Friends and Frenemies

Almost everybody has heard the quote "Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer". Though the origins of the quote seem ancient and undocumented, modern lore attributes it to Vito Corleone as cited by his son Michael in The Godfather Part II. Surely, this advice is in play in social media these days with people accepting nearly every 'friend' request that comes their way. Probably, more than once, we've engaged in frenemy tactics by friending the enemy.

A frenemy is someone who poses as a friend but is more apt to be a rival of some sort. The most likely way this happens is by friending people at work. Unless you are the chief executive of your company, at least a few of your work friends are probably at the same job level as you - and as human nature would have it, some peers do not want you to be more successful than them. Allowing them an indepth view of your life via your Facebook profile and postings could prove to be problematic. Of course, not accepting their friend requests will result in trouble too.

Family members disguised as friends can be another issue entirely. Family members, both close and extended, are like co-workers and neighbors. You don't get to pick them but you have to figure out how to get along with them. This is completely opposite from how we develop true friendships. But in the world of social media, they're all lumped together - the good with the difficult. Dealing with family on Facebook can be like sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table - bring your best manners and hope they remember their's too. Holiday gatherings often conjure up stories of events long ago, but nobody on Facebook needs to read how funny it was when you wet your pants in first grade. Agree to adopt the motto: "What happens in the family, stays in the family".

A small survey done last year by Eversave showed that 84% of Facebook users admit to being annoyed by friends on Facebook with their #1 pet-peeve being complainers. Also making the list were: political posts, brags about perfect lives, and too many updates about precious kids. These grievances were revealed by the survey but I'm sure many of us have a fairly lengthy list of our own. Here are a few I would add: being marketed and sold to, the brainiac who publicly corrects everybody's spelling and grammar, posting offensive and obnoxious photos gleaned from some website specializing in off-color content.

So what are we to do?

• Create and use lists by sorting friends from frenemies
• Unsubscribe from frenemy updates
• When all else fails: Unfriend

More Godfather advice, this time from Michael Corleone: "Never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgement". 

Do you have any known frenemies on Facebook? Why did you friend them? What behaviors bother you enough to label them as frenemies?

Have a topic you'd like to see discussed on Simply Squirrel Food? Send me an email I'd love to hear from you.

Link Me - Friend Me - Follow Me: A Comparison of Social Media Site Popularity

Infographic by- GO-Gulf.com Web Design Company

How Rich Could You Have Been?

Everywhere you go these days, it seems everyone is talking about Facebook and the long-awaited IPO. Well today's the day the company that originated on a college campus in 2004 goes public. In the span of slightly more than 8 years, Facebook has over 900 million users and is estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

Countless companies have started since 2004, was one of them yours? How much would your business be worth if you enjoyed the same level of meteoric success as Mark Zuckerberg?  One Simply Squirrel Food reader sent me an interesting tool that allows you to calculate the value of your company if it had followed Facebook's rate of growth.

You can access it here:

What if I were Mark Zuckerberg?

Have a topic you'd like to see discussed on Simply Squirrel Food? Send me an email I'd love to hear from you.

Flying the Socially Friendly Skies

Now that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been around for more than a decade, I thought I had figured out how to prepare for a flight to incur the least amount of interference and delay possible. I move all sharp and pointy objects from my purse and carry-on to my checked baggage, all necessary liquids are under 3 ounces and placed in a 1 quart clear plastic baggie, and my selection of shoes worn will be with the one intent of getting them off and on with ease and speed. With my ID and ticket in hand, I should be good to go. But wait...maybe not everyone is satisfied they know enough about me yet.

Earlier this year the Dutch carrier KLM rolled-out "Meet and Seat" which allows ticket-holders to share LinkedIn and Facebook profile information as a tool for selecting seat-mates. Not only will passengers have the opportunity to pick a coveted window or aisle seat, by sharing their social media profiles they can strive to find conversational compatability with fellow passengers as well. It's a totally voluntary option allowing in-flight meet and greets to those who are interested.

Though it sounds like a way to deliver some pleasantness and fun to the travails of flying, I can see some likely problems. First, basic profile information doesn't reveal the type of information one might find useful while contemplating a long flight in cramped quarters, like:

• How much do you weigh? (How much of my seat are you going to appropriate?)
• How much do you drink? (Are you fun or surly when intoxicated and how many times will you need to step over me to get to the lavatory?)
• What viruses have you been exposed to in the past 2 weeks? (Why does a cough heard on an airplane always conjure up thoughts of some rare but deadly air-borne illness?)

