Perhaps by now you’re heard of the “Please Rob Me” site that highlights those on Twitter disclosing that they’re away from their homes.

While the site is kind of funny, it draws attention to a serious point — disclosure of detailed personal information, including your precise physical location, will lead to crime. Notice I didn’t say MIGHT lead to crime. It is inevitable that the bad guys are going to figure this stuff out. They always do.

Last week I saw my first tweet that actually had a map attached to it. The stalkers can not only find you, the technology is telling them how to get to you.  Or your empty house.  Or your kids.

I’m particularly concerned by this emerging generation who is de-sensitized to what they’re sharing about themselves.  They’ve been conditioned to put everything out there all the time, so why not tell everyone where you are, too?  They’re actively and willingly teaching The Machine their personal habits, behavior patterns and hang-outs, just so they can be named “mayor” of a location on Foursquare or receive a free latte at Starbucks.

Where corruption can occur, corruption will occur. It is only a matter of time before a tragic crime draws attention to these serious issues and people start taking action, perhaps even legislation. Let’s not wait for that, OK?

As an individual, and especially as a parent, I think we need to draw the line on certain social web behaviors.

• Actively teach your kids to be net-savvy. Instill a healthy dose of paranoia into their mindset.  Teach them about privacy settings and being Internet “street smart.”
• Take a view that Internet access is a privilege, not a right. Set clear expectations and limits. If a child does something to endanger themselves on the Internet, there should be consequences, just as if they had wrecked a car or set a fire in the kitchen.
• Personally, I would forbid my kids from using Foursquare or any technology that reveals their personal location at  a point in time.
• Be involved in what they’re doing. Know enough about the technology to ask the right questions. Look at who has friended them and what those people are saying to your kids.  Until you are convinced they can demonstrate mature judgment, I don’t think kids have a right to Internet privacy.

A man told a story yesterday on a news report on Internet safety that as a precaution, he follows every one of his young son’s Facebook friends. “I’m a 39 year old man,” he said. “And these kids automatically follow me back even when they don’t know who I am. And their parents never question it either. It just shows me how dangerous this could be for young kids.”

If you’re a parent, deal with this. Don’t ignore the issue or avoid conflict with your kids over the family “privacy” battle.  Will you leave a comment and let me know what you think on this issue?

The Economist is one of my favorite magazines. I usually read it cover to cover. So imagine my excitement when I saw their special report this week, Social Networking: A World of Connections.

After I read the report, I concluded — to my surprise — that there was really not much new in the report. This is not a negative reflection on The Economist. I believe it’s a positive reflection on the efficiency of Twitter to stream the most important news and trends my way before they get summarized by a business periodical.

Nevertheless, there were a few interesting nuggets I wanted to pass along:

>>Follow me on Twitter signs are appearing on the doors and windows of small businesses around the world. Asurvey found that 17 percent of Britain’s small businesses were using Twitter. They saved an average of $8,000 a year by cutting out other forms of advertising.

>>  A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only 10 percent of them gave employees full access to social media networksduring the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The  executives’  biggest  concern was that social networking would lead to “social not-working.”  Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

>> An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks.  One study estimated that personal use of social networks during the working day was costing the British economy almost $2.3 billion a year in lost productivity. Another concluded that if companies banned employees from using Facebook while at work, their productivity would improve by 1.5%.

>> The magazine described Facebook’s “hacker culture.”  Their head of engineering’s motto is “move fast and break stuff.”  What matters is getting fresh products out to users quickly, even if they do not always work as intended. To generate new  ideas, they hold all-night hack-a-thons to at which engineers work on their pet projects. This Red Bull culture maybe why Facebook has just one engineer for every 1.2 million users.

>> Survey of 300,000 Twitters users showed more than half tweeted less than once every 74 days and 10 percent of all users account for 90 percent of all tweets.

>> Facebook’s audience is bigger than any TV network that has ever existed on  the  face  of  the  earth.

>>In Asia several social media companies such as Japan’s GREE, South Korea’s Cyworld and China’s Tencent, are already making healthy profits from sales of games, premium personalization options, virtual goods, and custom backgrounds.

>>Salesforce.com predicts that demand for corporate internal social networking services will riseas managers realize that they now know more about strangers on Twitter and Facebook than they do about the people in their own companies.

