Wow.

To me the creepiest part of this article on Social Beat isn’t that marketers need to be reminded not to be creepy on social media, but that this article is being published in 2011. Any marketer who hasn’t internalized these rules as instinct by now needs to think about finding another line of work.

Pam Moore posts 50 signs of social media addiction over on Social Media Today. If you find most of them apply to you, you might want to consider a recovery program. I suspect it may not be long before we see the 12 steps of Social Media Addicts Anonymous.

1. We admitted we were powerless over social media — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that an offline Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to log off from our computers and turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our offline selves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our social media wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these social media-inspired defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed through social media, and became willing to make amends to them all — but not by sending email, a tweet, or posting on their Facebook walls.
9. Made direct amends to such people offline wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory about the nature of our online lives and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God (rather than our improve our ability to manage multiple social media accounts) as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to social media users, and to practice these principles in all our offline affairs.

Bilal Jaffrey makes my teeth grind with his use of the phrase “in the online space” in his opening sentence, but his heart is in the right place in this Social Media Today post.

In the mad rush to be on Facebook, to leverage the latest Facebook enhancements, to get more people to like your Facebook page, to implement all the Facebook tips for small business that can be found … in all of that, marketers and businesses are forgetting that they’re building on someone else’s platform, not their own.

When all is said and done, don’t you want your online traffic coming to you, not to them?

Because as much as the web isn’t about control, you can nevertheless control the platforms on which your content is disseminated.

Then, when Facebook does something that messes up your communications strategy — like yesterday’s announcement that Facebook pages can no longer send updates — you won’t be as affected by the news.

And let’s face it — especially with something of a social media features war taking place between Facebook and Google+, this won’t be the last major feature overhaul that takes place on Facebook. The last thing you want is for your online communications strategy to get chewed up by all the shrapnel.

(Hat tip to Barbara for bringing the SMT post to my attention.)

“Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.”
—Billy Wilder