Next, I know a woman who kindly describes any nosy and inquisitive person as simply being someone with a "high need-to-know". Matching that personality type with their equivalent "I have a high need for you to know" types makes me wonder if it's really a good idea to expand our social media platforms to real-life situations. What would be worse - being questioned for the duration of a flight about the details of your life or business; or being held captive to someone's ongoing braggadocio about theirs? Admittedly, both of these scenarios happen everyday and everywhere outside the realm of social media; but I'd have to admit to being both curious and nervous about why someone pre-selected me to be their seat-mate.

Lastly, sharing a flight with someone, in most cases, does not provide enough common ground to start a relationship. Without the benefit of pre-selecting the seat-mate, a passenger will typically greet each other cordially and make some small-talk conversation as a way to pass the time. At the end of the flight, each will extend to the other good wishes upon departure and go their merry way. Neither has the other's full name, place and position of employment or other personally identifiable information.

In the event the two personalities really hit it off and wish to continue to foster the budding relationship for either personal or business reasons, I see the end of the flight as the best time to share some limited contact information, and even then with an eye towards personal security.

At least for now, when flying, I'm going to leave the personal profile fact-gathering and interrogation to the TSA and not worry about passing muster with my randomly assigned seat-mate.

What do you think? Would you be interested in sharing your Facebook and/or LinkedIn profile info to be able to select your seat-mate? What info do you think would be good to know about a potential seat-mate?

Have a topic you'd like to see discussed on Simply Squirrel Food? Send me an email I'd love to hear from you. 

Yogi Berra Logic & Social Media

I love it when I can connect two of my favorite things - baseball and social media. I came across a wonderful piece about how some of Yogi Berra's sometimes mangled logic can be applied to social media. I know you'll find it both entertaining and useful. Enjoy!

Yogi Berra: 13 Social Media Lessons From The Mound [Quotes]

by Heidi Cohen

Social media can learn a lot from baseball, particularly in terms of consistently practicing to improve your results and putting the greater good of the team and its community ahead your personal feelings. (Read more)

Spying or Safeguarding?

Do you think it is okay for a parent to spy on their teenager's Facebook account? I know a couple of mothers who admittedly do, and I know they sometimes struggle with the mixed bag of guilt and sense of responsibility while doing it.

As an empty-nester, it's been a while since I've had teenagers at home so I never had to deal with this issue first-hand. In fact, my kids still remind me how stubborn I was about moving our internet connection from dial-up to the broadband offered by the cable TV provider. While they were sure I was being obstinate, I actually found dial-up to have one distinct advantage over the faster services - neither of my teenagers could be on the telephone and the internet at the same time. While one would always want to use the computer, the other was constantly nagging that they needed to make a phone call. Voila - restricted access to both technologies without my intervention. I thought it was brilliant! Oh, those were the days - not really all that long ago, but seems like decades since we relied on a single phone and shared computer access.

Though it's difficult to keep up with the speed of change, parenting needs to stay abreast of technology advances. I do not think it's a violation of privacy to monitor a teenager's Facebook page, in fact I think it's prudent to do so. From the moment of their birth, parents take on the responsibility of protecting their children from harm and monitoring social interaction is just an extension of that. Teenagers, in particular, are vulnerable to outside influences and when they're on the net they are exposed to a lot of 'outsiders'.

Read the recent MSNBC article: 60 percent of US parents spy on teens' Facebook accounts.

What's your opinion? Do you think it is okay for a parent to spy on a teenager's Facebook page?

Have a topic you'd like to see discussed on Simply Squirrel Food? Send me an email I'd love to hear from you.

Recent posts:

Say No to Facebook's Health & Wellness Offer

Discipline Lesson or Public Humiliation?

They're There & Their - Bad Grammar is Everywhere

Say No to Facebook's Health & Wellness Offer

After dangling the promise of a 'life saving' Facebook announcement, earlier this week we learned that the behemoth social media site is now offering a place on each person's timeline to show their organ donor status. The announcement was met with great kudos from various media outlets as well as reportedly increased interest in organ donor inquiries and enrollments. At first glance, it looks like a benevolent move - but further thought leaves me bothered and disturbed.

