to the highest bidder?

Well, someone thought about that faster than I could – and here’s the result:

I built the slides completely in Keynote – giving PowerPoint the snub.  I’ve been having a lot of issues with all Microsoft products and not being able to handle things that are copied and pasted – Keynote doesn’t seem to have that issue.  It seemed to work out a lot better, but there are some quirks that I don’t know how to remedy yet – like how to turn off bullet points.

The presentation itself was a lot of fun – a lot of great people there, willing to learn and ask lots of questions.  I’m hoping to teach the Twitter class again, but not sure when I’ll do repeat classes.  I was thinking the presentation itself would take up only about 15 minutes and the rest would be for discussion.  I was way wrong – the whole presentation took 45 minutes.  Had some great feedback, too:

“Nick has a unique gift for knowing WAY more than you do, yet teaching you generously without making you feel like a complete idiot. And you leave with some knowledge and some confidence in a very short time.”

“Valuable information for beginners and beyond, at a great price! I learned a lot and left feeling rather inspired, and confident enough to attack some issues I needed to conquer to make Twitter more useful. Thanks!”

I’ll definitely have some adjusting to do get ready for $1 101 on Facebook next week.

All in all, I would call it a victory.  Here’s the slides:

“FACEBOOK has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures WITHOUT your permission.”

After checking on Snopes, I looked toward the official Facebook blog.  Sure enough, they have posted a note debunking this rumor.  Friday I wrote a post on Psychotic Resumes on how to lock down your Facebook profile.  I didn’t cover how Facebook actually uses photos, which, from that blog post has been described:

“How We Use Photos

We’ve run advertisements from our own advertising system for more than a year that let your friends know if you have a direct connection with a product or service, in the same way that your friends learn through your News Feed if you’re connected with another friend or an organization’s Facebook Page. For example, if one of your friends becomes a fan of a Page, you may see an ad, like the one below, with your friend’s profile photo that indicates the action that friend has taken.”

What this means is that if you fan a page or something like that – your picture and name might appear to your other friends showing that you’re a fan.  You can turn this off (if you’re REALLY paranoid) by going to Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall.  Then click on the “Facebook Ads” tab.  Mine is currently set to “Friends Only”, but you can set it to “No One.”  You might have more options depending on how your security settings are set, but… this is a pretty innocuous use of your info.

Facebook might have screwed up when it came to their last TOS change, but this time – it’s completely made up.

The economy sucks and employers are just looking for excuses to trim the fat.  Especially true if that fat isn’t attached the company yet.  One of the fastest ways to be rejected from a new job or to be fired from your current job is to leak sensitive or objectionable information on your Facebook profile.

Never mind that social media spying is unethical in its own right, no, no, it rests squarely on our shoulders to carry the burden of witless and mistrusting employers.

But because humans are human regardless of what color tie we wear to work or just how nice we look in that suit, we’re all going to post something stupid to Facebook sometime.  Don’t let the corporate fat cats catch you at it.  Put the lock-down on your Facebook this instant.

Step One – Make a List

Now, the typical Facebook user has three groups of people as “friends”.  You have your real friends, the ones who would have your back even against a hoard of Zombie Elmos.  These need no privacy settings and should be your “base group” of friends.  Then you have those jackasses you met once at a party and friended you for the +1 friend stat… or maybe your not-so-nice family members fall into this category.  Then you have everyone else – the outside world or people you know from that concert back when weed was still kinda illegal everywhere.

The latter two groups of friends should be put in their own “list”.  Besides giving you a great way to arbitrarily rank your friends, lists also give you great privacy benefits on Facebook.  You create one by clicking on the “Home” page – the one with the master news feed from all over Facebook.  Then find your “News Feed” sidebar, here:

Click on “More” and at the bottom of the list, just above “Less” you’ll see “Create New List”.  Click on this, it pops up a window asking you who you want to add to this list and what you want to call the list.

