A big, hairy Facebook faux pas
I received a hard lesson in Facebook etiquette recently after regarding the Aloha Summit, then tagged several influential bloggers in the note. Turned out that was an error on my part.
While my intention was only to use tags as a notification mechanism, I found out that's not the function tags are primarily designed to serve. Seems several were annoyed that I included them and considered it spam.
One of my blogger friends, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, helped to educate me on the use of tags by saying, "the original purpose of tagging someone in Facebook was to let them know that you mentioned them in your note."
She did go on to say that the use of tags has "evolved to both of the things you mentioned, but not everyone responds to it the same way," and suggested that, if I'm going to tag people in a note, that I explain at the beginning or end of note why I did so. It was good advice that was well-received.
While wiping the considerable amount of egg from my face, let me apologize to those included. Tagspamming was not my intent. I was operating out of ignorance. It's a lesson learned that won't happen again.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the link. I personally get tagged all the time without a mention of me in the note. The reason why people get upset is that when they are tagged, a notification about the note shows up in their Mini-feed. I personally don't mind - if a person knows how Facebook works, they'll know that I'm not necessarily endorsing that post. But I try to be cautious about when I'm tagging other people unless they know me well enough to see that I am not trying to exploit them.
No matter what you do, sometimes you can't avoid someone, somewhere, being offended. But you always have such good intentions that such an innocent faux pas hopefully wouldn't surpass their previous knowledge of you as a stand-up guy. :)
Posted by: Tinu | February 06, 2008 at 08:44 PM
Tinu, thanks for the encouragement and the wisdom of your comments. It's just that, not everyone knows what a stand-up guy I am.
Posted by: Paul Chaney | February 06, 2008 at 09:08 PM
Paul -- I'm not so sure about that.... EVERYONE knows you are a stand up guy!
Posted by: Ann Handley | February 06, 2008 at 10:59 PM