First off, I wonder why we haven't heard a loud-resounding roar of objection from the privacy advocates. Though I don't expect anybody to object to the efforts to raise organ donor awareness, the Health and Wellness area of a user's timeline encourages people to divulge health information of a much more private nature. The additional sections that are available for completion are:

• Overcame an Illness
• Quit a Habit
• New Eating Habits
• Weight Loss
• Glasses, Contacts, Other
• Broken Bone
• Other Life Event

Completing any one of these sections moves Facebook's actions far from the realm of benevolence. To locate the section go to your profile page, click on the Life Event listed in the same box as Status, Photo, and Place. Clicking on the Health & Wellness tab will open to the individual topics listed above.

Health care privacy is a very serious issue. All medical providers and insurers are bound by law to retain indvidual's health information in a secure manner allowing access to the protected health information (PHI) only upon the patient's informed consent to release it or for treatment, payment and operations (TPO). It's all laid out in the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act) and a myriad of state laws.

Why is patient privacy protection so important? Very simply, people will be comfortable seeking treatment when they are confident their information will not be used maliciously against them. With the high cost of employer-sponsored health care plans these days, consider how difficult it could be to get a job if you have a chronic disease like diabetes. Do you suppose a mortgage company may find health information useful in determining it's risk in underwriting a 30 year loan if you have a history of heart disease?

At this time there is no Federal or State law that extends patient privacy protections to social media sites - particularly when the patient posts the information themselves. Facebook is under no obligation to protect the information and already offers only dubious levels of privacy on non-sensitive matters. The possibilities of what Facebook and other parties could do with the information is both staggering and disturbing. Join me in objection by refusing to complete any part of the Health and Wellness section.

As for the organ donor awareness initiative - that's all it is. A marketing effort to raise awareness, and while sharing your donor status on your timeline might be good for awareness, it in itself will do nothing to deliver on Facebook's supposed mission to save lives.

Have a topic you'd like to see discussed on Simply Squirrel Food? Send me an email I'd love to hear from you.

Discipline Lesson or Public Humiliation?

With all the stories that keep coming up about how parents are utilizing Facebook as a tool to discipline their children, I'm really glad I was raised during an age when the latest-greatest technology was color TV.  During that era, so long ago, discipline might've been no TV for a week! Hard to imagine now how harsh a punishment that was since we were being denied access to a mere total of 4 networks. But harsh it was, enough to keep us eating our vegetables, doing homework, and completing our household chores...at least most of the time.

It must be written in the "I am the parent - you are the kid" handbook, that it is not necessary to have a direct correlation between the real or perceived offense and the punishment. Ignoring the responsibility of feeding and walking the dog could earn the penalty of cleaning bathrooms. Refusing to eat green beans could result in doing the weekly ironing. It was the parental privilege to mete out the punishment as they saw fit. Other than the very few close friends the violation was confessed to, the incident stayed behind closed doors. Probably where the roots of the iconic Las Vegas slogan was born: what happens at home, stays at home. 

Facebook seems to have changed all that. The recent story about an Ohio mother who chose to punish her daughter publicly via Facebook takes a disciplinary action from the privacy of home to the internet public. MSNBC has the story: Mom who used Facebook to discipline teen has no regrets. In summary, the 13 year old girl was disrespectful in the way she talked to her mother. In response the mother posted a picture on the girl's Facebook timeline that contained the following message: "I do not know how to keep my (mouth shut) I am no longer allowed on Facebook or my phone. Please ask why, my mom says I have to answer everyone that asks."

Both the girl and the mother claim she learned her lesson and will likely not re-offend in the same manner again. I think it's abuse. Even though this continues on the no correlation between the offense and the punishment path, this isn't an issue of clean the garage because you left the milk out. It's retaliation in a most public and humiliating way. And while the girl was duly punished, Mom is enjoying some bit of celebrity as she's being interviewed by various news outlets.

Perhaps life really was easier when an earlier generation was deprived access to TV for not eating liver and onions. With only 4 networks there was no room for the reality glimpses like this of disfunctional parenting.

What do you think? Do you think this mother was justified in her choice of discipline?

Have a topic you'd like to see discussed on Simply Squirrel Food? Send me an email I'd love to hear from you.