Having watched the proliferation of this inaccurate and oft-misunderstood term into our businesses and lives, I’ve come to realize that somebody has got to do it. Why?

Because we are all misusing and abusing the term and most people completely misunderstand what “social media” is supposed to mean and are acting on what they think it means then end up down a rabbit hole of relentless online activity that bears little fruit for the efforts. We are all going crazy doing things we think are “social,” and what we really are doing is alienating others in new, more powerful ways, including our customers and many of the people around us.

I blogged about the problem with the term “social media” back in March 2010 for GigaOm. I was struggling first to find the “right” definition of the term and went to Wikipedia to see what people had posted there. Here’s what it said back then:

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Here’s what it says today:

Social media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”^[1] Social media is media for social interaction as a superset beyond social communication. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media has substantially changed the way organizations, communities, and individuals communicate.^[2]

Am I the only one who sees the above as a bunch of mumbo jumbo?

The way we are defining “social media” and then acting on “using social media” or “leveraging social media” is creating mumbo jumbo in our lives. It is taking the natural human instinct to communicate and build community and turning it into a circus of untenable communications.

We as publishers cannot keep up. We as consumers cannot keep up.

So what do we do when we can’t keep up?

Right now, we are desperately seeking new tools to try to manage something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. We should never have defined the various tools on the Web that sprung out of early Web pages and called them “social” and made them into shiny, desirable objects that we all had to have in order to…to what? Be noticed? Be better at something? Be more popular? Be famous? Sell more?

What are really trying to do with “social media” anyway? And why is “social media” becoming the main focus – no, the driving force – of how we communicate with others online? It’s ludicrous.

“Social media” has NOTHING to do with humans communicating with each other. And half the tools we are assigning as being part of “social media” are inherently the antithesis of social, practically ANTI-social.

I’m going to explore this concept over the next few months, and will offer alternative terms and definitions. Good, bad or ugly, the term “social media” is probably here to stay, but I want to offer new language that more accurately describes what we are using and what we are doing – and trying to do – online.

With better language around online tools and activities, I think we can find better ways to leverage – and benefit – from them that are more in tune with our needs and our nature.

What does the term “social media” mean to you?

The other day, I started getting “badges” recognizing my blogging accomplishments of reaching a blogging goal that I didn’t even set for myself.

I find it curious and amusing that a blog publishing company is applying game theory i.e. gamifying the blogging process. To what end? Are they thinking this is going to be motivation for people to blog more? Because they get a “prize” for reaching blogging goals? It doesn’t bother me that it’s there, mind you. I just find it curious.

I’m all for gamification of certain processes, even in business and work which I’ve blogged about before, but can’t imagine it is really going to effective to get people to blog more or blog regularly. And if we start blogging for badges, what will happen to the quality of our blogging? I wonder…

What do you think? Would getting encouraging messages and badges help you blog more?

Here are some of my thoughts on the topic:

Why you may not want a Google+ Page

1. It is one more place to post.

2. It is unfamiliar and there are fewer case studies at the moment to validate it.

Why you SHOULD get a Google+ Page

1. It’s already big and getting bigger. It has made significant impacts on social media communications with surprisingly rapid adoption. If the people you are trying to reach are using it, it’s logical for you to at least explore it and see if you can provide value by being there.

2. It’s different enough from Twitter and Facebook to potentially be useful to you. You probably already have a preference between Twitter and Facebook or having more success on one over the other. G+ fits somewhere in between both and it is worth checking out the features and functions to see if it might work even better for you. I wouldn’t advise giving up something that is working, but adding G+ could round out how you reach out to customers and potential customers.

3. You can save your place there and learn as you go. Even if you are not sure how to use yet, having a placeholder presence, especially at this early stage, is important, even if you initially only used it as a gateway to your other social channels. Because it is new to everyone, the G+ community is more forgiving and also very helpful. But be careful not to create a virtually empty like Kaboom. At least fill out your About page and post several times with relevant content that gives first-time visitors a sense of who you are and what you do. If you know you aren’t updating yet, conclude with a post that explains your strategy. Encourage people who stop by your Page to circle you so they will know when you do start posting.

4. You could be one of the first in your industry or area to be there giving you some of the benefits of “first mover advantage.” Granted, that advantage may not be sustainable as adoption increases exponentially, but if you’re the first, you’ll always be able to say you were the first.

5. You can gain attention right now for being there, before it gets too noisy, and potentially build a strong following that you can learn over time how to leverage appropriately.

6. Updating it would be negligible to start – just a few minutes a day to start to get your feet wet. Soon G+ will be integrated into more social management tools so it will be as easy to update as Twitter but with the multimedia capabilities of Facebook. It is already available in Hootsuite for Enterprises, for example. (See their announcement).

Here are some Google+ Pages for companies and organizations that are braving the waters.

