1) Forcing their employees to get personal accounts on a variety of social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and more.  This is uncool for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that social media use is a very personal choice for people, and not the right choice for everyone.

2) Forcing these employees to then a) give the account info to customers for connecting in addition to the company account info, instead of just giving folks access to the company accounts and b) to use their personal accounts to promote the company.  No, no, no. This is all kinds of not ok!

3) Requiring password access to the employee accounts. Employees – do not give your employer access to your personal account this way. Stand your ground. By giving the employer or employer’s representative this kind of access you essentially allow them to impersonate you at will on social networks, if they are especially evil, and to see your private interactions and info if they are somewhat less evil. Even if they have it and never use it, really – how can you think this is ever ok? Defend your space and your right to a personal life separate from your workplace.

Companies, you have no right to require your employees to use social media, much less to use it in their own name then to promote you under their name.  That crosses a line.  It violates boundaries, and in some cases enables cheating on social networks, among other things.

Personal accounts are none of the business of the… business as long as the employee doesn’t defame them, and it should be the employee’s choice to represent the company in that venue and not be required to be used for the company.

Instead, simple employee guidelines should be in place as part of the company employee manual for those who do have personal social accounts how to represent the company should they CHOOSE to do so and how to handle disgruntled ex employees and other issues, and employees should be given posting access to the main company profiles and instructed to post using their initials under the company umbrella instead.

Companies if you’d like help navigating the tricky waters of bringing employees online and having them help man the official company accounts, reach out for it.  But for pete sake don’t invade your employees’ lives just to make a buck.  It’s actually worse than automating social using tools like PAL, and you all know how I (and your customers) feel about soulless automation.

Your photo can have serious repercussions for people.  So many seem to forget that so often. The abused woman who has finally started her life over in a new city, and finally ventures out of the house, only to have her photo snapped and posted on Facebook for her stalking ex to see and use to find her (especially if the photographer carelessly has geolocation turned on). Should she have stayed home for the rest of her life and never gone to a business networking event because you don’t want to be restricted in your art? The new employee who’s boss has made it clear that even though he is sure he is being responsible, even one photo of them at a party holding a beer can result in termination. So even though they are drinking responsibly, having that one beer then switching to soda like they said they would, they should pay for your art with their job? These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, every time I have the discussion about my own definition of expectation of privacy, it causes photographers grief.  Let me be clear – I make no bones about preferring to be left in peace to network or enjoy my friends without wanting my photo taken when I’m at a public event. I’m equally clear about not wanting photos that may be taken anyway posted without my permission. I tell that to photographers at events in the first five seconds of meeting them. Then I go on and do what I came there to do, often surprising the photographer in following days with a take down request if they don’t listen and ask before sharing. I’m not shy about being vocal about what I consider my right to control my own privacy without having to be a hermit. I’m always amazed at the people who hear me do all of this and are surprised you are “allowed” to request folks a) not take your photo b) remove it form view if necessary. Of  course you are! Speak up!

Photographers, rather than continue to go back and forth unproductively on this, is there something we can both do to foster change here? I don’t hate photos or photographers or even having my photo taken, I just resist having it plastered all over the web carelessly. I resist the consequences your photos can have for less savvy people if where you share them isn’t thought through. To me the resistance to the simple request to just ask folks if they want to be online (or be photographed at all) is a bit unnerving. After all, we often say yes. Will we reach common ground?

What is your personal definition of privacy when it comes to photos and photographers?

First, the fact that Facebook is holding profiles hostage for page linking purposes. This is making many angry (including me, for what it’s worth), and rightly so. They have effectively eliminated your control over your own profile, and the price you pay is a loss of your personalization. You know, that little part of your profile that helps people decide if you really are that chick from 6th grade science class, or if you are a work associate who is interesting enough to have in their stream, or where you can list your undying love of “alt indie grunge cupcakes”, among other things.

How are they holding it hostage? If you didn’t allow them to link to Pages in your personal Info tab when they made the change, you lose your interests, work, education, hometown and current city (you know, all of the criteria people use to find you). Even worse? They’ll still link you to pages of their own choosing, even if you try this trick suggested by Corvida. So far, it also seems you can not delete them from the Info tab interface – only hide them or go to each page and manually leave it. Frustrating and time consuming. (If you are my friend on Facebook, you can see I removed or hid all of my interests and replaced them with a link to the page Facebook Give Us Back Control Of Our Privacy, just to be cheeky.)

Also of interest if you are a business: Facebook isn’t ensuring that it is linking to the correct pages. I have this website for Uptown Uncorked, for example, and I’ve had a fan page for Uptown Uncorked for a very long time. Instead of linking there in my work section, Facebook is linking to its own new Community Pages feature, even creating a new community page for businesses and things that already have established presences. Some people seem to be able to suggest an URL when it’s incorrect, but I don’t have access to that feature, and neither do many others I’ve asked at this time. If I find a solution to that issue, I’ll update this post with it, as it is happening on my work, education, and other links now, and I see it happening to others. I used Corvida’s trick to avoid being linked, so it brings up the question: Is the URL correction link others see only available to those who give in to Facebook’s forced links to Pages? If you know, comment?

For more on the forced profile linking issue, I suggest reading this post on TechnoBuffalo about Facebook Taking Your Profile Hostage by Sean Aune

Moving on to the big picture issues surrounding Facebook’s Open Graph API. This particular move by Facebook has gotten the attention of Washington. Specifically, Senator Charles Schumer is questioning the privacy issues surrounding it, which you can read more about in a write up over at Read, Write, Web.