>>Intel estimates it has saved millions of dollars a year in fees by recruiting senior managers through LinkedIn rather  than using headhunters. US Cellular said it saved more than $1 mm last year by using a LinkedIn system that produced good candidates faster than traditional recruitment channels.

>> Social networks have made the labor market more transparentin another way too. A survey by CareerBuilder.com of  2,700 executives last year found that 45 percent of them looked at job candidates’ social network pages as part of their research, and more than a third of those had unearthed information that put them out of contention. Time to turn up those privacy settings?

Some interesting stuff!  Of these facts and trends, which jumps out for you as having an impact on the way you do business?

Illustrations: Part of The Economist report.

There seems to be this new genre of media out there meant to scare the crap out of you.  The techno music starts to pulse and then these animated slides whiz these amazing facts at you like “Did you you know that the average worker now spends 26 hours a day on Facebook?”  <next slide>  “And that rate is growing at a rate of 1,120%”  <next slide>  PER MONTH??”

These ”scare slides” are meant to impress you with social media’s omnipotence and power. Through the pounding music they want you to think that change is coming at you so fast that you might as well just call it a day … unless you buy their consulting services.

I don’t know where they come up with these facts, but here’s one that caught my attention: “For a college freshman, half of what they have learned will be obsolete by their junior year.” 

While that “fact” seems improbable, it did make think about the accelerating rate of change and the impact on indivudals as we try to remain effective leaders.

A hypothesis:  Personal “technological adaptability” is going to be an increasingly important life skill.

Here’s what  I mean.  The rate of technological change is occurring so fast that an ability to quickly assess, process and deploy new apps will be a source of competitive advantage not only for companies, but for individuals.

Let’s say we had two employees, equally educated and experienced. Both are given a task. Employee One begins the task, as assigned by the boss. Employee Two first assesses free tools on the web that can sort, organize and automate that task.  Ultimately that employee will provide a better, faster and cheaper result for the company. And get a promotion!

Even two years ago this would not have been an issue. Both employees would basically have access to the same company-issued and approved technology — Excel, Access, Word, etc.  But now, for almost any work task, somewhere, there’s “an app for that.”  The ability to find and apply these free and useful ideas will become an increasingly critical skill.

So what does this mean for me and you?   How do we keep our edge at this incredible rate of change?   Where do we find the time to do explore and learn new applications?  How do companies enable this skill in employees?

One of my pet peeves is this whole “snarky” thing. 

I often see people excuse away their unprofessional on-line behavior by saying “Well, I was just being snarky.”

Since when is it acceptable to be rude, sarcastic and dismissive to other well-meaning, professional people?   We probably wouldn’t act that way in a face-to-face interaction but somehow in the bizarro world of the social web, it’s OK as long as you call it snarky.  Inexplicably, it’s usually the more experienced bloggers who hide behind this position, and seem to be proud of it.  They wallow in their snark. 

Gratefully, {grow} has usually been a snark-free zone.  The folks in this community take accountability for their thoughts and words and don’t hide behind euphemisms.  Thank you. 

As for those who mask cynicism and cruelty behind snark, grow up.  Be accountable.  Be a leader.  Set an example.

Whew. That felt good. : )

Addendum: The day after I wrote this post, I saw this quote from American entertainer Conan O’Brien, commenting on his emotional exit from the Tonight Show: ”I hate cynicism.  It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

I was reading Ross Dawson’s excellent blog on media trends and was entranced with a visualization he developed (with Richard Watson) on future trends.

Along with the usual trending topics of urbanization, gentrification and a power shift to the east was “anxiety.”   Anxiety as a trend? 

This struck a chord, especially during a week where every critical technology in my life malfunctioned!  What are the ways technology is contributing to growing levels of anxiety in our culture? 

• Paralysis

Last year I was in the hunt to buy a new digital camera. On top of the millions of combinations of brands and features, there were an incredible number of purchase options.  And sorting through hundreds of consumer and web reviews –supposed to make things easier —  seemed impossible to process.  Many consumers faced with a similar amount of information simply shut down — they are afraid to make the wrong decision. Decision paralysis that comes with too much information is a real issue.