Sesame Street

Kodak

Sherpani

BlogHer

Ford Motor Company

Burberry

Red Bull

Some organizations and government agencies on G+:

Pencils of Promise

NASA

Save the Children UK

El Prado (Spanish)

National Wildlife Federation

National Parks Conservation Association

The Nature Conservancy

World Wildlife Federation

The Hunger Project

charity: water

Here is a list from BrightEdge of major brands using Google+.

Some media outlets on Google+:

Mashable

Anderson Cooper 360

Business Insider

Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Financial Times

BBC News

NPR Fresh Air

What are your favorite Google+ Pages so far? What is your Google+ Page URL?

Of course, this was just my gut reaction, but here a few things that bothered me about the piece. I’ve italicized excerpts.

Facebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share.

This lede right away tells me that Facebook, once again, may be trying to push through a major change in how our information is being handled, and to some extent, we are at the mercy of the company leader’s careless whims. Already, I’m on the defensive.

Curation used to mean opting in to sharing…I believe we are entering the age of curation through unsharing, and it will force us to change.

Curation still means opting to share. If we are forced to change our online behaviors to opt out of sharing - if sharing is automatic with every action we take online – that is not called curation. That is called Invasion of Privacy.

Some believe “frictionless sharing” via Open Graphs will be the death of curation.

“Frictionless sharing,” aka Invasion of Privacy, won’t be the death of curation. It will be the death of our expectation of privacy. Or at the very least, a threat to it.

The article goes on to talk about the higher noise that will occur as everything we do online gets reported automatically to our friends. Anyone remember Facebook’s Beacon?

And then the author places the burden on you – on each of us – to learn how to “unshare” with some onus on developers to “get them to cooperate” by including ‘unshare’ options on apps and sites where the set up is or may soon be to automatically share all of your actions.

I think the thing that infuriates me the most about the ideas put forth in this article is that it takes complete advantage of many people’s lack of understanding of what is happening with their information and actions when they interact with sites and apps. Yes, we should all be more educated about what happens when we do something online. But most people aren’t – and don’t think like – techies, developers or marketers. Most people treat their computers and smartphones as appliances. That may be wrong, but it is often the reality.

Consider this: In the pre-Internet days, we used to pick up the telephone to make a call, and we had every expectation of privacy. But even today, when we make a call on our smartphone, there is an implicit expectation of privacy there, right? When we turn on our television, we have always understood this is a private act, that what we watched on our TVs at home would not be known by others unless we chose to share that information.

So imagine now if we made a phone call and the fact that we were on the phone or the name of who we called was made public on our social news stream. Or that when we turned on TV, what we watched was instantly shared. We’d be outraged, right?

Clearly, as consumers, many of us have a false expectation of privacy when we connect to someone else’s website or use someone else’s app because we’re using a computer or smartphone – an appliance – without fully thinking through the ramifications of our everyday use of these devices. But where are the lines being drawn between our expectation of privacy surrounding what we do on these sites and a company’s desire to broadcast our actions to drive traffic, increase branding impressions, push sales?

We should NOT have to opt out of sharing when we take normal actions of accessing information, purchasing products, interacting online in what should be non-public engagements.

Jeremy Epstein at Never Stop Marketing commented about this concept of having to opt out of sharing in his post Sharing an Interest in Sex? On Default Opt Out. He elaborates on Seth Godin’s early treatise on the concept of Permission Marketing and also explores what this kind of “opt out sharing” means from a marketing standpoint i.e. should marketers and content publishers be doing this? Jeremy doesn’t take a strong stand against it but does say he feels it is running up to – and possibly over – the line of Permission Marketing.

I say NO, don’t do it. If you are a marketer or content publisher and you are doing this, you are crossing the line. Remember the class action lawsuit against Facebook for Beacon? Enough said.

And I think every one of us should say NO to this type of information sharing process to keep it from becoming a trend or a communications shift. Sharing what we are doing online should be our choice, not something that others force on us as a default setting.

This isn’t natural. Often the best product design is translating existing behavior patterns to new mediums. But the proliferation of content, in both volume and access, requires a brand new conception of sharing and curation. Together we can bring about a golden age.

Golden age? The Invasion Age is more like it.

We all need to be more aware of these insidious ideas and movements toward unleashing our actions online into the social streams and forcing us to have to pay even closer attention to privacy settings that are hidden and change often. We should not accept the premise that we need to learn a new habit and get used to “opting out” of sharing because these sites and apps are going to share news about your actions whether you want them to or not. We need to boycott the sites and apps – like the Washington Post – that perptetuates this premise.

An action you can take: Have you noticed on Facebook those new “news” feeds at the top of the regular news feed that says what your friends are reading? Do NOT click on those, and do not allow the news apps access to your reading activity. And if you are using them, remove access and delete them from your Facebook permissions. There are many other ways to actively share what you are reading.

What do you think about the idea that sites and apps will automatically share everything you are reading, listening to, and doing, and it will be up to you to “unshare” or reconfigure and find tune your privacy settings to prevent this from happening by default?

ADDENDUM: Jeremy just brought this article by Marshall Kirkpatrick to my attention on the same topic: Why Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is Wrong