[Image source: The Oatmeal]

The article How To Get More Likes on Facebook tells a powerful story. Oh, did I say powerful? I meant pathetic.

If you spend any time on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll see lots of people seeking validation. You know, the kind of validation that can only come from people you barely know and don’t care about. The kind of validation you didn’t get in high school. The kind of validation that says, “You like me, you really like me!”

And the most pathetic of the pathetic these days is Klout. That service bills itself as The Standard for Influence. Wow.

You see, by having your friends give you K+ for your magnificence, that really makes you influential.

Not.

You know what I say? If you worry about your Klout score, you don’t have any clout. And if your social media consultants tout Klout, throw them out.

Social Media for HR seminars are getting a little humdrum. Many of the presentations remind me of those Excel for Accounting! seminars back in the day. It wasn’t like the presenters knew how to create macros. Or arrays. Or understood GAAP, DCF, or EBITDA. They just knew there was this cool software out there and WASN’T IT FUN! It was going to make you SO PRODUCTIVE.

Oh, except for the “how?” part.

I don’t think that any HR practitioner should listen to a talk about tools. Heck, I could tell you all day how play guitar. Tell you that all the cool kids play guitar. Show you pictures of really great guitars. But that doesn’t mean you’re gonna be able to play guitar.

Want to learn to play guitar? Start playing guitar.

Same goes for social media and HR. How many more seminars do you need to sit through to tell you social media isn’t a fad? Or that it’s REALLY BIG!? You wanna know how it works? Use it. Strum a few notes.

People can tell you all day that social media for HR is cool. But unless you do it until your fingers bleed — and then keep going — you’ll never know.

A suggestion: Don’t sit through another Social Media for HR seminar unless they show you a hole to another universe. (See what I did there?)

You can buy a hole to another universe by Dan Golden at Blick. Link via the always cool Swiss Miss.

Seems that employers are asking for Facebook passwords as a condition of employment. I was going to write a bunch of bad words about that idiotic HR practice, but instead I wrote a poem based on The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams.

**************************
The Red Herring by Frank Carlos Roche

your career depends
upon

a good job
prospect

where you can
apply

without giving up your FB
password.

******************
The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Psst. Psst. Psst.

Psst. Psst. Psst.

I detest the live tweeting of events.

Speakers put hours, days, and weeks into their preparation at conferences. Meanwhile, certain attendees with their (questionably named) smart phones hack out 140-character “reports” about the talk.

WHILE THE TALK IS HAPPENING.

Can you imagine them reporting on a chess tournament?

First, they know almost nothing about chess.

Then, they start tweeting after the opening moves.

Ooh. They both moved their little guys two squares. (Um, that would be the Sicilian Defense.)

I never move my horsey like that. Horses are nice.

This speaker so doesn’t know how to smash those pawns with his castle.

I’m a chess guru and this Grand Master doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Um…yeah.

That’s why an article by Jason Fried titled Give It Five Minutes really made sense in this world of live tweeting. Jason says he was one to react too quickly to others’ ideas without thinking about them. But an encounter changed his way of thinking:

I was speaking at the Business Innovation Factory conference in Providence, RI. So was Richard Saul Wurman. After my talk Richard came up to introduce himself and compliment my talk. That was very generous of him. He certainly didn’t have to do that.

And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.

His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.

I say Think Before You Live Tweet. And if you can’t do that, start with the thinking part. It’s sadly missing too often.

Jay Shepherd — yeah, he’s a labor lawyer — says you don’t need a Facebook policy.

Still, without a Facebook policy, how do we know what we can and can’t post?

Look: somehow you managed to figure out that it’s a bad idea to yell on a street corner that your customer is a moron. Yet we have no Street-Corner-Yelling Policy. And you accurately deduced that you probably shouldn’t shout in a crowded theater that your coworker sleeps with farm animals (or shout “Fire!”; I think I learned that in law school). Yet we are completely bereft of a Shouting-Slanderous-Statements-in-Theaters Policy. Facebook is no different.

Sometimes the best policy is no policy. Rock on, Jay.

Remember back in the old days? By that, I mean just five years ago? Back when Twitter’s ratio of real people to spam robots was at least 5-to-1? Back when every request you got came from someone you knew a bit? Then the worm turned?

Same garbage now on LinkedIn. What’s supposed to be the leading social media site for business professionals is becoming the leading social media site for people who want to scam your info. (Search for “makerting” yourself. You’ll get lots of results.)

In the last few days alone I’ve gotten multiple requests to connect with hot “makerting” girls. You know the type — the MySpace pout picture. The impossibly great resume. And they make “tings.” They’re all in “makerting.”

You can’t blindly connect to everyone on LinkedIn. It’s getting spammy out there. Before you send all your professional data, including your phone number and private email address, to a stranger, you have to “tink.”

You’re living in Greenville, South Carolina — the Buckle of the Bible Belt. You like your morning coffee. And the sports page.

You turn to page C3…and spit your coffee on your short-sleeved dress shirt. The ultimate swear word has turned up in your local newspaper. You’re agog. You’re aghast. You…and the entire online community have seen a swear word accidentally printed in your newspaper.

I made a snapshot of it below. (If you’re offended by that word, don’t see Goodfellas, where it gets used 2.06 times per minute on average. There are worse ones.) Looks like someone put a slug in there and was waiting for additional copy that didn’t get inserted. Never a good idea if you’re in the writing business.

The Bad Word in the Greenville News

What interested me was how long it took the Greenville News to get out there in front of this story. They didn’t. This silly story went viral. It blew up on Facebook, Twitter, and online news outlets. What did they do at the Greenville News? Wait until 4:41 in the afternoon to post an apology on their website.

Too late.

Stories move fast. Faster than most companies are capable of responding to if they’re using a 1991 mentality in a 2011 world.

You know when people tell you that you need a social media policy? It’s not the technology. It’s opening a channel of communication and a way of thinking about communication BEFORE someone accidentally writes f^*k in one of your communication pieces.

Will you wait an entire day to respond? If you don’t have a social media channel open right now…well, you know the answer.

What Louis C.K. says in this video is right on. In HR, you need a reason to use social media. And when you do, it had better be a) good, b) frequent and c) clever. If you suck at communicating now, having a bigger megaphone won’t help.

When I was walking Snickers the Wonder Dog this morning, I spent time thinking about doing a “Communication Advice” series. The first one was going to be about the absurdity of being a “social media expert.” I was going to say, “Putting yourself out there as a ‘social media expert’ is the equivalent of saying you’re a print expert. Or a telephone expert.” It’s ridiculous. I was going to rant.

Then I read this on My Hell Is Other People. The article says it all. Read it.

You see those privacy settings on Facebook, right? If you work, learn to click on them. If you don’t limit who can see your junk, you deserve it if HR looks at your pictures of weekend debauchery. Facebook is none of HR’s business in my book, but if you’re too stupid to set your Facebook privacy to “DefCon 1,” it’s your fault.

You’ve been warned.