Once you’ve sorted out all your friends, you can start limiting what they (and the list they belong to) can see.  First, find this menu option on the toolbar (it’s under Settings next to Logout and Search at the top of the page):

Once you click on this, the Privacy Overview page appears with four options (not to mention, the ever-useful “Block List” – put someone on that, and it’s like you never existed):

Profile is where you should go first.  Click on that and you’ll see each part of your profile has an individual privacy setting (there are two pages).  I have ALL of mine set to “Friends Only”.

What this privacy setting says is “Only my Friends can see my Basic Info section (name, school, etc) – and the people on my Limited Profile list can’t see it.”

If you click on “Edit Custom Settings”, you can change things up a bit, in case you want something harmless to be visible:

You have a lot of freedom here – you can have anyone on Facebook able to access this portion of your profile, Friends of Friends (not necessarily your friends), Friends Only, or Networks. For example, say you just moved from Denver to Chicago, you can add the Chicago network to your profile and make your basic info available to THAT network only and exclude the Denver network.  Useful for screening out “objectionable” bits and pieces if your school or employer has a network.

You can also specifically exclude certain lists (like the ones you just created) OR people from seeing that aspect of your profile.  However, combinations can be tricky.  For example, in order for someone to stop seeing your Status Updates, you have to block them from both your Wall and your Status and Links Updates.

There are TWO pages of privacy settings to set, so get to it.

Step 2 – Applications

Finally, once you’re done with that,  you have to set the applications settings.  Why?  When one of your jackass friends adds one of those jackass-rating applications like “what kind of penguin are you if a clown gets shot out of a cannon quiz” – then according to Facebook:

“When a friend of yours allows an application to access their information, that application may also access any information about you that your friend can already see.”

Great.  So, you can avoid all the crappy applications you want, but still be giving away your information.  How do you block it?

Go back to the Privacy Overview page (the one with four options and the block tool) by clicking on “Settings -> Privacy Settings” from the top menu again and click on “Applications”.  Click on the “Settings” tab, because really – the disclaimer is mostly jibber-jabber and I don’t have time for that crap.

Before I unchecked all these, all of them were active… so who knows what shady businesses have personally identifiable information about me, where they are, or what they intend to do with it.  My suggestion is to turn all of these things off.  All of my applications still work fine.

In order to opt out completely, you have to turn off ALL 3rd party applications individually, which… is frankly a waste of time.  Just find the ones you have no idea about (IE – not Pandora, Twitter, etc…) and selectively turn off what you are afraid to share.  This may break some of your apps.

Because I’m sort of twisted, I imagine that the real purpose for at least one app has been to secretly gather as much info as possible about potential hires and selling it to HR folks for a premium.  If a hiring company has gone to so much trouble that they’re willing to build a Facebook app to spy on me directly or through my friends, then, I really don’t want to work there in the first place.

Step 3 – Feed Updates

Imagine if you will, the most gawdawful picture of yourself – and someone has tagged you in it.  You comment “LOLZ”.  This now appears as a “status update” in the global feed.  Everyone who can see your feed can see the gawdawful picture.

Your friends see it.  Your mom sees it.  Your mom calls your grandma, and she sees it.  You get a call and have to explain why your two-piece bathing suit turned into a one-piece on some beach in Tijuana while mom and grandma sob into the phone.

No more.  Select “News Feed and Wall” from the main Privacy Overview page (the one with the four options):

I have mine set liberally because these aren’t as important to me, but they might be to you, so… lock ‘em down as you want.

Step 4 – Public Search Pages = Good Public Face

The final step in locking down your Facebook profile is to create a public search page for yourself.  This might seem counter-intuitive, but so long as you don’t post random, disturbing, objectionable pictures as your profile picture, this is definitely a good idea to show a company that you know how to hold your cards close to home.

