Full disclosure: I am not a social media guru, or ninja, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. I use Facebook; I use Twitter; I use Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm, Grooveshark, LinkedIn, Ravelry. I understand how great every one of these things can be for your business or your cause or your personal brand. [Sidenote: did you know that every single client I've ever had for I Love Life I Love You has been a friend or a colleague - someone that sees me every day online and/or IRL? I didn't, until I stopped to make a list of past clients over the past two years.]

But earlier this year, I saw firsthand how damaging it could be to misuse these things. And I reacted – slowly, because the person in question was a friend, after all – but it ended badly.

I have an acquaintance I met several years ago. We’ve kept in touch mostly via social media, and as such I’ve always been aware of her creative projects. She recently quit her day job to do what she wanted – make art – and it seemed like it’s working out well for her. So she started to tell people about it.

Nearly every time I’d log in to Facebook, I’d find an invitation to become a fan of Wheee!DJs, CreativeDepartment Inc., and Funfunfun – The Band. Yes, I should give her a little bit of credit, because it wasn’t every time, but we’re still talking about multiple invites a day sometimes.

Guess what? I don’t really go out. I don’t attend the events of Wheee!DJs, because I have a difficult time with crowds and I don’t really drink that much anymore. Funfunfun is a decent band, but I don’t feel passionately enough about their album to advertise it on my Facebook page. And CreativeDepartment sounds like a pretty cool organization, but they provide a service in which I’m not even remotely interested, and for which I’m hardly a member of its target demographic.

Still, almost every day. “Sandy McSanderson has suggested you become a fan of Wheee!DJs.” It’d be different if these were email invitations, because then I could tell Gmail to send messages like these from this person directly to the archives, skipping the inbox altogether and requiring no action from me. But Facebook doesn’t offer that option for fan pages. I can’t click “Ignore all invites from Sands McSanderson,” because that button doesn’t exist for fan pages [though it does, thankfully, for applications like Zombieville or Farmtown or whatever]. Also, when I end up on a mailing list I don’t want, I can click “unsubscribe,” but there was no “Please don’t ask me again!” button. So every time I logged in, I had to deal with these unwanted invites.

I know what Sandy was up to. Facebook allows you to invite all your friends at any given time to become fans of something you’re promoting. And I understand, I really do. These entities are things that Sandy cares a lot about – she works hard for them and has helped build every single one from the ground up. Who wouldn’t be proud of that? Hell, I’m proud of her for it.

But that didn’t change the fact that what she was doing – giving me unwanted information in unwanted amounts – was spamming me. Even worse, she was doing it via a friendly medium – making use of our friendship to try and hard-sell me something I didn’t want, and making it really difficult for me to ask her to stop doing it.

The irony is, of course, that whenever Funfunfun/CreativeDepartment/Wheee!DJs does something awesome, for which I’m totally one of their right people, I’m not going to listen. I’m already in the habit of clicking “delete” without looking at what it actually is. I don’t trust anything Sandy sends me anymore, because I know she’s not listening when I say “no thanks.”

How would you react to a situation like this? Do you have any similar experiences? How did you deal with it

Related posts:

  1. Curation! Or, Why I Learned to Tumbl.
  2. 8 Things I Learned from Playing Classical [and rock and roll!] Music
  3. Faithful Friend: 5.13.2011
  4. Inspiration: 1.27.2009