Facebook, friend or foe?

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on May 18th, 2010 at 11:51 AM | 1 comments | | Tweet

The filters of censorship one must consider before pressing "cook" on a message that goes out to the known world are myriad and stymieing.

With all the privacy issues, aggressive spammers and the social protocol ever-changing on the world’s most popular social network interface, there’s been some hiccups recently, and lots of rethinking on the part of many Facebook users.

As a veteran writer, I’ve always pondered a medium that has me thinking about audience before content.  It took me quite a while to find my voice in the advertising/marketing industry for the same reason.  The filters of censorship one must consider before pressing “cook” on a message that goes out to the known world are myriad and stymieing.  So why am I drawn to such a giant of intrusiveness and exposure?  Why, as a business person and a writer and a human being with an honest-to-goodness, flesh-and-blood community, would I continue to embrace a tool where misstep can cause misery, and there are no undo, undo, undo buttons once you’ve pressed the “share” key.  (Well, there are, but it can be too late.)

I think my answer has much to do with Joan Didion’s oft-regurgitated aphorism about “writing so I know what I think.”  Making one’s thoughts public takes that a step further.  I post on Facebook so others know what I think.  As a business owner then, it’s not a stretch to call this a fundamental part of “brand building.”  Facebook, Twitter, blogging, these are our culture’s most contemporary methods for direct brand-building.  On the other hand, it’s also an interface for brand-bashing.  If you’ve followed some of the Facebook faux pas of late, you’ll realize that social media is a two-way street, and sometimes cars come at you on your side of the road!

Take the Nestle debacle, for instance.  Admonishing your customers publicly is the biggest type of public relations suicide an industry can demonstrate.  Then there was the Dominoes Pizza fiasco.  Companies that aren’t offering employees social media and Internet sharing guidelines are finding out the hard way that YouTube can be a disgruntled worker’s best revenge.

Folks, communication is just different now.  We’ve all got access to that little red button that can topple fortunes, kings and friendships.  If we’re going to have to “like” Facebook and its inevitable offspring, then we’re going to have to learn how, as writers and speakers, to measure twice and cut once.  Our busy team at BridgePoint Creative is working on learning how to do just that.

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