I’ve been saying for a while that I question how long the world’s most popular social media service will retain its popularity. Yes, there are security and privacy issues that come up from time to time and some of the games and activities on there can waste people’s time to the point where they put their jobs at risk. But what I feel will do in Facebook is that it will become a victim of its own success.

Facebook is all about connecting people. Back when I first started using it, I can remember staying up several nights until 3:00 am looking up people I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Throughout the last few years, I’ve reconnected with old friends, made new ones and even added classes and training related to Facebook to the services my business offers.

So why am I starting to hate it? Well it has done such a good job at connecting people and making it easy to share your thoughts or what you’re doing that I’m starting to realize that I really don’t want to know as much about my friends as I’m starting learn. Yes, I think it’s making people communicate too much and too personally.

It’s just too tempting to see people talking about something you’re passionate about to not chime in. But it’s just as easy for someone to reply that they disagree with you. And unfortunately, they don’t always do it tactfully. This isn’t so bad if you’re talking about sports or movies, but if you’re talking about a hot button issue, the debate can get ugly.

Over the last week, I have heard more than I want to about Susan Komen dropping and reinstating funding to Planned Parenthood, how evil Obama and/or the Republicans are and how you’re a bad person if agree or disagree with allowing same sex marriage. These issues all have valid arguments on each side which I don’t care to get into here, so I don’t mind people having an opinion even if it’s different than mine. The problem I have is with the fact that so many people choose to share their opinions in a manner that is both condescending and disrespectful for those that choose to disagree. And the worst part – these people are trying to promote their businesses and/or career at the same time.

So bringing this back to Facebook, it has succeeded in its mission to connect people and allow them to share information. But it has failed in thinking that people could do in a professional and mature manner. And why am I starting to strongly dislike it? After all, I can simply ignore what I see, hide people from my feeds and take a number of actions so i don’t have to look at someone else’s “free speech.”

What I don’t like is the fact that it’s causing people to dislike the way some of their “friends” are acting – and in my case, it makes me wonder about people’s judgement. But more importantly, it’s causing people to de-friend each other because of something stupid one of them posted that they never would have shared in such a manner, especially publicly, in real life.

Related posts:

1. 10 Things to Never Post on Facebook
2. Will Facebook Still be Around in Five Years?
3. Social Networking – LinkedIn and Facebook
4. A Day of Scams: Facebook and Craigslist

Quality is extremely important in the business world – if you make crappy products or provide horrible services, you won’t survive. Even as speakers, a good talker can get anyone to hire him/her for a presentation, but only if that person is a quality speaker will he or she be hired for a second engagement. Quality also affects our online presence – probably in more ways than you realize. If you’re just online for casual conversation, then this may or may not concern you. If you’re online to promote your business, cause or idea, then it’s something you want to pay attention to.

Quality affects everything from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to who follows you on Twitter to whether people continue to use your services. Let’s start from the ground up.

You need a quality web destination:

Whether you’re working for yourself, someone else or looking for work, you need a “home” page for people to find you. For some, it’s their web site. Mine is JamesFeudo.com. For others, it’s their blog which they might host on their own or through a free service like WordPress or Blogger. And then there are those who use a Facebook page or Twitter or LinkedIn profile. Depending on your situation and budget, any of these should work. So no matter what you use for your home page, it has to have a clean and professional look. You don’t want it full of spelling/grammatical errors or broken image links. You want it to represent you well. If you’re not sure if it represents you well, find someone who has expertise in this area and ask them for advice.

You need quality links to your profile:

Ever since Google rose to be the number one search engine, the number (and of course, quality) of links to your site impact your rankings for search terms. While no one outside of Google knows the exact details of their search algorithm, one thing that most people have figured out is that having a lot of other sites link to you helps you rank higher. Of course, the higher the quality of these sites (meaning, the more sites that link to them), the more of a positive impact the link has to your rankings.

You need quality followers:

Social media rankings are a dark art similar to SEO. To use Twitter as an example, the more people that follow you, generally the more influence you have. Of course, if you use tools such as Klout to see your rankings, they take other things into consideration such as the quality of your followers (do they themselves have a lot of followers, etc…). Of course, Klout considers other things like how often people mention you or re-tweet your tweets and that is also a reflection of the quality of your followers and your interactions with them.

