Are You Getting Frammed? Spammed by your Facebook Friends?

Too many people are getting FRAMMED these days.

FRAMMING is being spammed by your so-called Facebook Friends including:

Shameless self-promoting links, events, fan pages, webinar promos, etc.

“Cherry-picking” among your Friends List — picking the most ‘useful’ for marketing & networking

App-spam –your Friend sends you something (coffee, flower, goat) but when you accept, you give the app permission to access your Profile info.   (You have a choice here - don’t accept.)

Fram  hurts more than traditional spam because, after all, it’s the ultimate in permission marketing. You haven’t merely signed up for an impersonal newsletter, you’ve opened the door wide to your life. You’re not an address on some database sold and re-sold by dead dotcoms. You’ve willingly extended an invitation to participate in your own personal universe.

Yesterday I received an avalanche of plaintive emails from friends concerned about how to handle Fram, especially how to keep the shameless promoters at bay. Major peeve: How do I keep a supposed friend from cherry-picking through my Friends list, friending the juiciest ones and then barraging them with annoyingly transparent self-promotion?

Of course we could all be wiser about whom we confirm as our friends. But what tends to happen is we fall for the ‘Friends in Common’ ploy. If Victoria is friends with my friend Jen, then she must be okay, right?

These days, even the most solid of your friends may be drinking the Social Media Koolaid. Social Media been promoted as the solution to whatever ails you, baby. This means that even your smartest friends may jump on board and go a little loco, particularly if they’re worried about job security or finding new gigs. In the midst of fear, when everything you read says: You must be on Facebook or else! it’s hardly surprising when people overreact.

One pal of mine felt terribly guilty for letting a shameless promoter loose among her real friends. Another had a spring-cleaning day, de-friending those who weren’t friends in the first place. With the explosive growth of Facebook and Twitter, nearly everybody is re-considering how and why they want to use the powerful social media tools out there. We should all be thinking about how to use social networking honorably and ethically.

Given the creeping FRAM, it might be time to devise your own Social Media Policy. Consider:

How comfortable are you mixing your personal life with your business life? How will your clients, colleagues or boss react to your political posts, 25 Random Things list and party tags?

Should your Facebook profile be for only real friends, that is, people you would recognize in the check-out line at Safeway? (Sure, they can behave badly too, but at least you can track ‘em down!

Should you blend your virtual buddies with your f2f?

Should you set up a page just for your business; a business-only zone?

These questions are the proverbial tip-of-the-iceberg, meant only to provoke us all to think about our goals and intentions for using social media.  Naturally, it’s much easier to come up with a plan if you’re new to Facebook. If you’re already active, the fixes for FRAM may be trickier. Keep reading for some very useful tips.

Undoubtedly someone will leap up and offer a FRAM workshop/webinar/training for the special network price of $$ within five minutes of my posting this.     ::sigh::

In the meantime, here is an excellent and hugely useful article:  10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know written by Nick O’Neill and posted on AllFacebook.com.

What do you think? Are you getting Frammed, too?

Guru’s Note: I am obviously a major fan of Social Media. Gulping Koolaid, that’s me. But my reasons for loving it are based on the nitty-gritty of having experimented and discovered the good, bad and the ugly of it all. For me, it’s been almost all good. But there are moments …