As many of you know, I am The Starr Conspiracy‘s social media strategist. It’s a lovely job. My clients are smart and successful vendors who sell software and services to HR professionals.
And I can’t tell you how many of them are stupid chumps on the internet.
Some of them futz around on Twitter and Facebook and call their efforts strategic. That’s adorable. You know who else futzes around on the internet? Your cousin who still likes Jethro Tull and Supertramp.
For the record, Bachman-Turner Overdrive is worse than Jethro Tull and Supertramp — but that’s another blog post.
Back to my broader point — I love it when HR vendors get curious and start signing up for ‘free’ third-party applications on Twitter and Facebook. Although vendors expect to be paid for their services, they don’t think twice before signing up for free applications that provide ‘analytics’. You like free? Here’s some free advice: there is a difference between metrics, measurements, and analytics. Look it up.
And here’s more free advice: those free tools are spambots waiting to take control of your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Sheesh. I hate it when I see these tweets. Thankfully, most of the hackers out there are benign and will simply send out spammy tweets to your friends and followers. That’s not too bad — but it could be much worse in the future.
What can you do to avoid this risk? Well, I was going to write a helpful white paper on the subject of sketchy third-party social networking applications; however, I am a little too busy playing with my cats to offer anything substantial on the topic. If I were to write the paper, this would be the executive summary:
- Go here http://twitter.com/settings/applications and remove shady applications that promise something for free. And stop downloading stupid stuff on Facebook.
Listen, I’ve got your back. You can call me if you ever want to stop futzing around like an amateur and get serious about your social media strategy. My services aren’t free but they are worth it.
Regardless of whether we ever work together, you really need to quit spamming me.
Now please go clean up your social networking accounts and let’s get back to being all strategic & stuff.