• Complexity

I just bought a new computer. It took me three weeks to move the software, settings and files from one computer to the new one. This involved multiple phone interactions with various software companies, finding licence numbers that required a magnifying glass to interpret and manipulations of servers to get all of my applications to work together again in harmony ( which has not happened).  Just setting up this basic business functionality was difficult and time-consuming.   While individual applications may make life easier in the short-term, the complexity and fragility of technology systems is making life increasingly stressful. Which also leads to …

• Impact of Gentrification

What if I did not have the underlying experience with technology to make this all work?  There are two speeding trains heading straight for each other — the increasing number of senior citizens and the increased complexity of technology. 

• Vulnerability

We are becoming increasingly vulnerable to Internet attacks as our dependence on web life-tools increases and the analog method of doing things becomes obsolete.  Don’t buy that?  Try getting by for one week without email. 

• Ubiquity

Undoubtedly the Orwellian vision of “Big Brother” is coming true. Technology companies may soon know more about us than we truly know about ourselves. What are the implications for how we live our lives when every movement, and every mistake, is recorded for posterity?

• Rate of change

Technology moves in dog years.  If you un-tether for a month, it’s like missing seven months of technological advancement.  The answer to staying on top of things?  Never un-tether.

Before you beat me up and point out all the wonderful benefits of technology (including this dialogue) I’d like to leave you with this thought.  Two hundred years ago, the pressure to keep up with technological change was not even a human consideration. Life pretty much went on as it always had,  and our mindset was that it would continue that way forever.  Mankind lived a rural life dependent on friends and family, weather and livestock … as it had for centuries.   There was no “app for that.”

Genetically, we are cut from the same cloth as our pioneering ancestors.  What are the implications for having a constant imperative in our lives to understand, assess, deploy and maintain our digital selves?

A lot of social media content elicits “rants,” “vents” and snark these days.  But today I am overwhelmed by the positive feelings flowing from the blogosphere.  Let me back up a step.

This has been a difficult couple of weeks. I have been very sick, had a string of daily technology disasters, and the perfect storm of critical customer deadlines.  By today I am exhausted.

Then this amazing thing happened.  I started getting all of these little “Follow Friday” love notes.  About every 10 minutes or so my computer would “ping” with an unsolicited little ‘atta boy. I think maybe 30 or so floated in with very touching and generous sentiments on many of them.  How did you know I needed this today?

Did you ever think we could live in a time when you could get 30 love notes from people you’ve never met? 

Even more important are the growing friendships I am developing with you. When I see your comments on my blog, tweets or Facebook posts, I get a smile on my face because I think of the special relationships I’m developing with so many people, and it has been so powerful and unexpected.

I began on Twitter eight months ago. In that time I have:

Collaborated on videos, articles and books with Rebel Brown, Ben Hanna, John Bottom, Jamie Wallace, Robin Frank, Shane Mac, Neicole Crepeau, Kimmo Linkama, Jayme Soulati, Anne Giles Clelland, Jenn Whinnem, Venessa Miemis, Nancy Scott, Rebecca Denison, Michael Winn, Jeremy Victor and Steve Farnsworth.

Started working on customer projects with Steve Dodd and Jeremy Floyd.

Donated to charitable causes with the inspiration of Danny Brown, Billy Mitchell and Kacy Maxwell.

Created a video (you’ll see it soon!) with Michelle Chmielewski.

Wrote a case study with Nathan Dube.

Provided potential new business opportunities to Trey Pennington, Nitin Gupta, Tim Knight, Stuart Mease, Lisa Foote, Michele Linn, Rebecca Renner, Christina Kerley, and Rebekkah Hilgraves.

Received new business opportunities from Nathan Egan, Lisa Worley, and Leil Lowndes.

Worked through problems on phone calls and meetings with Jason Falls, Dianna Huff, Olivier Blanchard,  Joseph Fiore, Christina Kerley, Gavin Baker, Karl Yeh, Dean Holmes, Jen McClurg-Roth, Dan Levine, Sidney Eve Matrix, Gregg Morris, Bill Sledzik, Jennifer Yeager and many others.

In less than a year, there been nearly 2,000 comments on my blog from hundreds of people.  Thank you so very much.

If you’re not on the list and we’re connected, it’s just a matter of time until we find some way to work together.  Let’s make it happen!

Thanks for making {grow} the greatest community on the social web.

