Over on Business2Community, Mai Overton offers up three reasons to be thankful for social media. Feels like a bit of a stretch to me, and I’m not sure how the photo of the homeless man ties in (I swiped it anyway), but it feels like less of a stretch to come up with three reasons to hate social media, to wit:

Social media is a ridiculous time suck: The other day, ZDNet reported that 10.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook daily. There are 525,600 minutes in a year. That means the equivalent of somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 years–or 286 lifetimes, assuming an average lifespan of 70 years–are wasted on Facebook each day liking things, watching videos, sharing pictures, making snarky comments and on and on and on. Imagine 286 people spending their lifetimes trying to cure cancer. Or doing volunteer work. Or reading great novels. Or anything productive. (Like maybe helping the homeless?) Tomorrow, imagine another 286. The day after that, imagine another 286. And on and on and on.

Social media is hurting businesses: Consider the  typical small business that’s trying to make it in the digital world today. They finally get a decent website built, and now they have to figure out how to integrate Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and all the rest into their business strategy. So they buy and read books and attend presentations and call meetings to develop strategies and then test this tactic and that tactic and focus their brainpower on trying to figure out social media when, instead, they ought to be focusing on making better products or providing better customer service.

Social media is boring: I don’t want to see a photo of the creme brulee you made, I don’t care that your dog just peed on the couch and I don’t need hundreds of people reminding me that it’s Monday and that Monday sucks. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s the first day of trout season, I don’t feel like voting in whatever stupid poll or survey you’re trying to suck me into and I don’t need you to broadcast your every move via Foursquare because the degree to which I care that you’re at Trader Joe’s is incalculably infinitesimal. Just stop it.

Takeaway for marketers: I’m not saying social media should go away (I’m as guilty as anyone of having been sucked into the social media vortex). I’m simply saying it needs to be placed (and kept) in perspective.

If you’ve been following the story of Pinterest‘s meteoric rise with more than just passing interest, you’ve probably noticed the criticism the site has received for its privacy policy.

Stories like this one from Above the Law have detailed how Pinterest “screws its users.” Sites like The Social Interest had plenty of suggestions about how Pinterest could make things better.

Pinterest has been listening. This morning they sent the following email to their users:

Updated Terms of Service

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on an update to our Terms. When we first launched Pinterest, we used a standard set of Terms. We think that the updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy are easier to understand and better reflect the direction our company is headed in the future. We’d encourage you to read these changes in their entirety, but we thought there were a few changes worth noting.

• Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.
• We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.
• We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.
• Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.

Like everything at Pinterest, these updates are a work in progress that we will continue to improve upon. We’re working hard to make Pinterest the best place for you to find inspiration from people who share your interest. We’ve gotten a lot of help from our community as we’ve crafted these Terms.

Thanks!

Ben & the Pinterest Team

Sounds good. But does it solve all the potential issues? First Post Technology thinks that maybe it doesn’t. We’ll see. Meanwhile, TechCrunch and The Next Web discuss not only the fact that the terms are updated, but address why that’s happening now: because Pinterest is preparing to develop and release APIs for third-party services and developers.

Takeaway for marketers: If you think Pinterest is growing fast now, wait till those APIs hit.

Of course not. That’s why, in a world where the news seems to be filled with endless stories of legal system absurdities, it’s heartening to hear some common-sense legal news from the left coast.

Heartland Automotive Services, a franchisee of Jiffy Lube, was sending text messages with discounts to cell phones–without obtaining the express permission to do so from the owners of those cell phones.

If you’re focusing on tweets instead of posts, you might want to rethink that strategy — at least according to this 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report. Fully 59 percent of companies surveyed feel that blogging is critical (25 percent) or important (34 percent) to their business.

Why? Because blogging delivers lower costs per lead, and there’s a direct correlation between blog post frequency and new customer acquisition.

Sounds good, right? Wait, there’s more: There’s similarly positive information about SEO and social media.

Of course, while the report delivers scads of great data about inbound marketing (customers reaching out to companies as opposed to the other way around), let’s remember that the report is provided by HubSpot, a company that focuses on … internet marketing.

Still and all, there’s some great info in here that, even if you take it with a grain of salt, neverthless delivers some compelling arguments for focusing on blogging, SEO and social media.

Takeaway for marketers: Read it. Print it. Think about it.

Here’s one that crossed my desk recently that … well, it just makes my teeth grind. In order to protect the innocent, I’ll present an analogy to the actual situation.

Let’s start with the following sentence: “A well-known writer was seeking a part-time job.”

The company with the website on which that sentence appears many times wants to score high in search results for “well-known writer” and “part-time job.”

The company pays a hefty fee to a major SEO firm to provide recommendations about how to improve its search engine results.

The SEO firm realizes that the public isn’t using the hyphens: They’re typing “well known writer” and “part time job” into the search engines.

The SEO firm recommends removing the hyphens from the website copy.

The company removes the hyphens. The copy on their site now reads: “A well known writer was seeking a part time job.” Not once, but many, many times.

This is wrong.

I don’t care what the SEO impact might be, it’s wrong.

In that sentence, “well-known” and “part-time” are compound adjectives. As such, modifying the words “writer” and “job” respectively, they are to be hyphenated.

That’s it. No debate. That’s the way the language works, and to make a conscious and thoughtful decision to present incorrect grammar is an insult to any literate person (though, to be fair, those ranks are thinning all the time).

“Business” is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language, but you’ll never find the New York Times changing the name of their online section to “Busness” or “Buisness” or whatever in order to boost more traffic to their site.

At least I hope not.

I get the desire for higher search engine results. Believe me, I really do.

But this is just not okay.

Takeaway for marketers: Standards, people, standards! Using improper grammar in order to gain a bit of SEO advantage is flat-out wrong as wrong can be. End of story.

MARCH 17 UPDATE: It turns out that pressing this issue caused a deeper dive into the data which revealed that Google results for keywords with the hyphen are 99 percent the same as without the hyphen. So while in the past the hyphen was needed to facilitate an exact match, Google has evidently gotten smarter with their algorithm, so the hyphen isn’t necessary in this sort of case. Chalk one up for good grammar.