Go back to the Privacy Overview page and select “Search”.  Here’s what you’ll see:

I set my search page visible to EVERYONE because anyone should be able to find me this way – especially an employer snooping on Facebook.  I’ve only turned on the options for things I can control – a friend and message link and my profile picture.  My fan pages and my friends pictures, I can’t control, so I leave those off, lest my employer see I’m friends with Bob Ross or that I’m a fan of medicinal marijuana’s page.  I don’t use it myself, but an employer could easily freak the hell out.

Finally…

Only friend people you know – there’s a big thing on social networks to “find and friend” everyone on the social network and it’s all just BS designed to make someone feel good.  Unfriend people who could potentially hurt you by sharing information you don’t want employers to have – ex girlfriends you don’t have a good report with, for example.  Most of all – keep your profile picture un-objectionable if you make it visible at ANY level besides Just Friends.

Remember that you have no obligation to show your employer your social media profiles – it’s a major invasion of privacy for them to ask.  Respectfully decline.

Good luck – let me know if I’ve missed anything.

Seth Godin came out with a blog post about what you should do on your birthday.  I like the idea of turning an ordinarily “selfish” day into a day of giving back.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any money to organize anything.  And I don’t have much to share that doesn’t come from my mind.  But – when I think about it, the one thing that I would really want to share with everybody is Star Trek.

I talk a LOT about Star Trek.  I credit a lot of the way I am to Star Trek and the lessons it taught me.  So, if you want to help me celebrate my birthday – go find an episode of Star Trek (I don’t care which series, but The Next Generation is my favorite) and enjoy it!  If you don’t have access to a nerdy family member or a stockpile of Paramount’s ridiculously overpriced DVDs, you can watch random episodes for free on Justin.tv by searching for “Star Trek”.

Or, you know, if Star Trek is not your thing – you could always help me pay rent by signing up for one of my Facebook or Online Reputation Management classes, or the WTF!? Marketing launch party (free).

I See You…

I just did a Google search on my own name and my city.  Luckily, my results aren’t that bad.

You might be able to, after some digging, discern where my Twitter page is, figure out which city and state I live in, and figure out that I worked at a campus radio station.

You won’t find that picture of me by the side of the pool being “rescued” by Green Peace.

A simple search of a random name in a random city reveals someone’s Facebook… with a rather embarrassing picture.  Yikes!  Some are even worse, and I don’t dare post those here for fear that someone might actually get stalked.  You can find all sorts of things on an un-locked Facebook profile.  You can find even worse things on an unlocked MySpace profile.

Everything from that stint you did on Girls Gone Wild to your birthday or exact address.

I’m a little crazy when it comes to this topic – I tend to spirit away information on myself like a dying squirrel covets nuts.  I don’t post my birthday publicly, I don’t post my address, my cell phone, my personal e-mail address, my… well, you get the idea.  I’d like to think that my hard work is worth it – I honestly can’t find myself online except through sources that I’m okay with.  I mean, here I am, typing away on my blog while some wacko nut-job out there is plotting his own little Silence of the Lambs game.  I have every reason to be careful – I have always hated baskets.

Okay, so I’m a little paranoid about that.  But employers are the real threat: they will find that horrible picture of you, share it with your would-have-been co-workers without hesitation, have a good laugh at your expense, and then send you your rejection e-mail.  Or worse – you could already have the job and be forced to watch it slip out from under you for one ill-conceived blog post.

The way I treat privacy is simple – if I’d let my best friend’s grandma read it, it’s okay to put on my blog.  Lucky for me, my best friend’s grandma is… well, a whore.  If you’re not so lucky, then you should take every available precaution to protect your dirty dancing pictures, embarrassing YouTube videos, and anything else you can think of that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to show your boss.

You shouldn’t go all scorched-earth, though – there’s still beneficial public profiles you could have.  An active, business-oriented Twitter, a LinkedIn profile, your personal website (the non-pornographic one).  All of these things can help brand you with all the professionalism that will let you land (or keep) your dream job.

Remember – granny is watching you.