Help! Facebook Turned My Friends Into Spammers

by Andrew Hanelly on June 14, 2010

Before you absolutely destroy me in the comments, I’d like to confess: I’ve probably “suggested you become a fan” of something on Facebook*.

And there’s a good chance you denied it. And I probably sent it to you again (thinking you must have missed it). I know you didn’t miss it. I know it wasn’t right.

And I know that because Facebook turned me into an obnoxious marketer.

My bad. I’m working on it.

Admitting the problem is the first step toward recovery, right? And I know I’m not the only one suffering from this terrible condition. I know because I get the Facebook reminder emails. Every day. From my friends. Who are now obnoxious marketers. 

Whatever happened to the old, boring updates?
We used to know what our friends were having for lunch. Sometimes they’d even tell us intimate details of their relationship. Every once in a while, we got to see pictures of them having too much to drink.

I miss those days. Nobody asked me to buy anything back then. Nobody desperately begged for me to click on their links.

Now, it’s pretty much all I see. And as social media has undeniably drifted from the fringe to the mainstream, it’s just getting worse.

We forgot what this was all about. We read articles like “How to Optimize Your Facebook Fan Page for ROI,” and “Getting the Most Out of Your Personal Network,” and “The Value of a Facebook Friend and How It Can Improve Your Bottom Line.”

And that’s when we ruined Facebook. We neglected the real relationships at the other end of the connection. We stopped thinking about people as humans, and started thinking of them as “fans.”

We started making real, live humans feel guilty for not taking part in their own manipulation.

We got emails like this one:

Hey Andrew!

Hope everything is going well with you! Just wanted to say I was sad to see you removed yourself as a fan from [My Page]** It’s a great free resource for [the cause I am promoting]**, so if you change your mind & want to support a friend’s cause, please continue to check out the website and consider becoming a fan again on FB.

  Take care

The trouble is: I really like this person. I really like ALL the people that do this to me. Believe it or not, they are my FRIENDS. And in real life, if we were at a party, they would never push their agenda on me like this. Unless they had too much to drink. And if that were the case, I’d just look forward to seeing their photos on Facebook.

Because that’s what Facebook is for: Maintaining real relationships with real people. Truly being “friend-worthy.” Adding value to the lives of people we care about. Sharing our own stories and thoughts, and sometimes, what we had for lunch.

And if we want to get it back to the way it was, we just have to start acting like it.

This is a lot of whining. What do you suggest we do, Mr. Hypocritical Smartypants?
I’m not suggesting that Facebook can’t be used to share your cause, promote your business, or advance the goals of your organization. I’m just saying that it needs to be done in a more subdued way.

It just means we need to stop barraging people with requests. We need to stop cluttering their feeds with our updates. We need to respect people’s personal space. We need to treat them like the people they are. We need to respect that moderation is the key. We need to respect that they have opted in to having a relationship with us on some level and that relationship has boundaries.

If Facebook is the equivalent of a gigantic cocktail party, than we need to start treating it like one. Instead of handing out brochures, hand out compliments. Ask questions. Add value to conversations.

Sure, you can let people know where you work and what cause you’re involved with, but don’t beat them over the head with it. If they like you, they’ll end up finding out anyway.

I’m not pretending to have all the answers in this grand social media experiment. In fact, what I really have the market cornered on is questions.

I hope that this post exposes me to criticism. I hope a few of you come out of the woodwork and call me out. I know I’ve committed the sin of using Facebook aggressively as a marketing tool. Consider this my penance.

But in the meantime, I need to go post a link to this on my Facebook profile. Every click counts.

*You can totally unfriend me for this.

**Edited to protect the quasi-innocent.

[image: cvander]

Andrew Hanelly

Written by: Andrew Hanelly

Andrew is SVP, Strategy at McMurry/TMG and for one semester in college, was a sociology major. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

  • Joe N

    I suppose this could be read in two different lights: 1) stop spamming me or 2) I would prefer to use this forum for friendships and relationships. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. You’re spot-on with the “real life agenda pushing” comment. And you soften it with “Adding value to the lives of people we care about”, which I feel will resonate with anyone that’s spent more than 5 minutes talking to you. I know FB has (sadly?) become an extension of who we are, but I still try to keep my relationships offline. I use FB as a forum to post dumb things and random thoughts, and sometimes to let people know that I rarely see what’s going on in my life. But I’ve never used of it, or even thought of it, as a personal marketing tool. If that’s what people want to do, I suppose that’s their choice, but if they are going to take offense to me not “liking Tom Brady’s veneers”, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. I think it’s easy to get lost and carried away in the social media age. Sometimes people need a reality check, and to assess what they truly value. I think your article is more of a friendly reminder to that, rather than a seething diatribe as to why they’re all a**holes for forcing their online presence down your throat.

