People are quitting Facebook.  Though it seems the cyber-crack of our Internet age is proving difficult for millions to let go of. If you’re embracing the concept of quitting facebook and giving up your daily check-ins on your newsfeed, I have a question for you: Why stop there? I ran a little experiment about a year ago on Twitter. A co-worker of mine with a sharp mouth had a bad habit of tweeting before thinking. In fact, one of her opinionated tweets brought some legal problems to the agency I was working for at the time. She didn’t change her ways however, and continued to tweet whatever came to mind. She posted a tweet one day that was private corporate information and not suitable for public consumption on Twitter. She was told to delete it and did so promptly. The tweet was only on her Twitter page for a few hours. I had previously subscribed to her Twitter feed via RSS and was able to read the stream on Google Reader without having to go to Twitter. Knowing the post had been deleted, out of curiosity, I scrolled through her previous tweets to discover that even the tweets she had deleted from her Twitter page were still available on the RSS feed.

There’s a lesson in this story. Your posts, your info, your pictures and your videos are out there and they’re staying out there. You can delete all you want. You can migrate your whole web life to another web app with a better privacy policy. Just remember, whoever wants it already has it and in some cases, it never really goes away. It reminds me of that line from the original Fast and the Furious movie when Vin Diesel’s character – Dom says, “…I had Jesse run a little background check on you, Mr. Brian Earl Spilner. He can find anything on the web, anything about anyone. So, why bullshit?” Truer words were never spoken Vin.

Don’t post anything that you don’t want anyone out there to know. Think twice about posting those bikini pictures from Cancun and please don’t drink and post.  By all means, if you want to join the group that has made a commitment to quit Facebook by May 31^st, you should definitely do that. The privacy debate that has circled around Facebook in last few months really just underscores the “what” more than the “where”.

In the frenzy of trying to get social media apps to market, do most companies really know what they expect social media to do for them?  Are they aware that they democratize their product by opening up social media channels? Are they aware that it may already be happening?

It seems to be an easy choice; most execs will say “we want to be where the people are!”. Of course it’s a great way to gain visibility, find your audience and grow your audience but you have to be prepared for the organic nature of social media. The original question remains – what do you want it to do for you?

Growing an audience is great but if you’re in the business of making money, you need to sort out how social media will enhance your revenue stream. Assumptions are dangerous as community members will not necessarily convert into customers. The key is to identify what the problem is before you can go about developing a social media strategy.

Creating a comprehensive social media map is a good place to start. You don’t have to be an information architect to do this. Just start with one or two channels, say Facebook for example and draw on a white board how a community might grow around your product. As you visualize, some questions will emerge:

• What activities will they engage in?
• Are the conversations around your product sustainable?
• If it’s a subscriber model, how do you keep the community interested and coming back for more?

As you go through this exercise, you will start to see what a rudimentary pathway to a purchase could look like. Don’t worry if there are more questions than answers. The important thing will be to have the questions ready when you go to hire a social media consultant. Now you have a direction and some problems to solve and are well on your way to a social media strategy.

CommonCraft has a great way of explaining social media and social influence marketing in plain English: