Social media is not for everyone. Does your butcher shop even need a web site? 

But here's the thing. If you are going to do something, put your heart, soul and possibly money into it and do it right. I'm looking at two Facebook fan pages. I call these brand pages. One has many thousands of followers, the other about 10% of the first, yet these represent equally well-known luxury brands with a nearly identical consumer demographic. They were created at about the same time. There is only one reason why there is a ten-to-one ratio of activity and followers. Can you guess what it might be?

Page A is open to fans posting photos, videos, and comments. Page B is not. Page A has a dialog going on week after week. Page B has a continuous feed of vanity posts, liked by people either from the company or from their agencies. Page A wants to engage with you. Page B wants to preach and blurt. Not by coincidence, the same two have Twitter accounts with the same comparison of engagement level. Page B does a little better on Twitter, because it started earlier and Twitter is more forgiving. Why? Because your posts are not usually read all lined up like they are on Facebook, so the lack of engagement isn't obvious. If you could examine the Twitter activities of of the pages on a tool like Thinkup, you'd see a huge difference: Thinkup calls Page B a "broadcaster". It's really just a news feed with no dialog at all.

Take a long hard look at what your company (product, brand or service) is doing out there. Is it possible you don't get it? One of the first things you need to do is to put yourself in the place of a visitor. Why do they come? How easy is it to find what they've come for? If you can honestly say that you've answered those two questions and that your page or site meets those expectations you've determined, you're good. If not, you'll need to decide whether it's worth continuing.

If you understand this statement, you won't need to read further: If anything you send electronically is not encrypted, it isn't private.

I was thinking about messaging someone on Facebook today. He wrote me about a mutual friend. I wanted to answer with a wry comment about my hoping to find my high school French teacher on Facebook, but thought better of it. In the case of Facebook, things change there from week to week, and some day I'd not be surprised to find all kinds of things revealed either to the world at large, or to all your friends. Messages on Facebook are like leaving a message on someone's answering machine. You know in those suspense movies where someone leaves a message and the killer hears it and knows the husband won't be home for two hours? Even if Facebook never breaches your privacy, what if your friend's laptop is stolen or hacked?

Email isn't private, either.

You must realize that many people could be reading your email for the most legitimate reasons. A few years ago, I was asked to investigate an anomaly in a customer's mail delivery services. I always inform customers that in such an investigation, we will likely see messages written to them. This is precisely how I came to see a compromising message from a known and respected online personality offering specific promotional services for hire to this customer. Such services would constitute influence peddling and a conflict of interest. It's very lucky for the peron involved that I was the one who saw this mail, rather than it being intercepted by, say, a reporter.

Private messaging on Twitter could suddenly be hacked, and if nothing else, accounts have been taken over en masse in the past. I also just got an email from a guy whose Gmail account was hacked. We've all seen how destructive the odd SMS could be. I'm not saying you need to encrypt every message you send. Just be aware that, like the husband of the innocent murder victim in that thriller, someone may "overhear" your message, even accidentally and that what you say in a message might be used, quoted out of context, or exploited in ways we haven't thought of yet.

I registered for Facebook in January 2007. I can't find the exact date I asked to leave, but it was probably later that year, around October. Much to my surprise, Facebook had no way to actually delete an account, you could only deactivate it. That meant, you couldn't log in but your data, all photos, anything you'd ever posted was going to remain with them. I emailed Facebook about this and was told that it was "very complicated" for them to remove my personal data. "You might want to come back." I kept up a two-week discussion with Facebook which ended with them claiming to have removed all of my data, although I have no way of knowing this was true.

I believe today, three years later you can delete your account, although I still don't know what happens to your data. I do know that Facebook, while it may be fun and even useful, is not what I want. Without going into a point by point, I don't see the benefit of adding a stream of personal data to a corportate entity so they can make money (which they need to do to stay in business) by selling it to other commercial entities. I don't feel the distractions of popup suggestions as an advantage to me. I'd much rather have friends tell me specifically what they're doing, and discover things serendipitously by talking to people and using my own prejudices filters that give each friend a credibility weight.

Here is why someone else says he canceled his FaceBook account. Quote: "a large part of what I have to do on Facebook now is adapt to their changes on their terms. This is unacceptable to me, especially when I don’t see the website adding significant benefits."

As soemone who has followed technology since a very early age, I love the idea of always being connected to multiple streams of communication, yet a don't get a good feeling from Facebook. Quite the contrary, I see Facebook as a huge, very media-rich forum of the kind I abhor in the wine or tech world.  I realize many people love it, including some who are far from newbies or technophobes. What I also observe though, is that the most clueless people I know are big on Facebook and they love friending a large number of people without regard to quality.

I think the number of very close friends, the ones you'd do almost anything for, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The next wave might have between 10 and 50 people you know well. When tese numbers get into the hundreds and thousands, it isn't Dunbar's number that worries me, it's the fact that it becomes CRM or in this case ARM: Acquaintance Relations Management.