    Well said.

  • bill

    Seriously struggling over the idea of posting this to my Facebook account! It does raise a pretty good question. Not sure if anyone has the answer.

  • Angela

    Your obnoxious friends were just as obnoxious before they joined Facebook, Facebook just put them right in your face.

  • Josh Healan

    It’s not intentional, but my self-promotion is still fairly limited to LinkedIn. To date, Facebook is where I maintain friendships. I have had several professional relationships that have eventually evolved from LinkedIn to Facebook friends but for me it’s usually not until they actually become friends, and not just colleagues. I could see this changing, mainly because my work and personal lives have become so integrated over the years. My professional use of Facebook is typically disguised as me seeking personal recommendations but in reality I am usually doing research, for work. My bigger fears revolve around Facebook becoming more dilluted as they themselves incorporate more ways to sell advertising.

  • Beta Male

    No, I do not want to fan your “male enhancement” page, I don’t care if you created and tested the drug yourself in your basement.

    Angela, is your outlook on life always so cheerful?

  • http://www.twitter.com/hanelly Andrew Hanelly

    @Joe N.: Thanks for the comment. You’re right that this is about a bit of “both” (stop spamming me, let’s focus on relationships). To me, the beauty of social media is that it can enhance existing relationships and build new ones. The rules of relationships still apply, this new medium shouldn’t pave the way for you to be obnoxious, it just gives you an additional point of contact with your network of real, human people. You gotta treat them exactly as you’d treat them in person: be nice, be helpful, listen more than you talk, and treat them as you’d like to be treated.

    @bill: Tell me about it! It was very strange to post a link to this on my Facebook page. So far, no hate mail…yet.

    @Angela: That is one way to look at it. But I guess I’d just question who you are adding to your network, considering you already thought of them as obnoxious in the first place.

    @Josh: Your mention of the integration of your personal and work life is an important one. In fact, I think it’s what fuels the confusion we collectively share about how to use social media. I remember being in a band and handing out flyers to friends asking them to come to shows. I’m sure it was ok the first time (most of them came), but then came continual diminishing returns. In other words, it seems like friends will tolerate a little bit of self-promotion, but if you abuse it, they’ll start to get annoyed. Why? Probably because you aren’t providing much value to a relationship, only taking it. Which is why I think it’s important to make sure you bring value: whether it’s social currency or your time and attention into THEIR lives.

    @Beta Man: Exactly.

  • marc

    Ahh, the image you have on this gives me a headache. Where do people find time to even participate in all of these things i’m getting notices for??

  • http://trafficcoleman.com/ TrafficColeman

    Howdy,

    FaceBook has become a flea market farm for wanna be marketers. They are taken over facebook and spamming other friends like crazy.

    Me as a 10 yr Internet Marketer, I’m just over stated that people will use this type of marketing instead of doing the old seo that works. I personally do seo for over a hundred of my clients when it comes to my company.

    I try to let them know that facebook is a good place to start to get your band out there, but its not the place to setup shop for a lifetime. I even wrote on blog on this subject called “FaceBook Wanna Be Marketers” you can Google it if you want to read it.

    I’m sorry for getting so far off subject, but I just had to express my fillings of the facebook is going..which in the hole like MySpace in a couple of years if people just keep this up.

    Thanks for this post, and this is “TrafficColeman Singing Out”

  • Pingback: Free Beer | Custom Media Blog | Engage

  • Pingback: What Making Sandwiches Taught Me About Marketing

  • Pingback: No Comment: Are Your Readers Pleading the Fifth?

  • Pingback: Tired of Awkward Silence? 4 Tips for Getting Blog Comments – Engage

  • Christy

    This is precisely why I keep my friends “Hidden”. There was an individual who was aggressively *marketing* their project by raiding the list of friends of everyone they knew. Instead of achieving *sales* the individual was reported as a spammer.

    (Great post):-)

Previous post:

Next post: