Twitter Trust #Fails
There's a big difference between a 'Trust Fall' and a 'Trust #Fail' to use the increasingly tiresome valleygirl slang #word Twitter users assign to stuff that doesn't meet their high standards.
A 'Trust Fall' is a trust-building exercise often conducted in turns in a group, in which a person deliberately allows himself to fall, relying on the other members of the group to catch them. They are often performed in corporate team building workshops to get everyone to loosen up and feel more secure.
A 'Trust #Fail' is when you let everyone who can see Twitter, including your 2000 followers, know that you're heading out of town and leaving a lot of expensive video equipment at home.
Israel Hyman, who shared real-time details of his recent holiday on Twitter, was burglarized and lost all his business's video equipment.
"My wife thinks it could be a random thing, but I just have my suspicions," he said. "They didn't take any of our normal consumer electronics."
In the future "he's not going to be announcing when he's heading out of town" online.
That's a pretty obvious case of naivety, but there are other less clear cut cases of trust, such as the St Louis family who are featured in advertising in the Czech capital Prague. A life size family picture in a supermarket window started life as the Smith Family's Christmas card. They posted it on the internet and it was purloined by someone and turned into an ad for a grocery delivery service. The business owner said he would have given them a bottle of wine if they lived nearer for any misunderstanding.
Then there's Nine Inch Nails musician Trent Reznor, who has decided to stop interacting with the online community:
When Twitter made it's way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there's a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I'm not what you projected on me....
I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and "human". I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I'm in love and it's all I think about and that's that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you've projected on me, fair enough - it's probably time for you to leave. You are right, I'm not the same person I was in 1994 (and I'm happy about that). Are you?
Looks like the Metal Sludge contingency has discover Twitter! Finally! For those of you that don't know what this is, please let me explain. Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I've ever come across. It's populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will **** make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could ****.
It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn't stop there - hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are. TRULY ugly on the inside (the outside is obvious)....
....I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.
Trust is a complicated thing, and sadly it tends to swing from unrealistic idealism to overcompensation when things go wrong. A Tweet from @jeffdachis caught my eye this week:
This is so true. It's one thing to fall backwards into the arms of people who are all being paid by your employer, (there will be repercussions if they don't catch you) quite another to trust your 'loosely coupled' friends.
Your newest Facebook friend could be a debt collector, who appear to be completely unregulated in North America. From 'Debt Collectors Using Cute Chicks On Facebook As Bait'
Beware of 'friends' on Facebook! That random cute girl who added you on Facebook might be a skip tracer for a collection agency!!
About four months ago due to a forgotten bill I became a client of CBV Collections in Vancouver. I made my payments on time, and had no issues. A little bit afterward, "Jenny Anderson" added me as a friend on Facebook. As I did not want to be rude (and she was a cute girl), I accepted her as a friend.
This morning, in my news feed, her status line was changed to:
"haha you guys i tricked you all my name is actually Emily and i work for cbv collections as a skip tracer i bet you guys got calls from them saying you owe money thats all my doing :) you want to call and bitch? i dare you to call me 604-[redacted]!!! I wait to hear from you :)"
This side of 'social media' is only going to get worse: it also doesn't appear to occur to those getting excited about @delloutlet generating $3 million in sales by offering deals through Twitter that this is very much home shopping network TV territory. Nothing wrong with bargain hunting of course but this is the antithesis of branding work, which many social media marketing enthusiasts aspire to.
There's a world of difference between brand building, which is essentially building trust for a product or service, and losing control of that carefully crafted image to crude bargain basement marketing.
In business a breach of trust can be catastrophic: 'trust is cheaper than control' is only true within certain parameters where loss of trust and control isn't game ending. Common sense needs to prevail in all areas of life.
Regardless of what happens in people's social life online media, the role of business collaboration networks is to build trust and confidence in employees so they feel secure to share, learn and build together in a nurturing online environment...
Trust Fall image from Synergy Learning Systems