At the crux of the matter is Facebook’s tendency to make everything Opt-In by default, something they have done with nearly ever feature launch since early days (remember Beacon?). What this means to a tech savvy user is simply checking your privacy settings once a week and after every major UI (user interface) change and toggling the switches to off if you want to. No big deal to us. However, it is a huge deal to the less tech savvy user (which are legion), to the young and perhaps under-educated about privacy online, and to the super busy user. By making sure the changes and features are set to “On” by default, Facebook is doing a huge disservice to those who just want to log in and stay connected to friends and family, or do a little basic business. They could solve a lot of their core issues with users by simply defaulting to “Off”, truly. An online privacy bill making the rounds currently aims to force that default, however; it would broaden government’s reach into privacy issues and online commerce in ways that may not be beneficial. I’m currently on the fence on whether or not to support it, but you can read more about the bill’s progress over on Ad Age.

You can read a great tutorial on how to adjust your Facebook privacy settings over on GigaOm in the post “Your Mom’s Guide To Those Facebook Changes, And How To Block Them“.

What the Instant Personalization part of things means is that you can get social sharing plus friend streaming via Facebook all over the web. The trade-offs are related to your personal information and are explained in the articles I’ve linked to in much more detail than I can give space to here. Check them all out, then come back and finish reading.

As a person working in marketing as part of their overall job and a social media geek, I think the idea of social sharing all over the web is a lot of fun. I can attest that social sharing is something I do already using Shareaholic, Delicious, Google Reader, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and more (but not often Facebook). From a business standpoint, looking only at reach, social sharing of this Facebook level magnitude can only help you. From a user standpoint, it can be a little creepy. How so? Well, one of the biggest things you can do with the information gleaned from tracking social sharing is serve up appropriate ads to people wherever they are online. As a business, this will save time and money and be more effective as you target only those who are most likely to give a crap about your service or product. As a user, it feels a bit creepy to realize that a random website knows which product you are likely to give a crap about. Add in the terminology (it’s a “Like” button, or perhaps a “Recommend” if the web site owner has taken time to change it at all) and you get some very strange reactions from people. My recommendation for users is to use the Ze Frank recommended tool shown below to take a look at what Facebook is already sharing about you right now, adjust your privacy settings accordingly, go to your profile and make sure you are happy with what you are linked to, and then proceed to “Like” your little heart out once you’ve got your privacy ducks in a row. Just make sure to check the settings again weekly, just in case. Be proactive.

This post has a lot of information to absorb already, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of how Facebook is turning brand ownership on its head – whether it is your “personal brand”, as they say, or your business brand. If you want a quick sketch of one of the many ways this is happening on Facebook, take a look at the new Community Pages.

What these pages do is take topics (any topics) and turn them into a community generated page. The point is to make the topic, brand, person, etc be “community owned”. It’s intended for things like “cooking”, but open to anything people have a mind to add. This is scary for businesses, as these pages can be started by a business, but are not ultimately in the control of the business. They are intended for broader topics (right now) but since any topic can be made a Community Page and anyone can start one (and in fact Facebook used Wikipedia data to start several already), if you are a brand with public perception issues or problems, you could be facing some real heat, and without a traditional Wall interface for uploading content or commenting, no way to fight it on the Community Page itself. You’ll have to up your social media game and come out swinging elsewhere and hope it filters back to the passive areas online like these new Community Pages. Facebook being Facebook, I’m certain that will change at some point to something else, but for now, that’s how it’s been laid out.

With such an overwhelming amount of change happening at Facebook over the last little while, I’m interested in how it’s affecting you or your business. How are you handling it? Are you seeking out people in the social media space to come in and educate your business or school on privacy issues and branding online, on how to deal with the new frontier of connectivity and openness? Have you found a solution to some of the problems mentioned above that you can share in the comments? Let us know!

(Twitter friends will see an auto notify of this twice)

Tonight’s podcast will be a good one! We’ll be discussing education and new media, social media and technology with Dave LaMorte, John Herman and E. Christopher Clark.

I’m hoping to cover a lot of ground in an hour, so I won’t be opening up the phone lines until the recording is over. I know I usually let listeners call in ten minutes before the end, and I will be doing that again in the next podcast (part two of the gender gap topic). Our panelists are all active educators and need their rest for Monday morning school. HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean you can’t come participate in the lively chat room. We can see it while in the call and can handle questions live on air that way.

If you want to be notified of future podcasts, sign up for a TalkShoe account and “follow” the call. I send a reminder the day of the call to those who follow it.

See you there!

NOTE: We also have a new forum to give you a place to carry the discussions from the podcasts over into the real world, submit topic ideas, talk about social media, promote events, etc. You can SIGN UP FOR THE NEW FORUM right here.

Tonight’s Call:

Next Topics on Fire continues the conversation on Gender Gap and Technology, this time focusing on solutions and not rehashing the problem:

10/5 11PM Eastern Topics on Fire: Episode 6, Gender Gap and Technology Part 2 (Panelists: Corvida, Leslie Bradshaw, Micah Baldwin, Meg Fowler, Jen Nedeau)

Future episodes and panelists include:

10/19 11PM Eastern Topics on Fire: Episode 7, Politics and Technology (Leslie Bradshaw)