P.S. I’m sorry if i missed somebody. Remind me and I’ll add you to the list!

A while back I wrote an article about the fortress-like tendencies of the A-List bloggers and the sycophants who follow them. I compared it to an exclusive country club.

But as I’ve reached a wider audience and gained more experience on the social web, I’m learning that some of the online behaviors deserve even less credit than that.   A couple of anecdotes:

• Last month I met with a high-profile blogger/speaker who said he had been “black-balled” by those following Chris Brogan (not Chris himself) because of disagreements he lodged with the uber-blogger.
• Another top blogger told me conference speaking invitations had dried up since he criticized fellow A-list bloggers
• I recently politely disagreed with a number of high-profile folks … who promptly “unfollowed” me on Twitter
• One follower implied I was chauvinistic because I had more men than women on one Follow Friday tweet
• A nasty and unprofessional online fight recently erupted between East Coast and West Coast factions over the issue of social media credentialing.
• Recently, a well-known social media pundit named me as one their favorite bloggers.  One of my followers said she now had a “moral dilemma” of whether to follow me or not because she did not like the other blogger. 

Pardon me folks, but doesn’t this sound a lot like high school?  Or worse.

The petty politics of every day relationships are exacerbated on the social web because we are making very limited assessments of people based on their written words. People seem quicker to judge, and harsher in their reactions without thinking about the real live human beings behind those little icons.  I’ve been guilty too.

In the end, I can only be accountable for myself.  The social web mantra of  “authenticity” and “transparency” is a load of crap.  Nobody is truly authentic. Nobody is truly transparent.  Nor should you be!  However, there is an urgent need for civility, tolerance and honesty in this space.  I’ll try my best to walk the talk in those areas and if this makes any sense to you, maybe we can support each other and make the change together. 

Thanks for hanging in there through the rant.  You may now return to your social media high school home room, wherever that may be.  : )

Community alert: Sean Williams, a regular contributor to {grow}, pointed out this timely WSJ op-ed piece  on the subject of social web civility. Which was a civil thing to do.

One of the great themes of our “social media future” discussion was “privacy” and the ultimate stand we hope people would take to keep companies (like the mythical Skynet) from abusing personal data.  I thought a lot about this and Easter Island came to mind.

Easter Island is the one of the most remote and desolate places on Earth and is home to the mysterious moai statues.  Although just a speck of a place, centuries ago the island had two competing tribes. The ruler of each tribe would build larger and larger temples and more moai in his honor, trying to out-do the ruler on the other side of the island for glory.

Over several generations, the lush palm forests on the island began disappearing as the tribes rapidly used this extremely limited resource for temples and construction of the massive stone faces. Remember, there was literally no place to go for more wood.

Within a few generations, every single stick of wood on the island had been consumed.  Researchers think this was probably the leading cause of the collapse of the native civilization.

You might wonder, “How could they be so stupid?”  Part of the answer is in the fact that they didn’t realize they were doing it.  The children became accustomed to the idea of an island with fewer trees.  They didn’t have videos and digital photos to document what the place used to look like.  And then the next generation only knew a world with even fewer trees, and so on.

Like a lobster slowly being killed in a boiling pot of water, generation after generation became accustomed to an increasingly de-forested landscape because they didn’t know a different reality ever existed!

Could this phenomenon happen again?

Today, personal information is being served up by our nearly constant digital footprint.  Our grandparents would probably be mortified by what we post every day and the record we’re creating for permanent, global dissection. It’s just what we do.  We call it the social web and we love it.

But the heat is turning up and already we can see that the privacy pot just might boil.  Will the next generation even know, let alone care?    Today’s teens are conditioned to accept highly targeted and intrusive ads as the norm, part of the cost of the experience.  As long as a cool, free good or service outweighs the incremental intrusiveness of a privacy intervention, people will be happy to go along.  If we fast-forward 10 years, would we be horrified by the personal freedoms that have been abdicated for instant gratification?

Perhaps our children and grandchildren will be conditioned to slowly, inexorably, willingly abandon their freedom, never realizing they are in the process of being boiled.  At least until they meet John Conner.*   : )

What do you think?  Lobster anyone?

* In the Terminator movies, John Conner was the hero who battled evil Skynet, a company who unleashed human-destroying machines on the world.  Skynet is also a telecommunications company in Europe. I don’t think they are one and the same, but time will tell.