On the website side of things, you want a quality audience there as well. If you make money on your web site, you need your viewers to take an action such as purchase something or click on an ad – or at the very least, share your links so others that might take these actions know about you. Again, quality is the operative word.

You need quality content:

Now this is the hardest part. Anyone can run an ad campaign for a couple dollars on Google or Facebook and get traffic to their site. But if that site has nothing of value to the viewer, they will move on without taking action and without recommending you to others within your target audience.

In this case, quality means a lot of different things. At the very basic level, you need well-written copy, a design that doesn’t irritate your viewers and content that has some value to it. It can be funny, informative, thought-provoking or educational but it has to be worth their time to read or watch.

In this world of automation and instant gratification, quality tends to take a back seat to production. Over the last few years, I’ve seen the amount of spelling and grammatical errors in best selling books increase and the quality of advice decrease (why share it all when you can publish a second edition?). While improving the quality of what you do won’t necessarily give you that quick hit that we’re all conditioned to seek, it will help you steadily increase the business and attention you receive due to your online presence. So if it seems like you’re following all the right steps but you’re not getting results, try increasing the quality of what you do.

Related posts:

1. Public Speaking Success: Demonstrating the Live Internet
2. You Might Be Addicted to Social Media If…
3. 10 Things I’ve Learned About Using Twitter
4. How Big is Yours?

People are finicky. Doing something to please one person may upset another. You simply can’t please everyone and social media has made this quite evident. People unfollow on Twitter or unfriend on Facebook for no apparent reason. Maybe you said something that offended them or maybe you just sounded boring to them. There’s no rhyme nor reason and you can’t expect people to think or act the way you do.

I use both Twitter and Facebook and teach classes that cover both services. In general, I rarely unfollow or unfriend people. On Facebook, the few people I unfriended were people that I connected with early on (back in the day when I made the mistake of joining groups to increase my friends count) that overwhelmed me with dumb application requests. On Twitter, I only unfollow people that have either unfollowed me or never followed me back. That’s how I operate, but others operate differently.

My biggest pet peeve on Twitter are people that follow thousands of people figuring that they will be followed back. Once all these people follow them, they unfollow them all so they look like a celebrity with a high follower count and a low follow count. To me, it sends a message that they don’t care about interacting or making connections, instead they just want you to be a number. No thanks. There are also tools for managing your followers so you can automatically unfollow people that are too chatty, post too infrequently, don’t get enough retweets or fit a lot of other criteria that many could consider nonsense.

Facebook is better in this aspect. The challenge there is the limit of 5000 friends so people with large followings often purge some folks to make room for others. On both services, posting too much or posting things that are considered offensive or too much of a hot-button issue will frequently result in your friend count going down.

Now all of this fine if it’s someone you don’t care about, but what happens when it’s someone you thought you made a connection with? It can hurt because it’s a form of rejection. Every now and then I’ll lose a follower from Twitter that I had good conversations with months or years prior to their unfollow and it does cause me to wonder why. I’ve talked to a number of people who were devastated because of a single unfollow. It felt, to them, like losing a friend in real life. In some cases, the cause was an argument. In other cases it was because the person was quirky and in still other cases, it was due to some follower tool the person tried.

I get asked a lot if it’s okay to contact someone who unfollows you. Generally, I think it’s okay except for certain obvious exceptions – those being related to having a heated argument or anything thing else that would end a friendship in real life. But the first thing to do is try to figure out what caused the unfollow to begin with. If the unfollow happens randomly, then check out the person’s profile (if you still have access to it) to see what’s going on. Have they done a mass unfollow to clean house or to look like a celebrity? Are there other clues such as the person seems angry or emotionally unstable? Has the person changed to the tone of their posts to be more work-like and is now only focusing on professional connections? Is the person trying to get attention?

If you don’t get any clues from their profile, try looking at your own. Did you post something that would offend or anger them? Are you posting nonsense or chatter? Are others unfollowing you? Sometimes we don’t realize the value, or lack thereof, of our posts.

