The Social Media Marketer

Social Media Information- How Much Is Too Much?

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There's a saying popping up on Facebook this week that's pretty funny.

“Facebook wants to know what I'm thinking. Twitter wants to know what's going on. Foursquare wants to know where I've been. All my websites are turning into a really jealous girlfriend.”

Yes, social media sites can be quite needy at times. To keep up with them and keep them current, you need to update them all the time. Just like that jealous girlfriend, you have to pay attention to them and give them constant reassurances in the form of new photos, status messages and content.

But have you ever wondered when enough is enough? Do you sometimes think you're sharing too much social media information on your sites, to the point that having them is harming your business instead of helping it?

And it's not only the official business postings that can cause problems for a company. According to Proofpoint Inc., a survey on policies and data loss revealed:

• 17 percent of companies have had problems with confidential, sensitive or private information being posted to a social network site.
• 10 percent of companies have disciplined an employee over social networking policies, and 8 percent of companies have fired an employee for violating policy.
• 45 percent of companies worry that sensitive information is being posted online.

The use of social media information to promote your business can be tricky at best-- and can also cause you some serious problems in the near future.

Take the website limewire.com, which many people online use to share music and video clips. The charm of Lime Wire is that when you download from there, you can listen and download pretty much everything you want to download for free.

Now, we're not saying it's right to download your music for free. After all, shouldn't the artist and record company make a little bit off that talent?

That's exactly what the owners of some very prominent record companies believe too – to the tune of a $75 trillion (yes, you read that right, trillion with a “TR”)

The lawsuit was announced last month. To put $75 trillion into perspective, the companies involved won a ruling against Lime Wire last May, and requested damages.  If this lawsuit comes through, Lime Wire would owe five times as much as the national debt.

Seems that in addition to operating its site, Lime Wire was also tweeting about itself, complete with song leads, to lure in new customers. The record companies got wind of the tweets and filed their suit.

The lawsuit hasn't had much success, with one judge saying she found the request ”absurd” because the lawsuit stretches copyright laws thin.

But think about it. Lime Wire is a company that might just have abused its social media capabilities by announcing what it was doing though so many tweets.

Have you ever been guilty of that kind of thing? Do you feel the need to announce every little thing you do when you're dispensing social media information?

Well, you could also be hurting your company .

So how do you know when you company is putting too much social into its social media?

1. Is there personal information about you employees? If someone has recently been fired, did a person involved I the firing go online and talk about it? That's too much inside information for the general public to hear.
2. Does your page include trade secrets? It's all well and good to be proud of your work, but it's not good to tell everybody how you do it.
3. Are you using social media to pick future employees? If you are, are you being careful not to use what you see against them, if what you see represents questions you can't ask them. For example, if you see a prospective employee with photos of her young children, you can't decide not to hire that person based on that information. That's grounds for a lawsuit.
4. Are your employees embarrassing you online and through your website? Are they posting photos and status updates from your last convention in Las Vegas?

Basically, it's like this. If you wouldn't put it on your billboard in the middle of town, you shouldn't put it online. Even when a profile is erased, that social media information can be subpoenaed in a court of law.

Information is a great thing. But when there's too much information, your social media networking can turn on you with very little warning.