One of the questions I hear frequently is, “Should I have one or two social media accounts for family and business?”

My strong recommendation is that you keep family and business separate.  The information needs of your family are going to be much different that those of your clients, right?  Why clutter customer feed streams with news of family dinners and disclosures about your husband’s snoring?  On the flip side, why bore grandma with re-tweets from the Wall Street Journal?

The argument I’ve heard against this is that you should simply be authentic and talk about whatever is going on in your life.  I’m hoping most social media participants are growing beyond this naieve  and simplistic view of the channel.  Nobody in business really wants you to be “authentic” if that means disclosing every little fact of your life.  I think a more accurate and practical goal is to remain “open and honest” in your communications.

Another argument against the complexity of two ( more) accounts is the risk of confusing accounts and disclosing something personal on a business account when you thought it was a family account.

Still, I’ve found the best strategy is to keep it clean.  Respect business accounts by minimizing the family details. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be personable and refer to family details on a business account, and by all means establish multiple accounts (if you have the time!) and enjoy all that the social web has to offer.

Thinking I’ll have a few arguments about this one?

Illustration: Christy Tanner

A lot has been written about the “danger” social media poses to companies and brands, but what about the real threat it poses to us as individuals?

Immediate, transparent, global, free communication is one of the most breathtaking information advances since the telephone. But when there is an opportunity for human corruption, there probably WILL be human corruption. Here are the biggest threats posed by the advent of social media:

Risk to personal security. For fun, I follow a few celebrities on Twitter, the digital Post-it note. The other day, one of them tweeted: “Down at Gino’s having a pizza with my boys.” Earlier in the day he had established the city he was in. With this kind of shoot-from-the-hip public broadcasting, it’s only a matter of time before we see the first Twitter-related crimes. Even for non-celebrities, how safe is it to post to the world, “My husband and I are off to Boston for the Web 3.0 conference.” Not very … unless you want your next post to be “Our house got wiped out by crooks while we were away!”

Risk to personal finances. Every time you register for a site, sign up for an app, or populate a social media profile, you are adding to a databank all about you. Strangers can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, e-mail addresses and much more. One blog writer recently quipped, “Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online.” Even more severe than identity theft and the obvious financial ramifications for an individual — we will begin to see online crimes being committed under the alias of another person.

Risk to personal reputation. Thankfully, nobody was holding a video camera in my face during my college years. But the lives of today’s youth are explicitly documented on You Tube, blogs, photo albums, and social media sites, creating a permanent online record. One corporate recruiter told me that a web search is more important to him than a resume. How will your Google-image affect your future job prospects, personal relationships, political aspirations? Did you read about the teen girls who took pictures of themselves in their bras at a sleepover, texted them to friends and then hours later ended up on porn sites? How do you erase something like that? Google never forgets.

Risk to data and information. A few weeks ago, a computer worm, using Twitter, infected tens of thousands of computers as it replicated itself across the Internet. The worm was created by a 17-year-old to “expose the vulnerabilities” in Twitter. The red-hot social networking/microblogging service has been scrambling to plug cross-site scripting and other Web site vulnerabilities to thwart worm attacks but, as one researcher points out, it’s much easier to misuse the Twitter API as a “weak link” to send worms squirming through Twitter.

Risk to personal health. Neurologists and doctors warn that obsessive immersion in screen technologies and social network sites will lead to short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, weight gain, and a tenuous sense of identity.

Risk to personal productivity. A friend recently told me that he needed to find a way to block himself from social media sites at work. “I’m hooked,” he said. “I can’t stop myself from getting online every minute that I can.” According to a U.K. study, British firms are losing $264 million A DAY on lost productivity due to undercover activities on Facebook. Businesses are starting to look for ways to deal with the social networking problem. Several companies in America already block social media sites.

So, where does this lead?
I’m a fan of social media. These new platforms have connected me to countless interesting people, opportunities and ideas. The purpose of this article is to serve as a counter-point to those who seem to be hypnotized by the hyperbole and beat the drum of social media while ignoring these certain consequences. There is virtually NO dialogue on the risks of the inevitable corruption that will result from having a free and pervasive window into YOUR life.

I’m hoping the dialogue will start now …