So what happens if the unfollow has no rhyme or reason? Then go ahead and contact the person but just keep your cool. In Twitter, you could tweet a reply to the person and on Facebook you could send a private message. Try something like “Hey, I noticed you’re not connected to me anymore. Just wanted to see if things were okay.” You want to avoid saying “why the **** did you unfollow me?” or something like “my day was ruined when I noticed you unfriended me.” You don’t want to sound desperate and you want to keep your integrity.

You may find out that person used some follower cleanup tool and didn’t realize you got axed or they may have done it by accident. When I got my android phone, I accidentally unfollowed a few friends on Twitter when I was trying to send them private messages. Mistakes do happen.

Worst case, they may have decided that you’re not worthy of their friendship. They may ignore you because they don’t want to tell you why or they may be immature about it. While it’s easy for me to sit here and tell you that you’re best to move on and forget about them, we all know how tough that can be. No one likes to be rejected. My best advice is to take a lesson away from it and focus on the people that want to be friends with you.

Social media can be a great thing or it can ruin your life. Learn how to use it and treat others with the same respect you want to be treated with, and you’ll be okay. Keep in mind that some of the friendships you make can be as strong as the ones you make in real life and breakups can be just as painful. On the flip side, social media allows social rejects a platform and a mask to hide behind so they can wreak havoc on the lives of others. This isn’t meant to scare you – it’s meant to inform you. Most people have mainly positive experiences with social media and the more informed you are, the less likely you are to run into the negative aspects of it.

Related posts:

1. You Might Be Addicted to Social Media If…
2. Why Most Speakers Are Clueless About Social Media
3. The Social Media Trap
4. Watch How You Use Social Media

A blog that I frequently visit came into some recent criticism that I felt was worth talking about. The site, Orlando Theme Parks News, which provides information and updates on all the theme parks in the Orlando, FL area skips over attractions that its owner feels are too ‘dark.’ This is includes the new Harry Potter’s World of Wizardry at Universal Orlando and the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Again, the site’s owner feels that these attractions conflict with his beliefs, so he never mentions them in his reports. This has caused a bit of an uproar on one of his posts, which makes me wonder: who really has control over your blog?

While I noticed the absence of the Harry Potter land in a report, I didn’t think much of it until I read the comments on one particular article. Some people were respectful while others used terms like ‘religious nut’. Keep in mind that this website is free to use and the ads are very unobtrusive, yet people still complained as if they are not getting their money’s worth. This guy takes the time to visit all these theme parks to take pictures and post information, yet people complain that he doesn’t do more.

While I happen to disagree with the site owner about Harry Potter or the Haunted Mansion being dark or evil, I respect his right to exclude them from his reports. As someone that lives almost 1500 miles from Orlando, I appreciate the service that he and other bloggers from the area provide. But again, it’s another example of whether or not as bloggers, we’re at the mercy of our readers.

Of course, it got me thinking of this blog. I have dozens of articles that I’ve written but never published because I don’t want to turn off visitors. Sometimes, it’s because I find it daunting getting the article to both make a point and not upset anyone so I just leave it and write another article on a different topic. I already notice that if I don’t have an article about public speaking or Toastmasters every two or three articles, it upsets some of my readers. Others prefer the personal development and motivational topics while still others like the tips on interviewing. The bottom line is that you can’t please everyone, so don’t bother. I worked for a dot com in the mid-1990′s and even though it was a free site, we’d receive “hate mail” (and that’s putting it mildly in some cases) whenever the site was down or there was a problem with it. People can be nasty.

As for the owner of the blog I mentioned, I think he should keep on doing what he’s doing. He’s obviously passionate about his work and enjoys it – which is why it’s a great site. If he were to force himself to cover things that conflict with his values, then his blog might suffer from it. It won’t be as fun and it’ll show in the quality of his posts. It’s really too bad that we have to hide who we really are to be accepted by some people. Perhaps the people that preach tolerance should try practicing it.

Related posts:

1. Success in Giving: A Lesson from Disney
2. Blog Roll Roundup
3. The Magic of Walt Disney World
4. Public Speaking and Presentation Skills Blog Carnival – July 2008 Edition