Social Media Today asks us: Are you sharing too much online?

The answer, before you even bother to click, is: Hell, yeah!

If television is the vast wasteland of Newton N. Minow’s famous speech, then social media must be some sort of galactic junkyard.

We’re all guilty. Every last one of us. We get involved in ridiculous political discussions, post snarky observations about nothing serious, broadcast images and descriptions of our drinks and meals, provide links to articles and photos and games and more … all as if someone other than ourselves really, really cares.

I do think this is all a phase, actually. As an online society, we’re getting something out of our collective system. Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I believe that the way we use and interact with the internet generally and social media specifically will be radically different in 2022 than it is in 2012.

It better be: How tragic would it be a decade from now to look back at all this and say, “Boy, those were the good old days — then it all turned to shit.”

But maybe we are indeed headed on a relentless plummet toward the bottom, fueled by stone-cold stupidity. Case in point: the data in the infographic posted by Social Media Today in the link above.

Here’s the one that really stunned me: 72 percent of people try to keep their Social Security number private. Which means more people are protecting their Social Security numbers than they are their credit card numbers, driver’s license numbers, phone numbers and credit scores. That’s the silver lining.

But it also means that 28 percent of people are NOT trying to keep their Social Security numbers private.

Think about that. More than one-quarter of the population really doesn’t care all that much about protecting their finances or their identities.

From the official website of the U.S. Social Security Administration:

A dishonest person who has your Social Security number can use it to get other personal information about you. Identity thieves can use your number and your good credit to apply for more credit in your name. Then, they use the credit cards and do not pay the bills. You may not find out that someone is using your number until you are turned down for credit or you begin to get calls from unknown creditors demanding payment for items you never bought.

Is this not common sense, if not common knowledge? Are 28 percent of the population really that stupid?

No wonder identity thieves feel like kids in a candy store … and no wonder the costs of identity theft are so high.

I’m not making this up. I promise.

As any writer or editor worth his or her stylebook understands, the phrase “third party” is sometimes used as a noun and sometimes used as a compound adjective.

Noun: “That website is owned by a third party.”

Compound adjective: “That there is a third-party website.”

About as simple as it gets, right?

With all due respect to my daughter, who is finishing up her first year at Villanova law school: not to lawyers, it’s not.

At least not to the lawyers who reviewed the following text:

You are going to a third–party website that [company redacted] does not control. The website is governed by the third party’s posted privacy policy and terms of use, and the third party is solely responsible for the content, offerings and level of security presented on its website.

The lawyers called for the removal of the hyphen in the first sentence.

The writer responded with this: “We’d prefer to abide by the grammatical rule of using a hyphen when two essentially separate words are modifying a noun.”

The lawyer responded: “No objection to leaving the hyphen, but then add the hyphen to all the ‘third party’ references that did not have the hyphen.”

This is the sort of thing that helps give lawyers a bad name.

Over on business2community, Melissa Agnes seems to be in crisis mode. The site is packed with tons of new posts from Melissa, including How To Empower Your Employees For A Social Media Crisis, The Makings of a Great Social Media Crisis Plan, part 1: Boingo, The Makings of a Great Social Media Crisis Plan, part 2: The Red Cross, and 25 Tips to Overcoming a Social Media Crisis. There’s a lot of good reading there.

As with so many things, though, from developing marketing plans to customer service issues to — well, pretty much anything else in business (or even life, for that matter), there’s a disconnect between the ideal on paper and real-world reality.

For example, take a look at those 25 tips. Tip 1 is “Speak! Don’t stay silent,” tip 4 is “Respond to each comment and complaint” and tip 11 is “Respond in real-time.” Meanwhile, tips 7 and 8 are “Get all the facts before you release your official statement” and “Release a detailed official statement.”

In larger companies, especially, tips 1, 4 and 11 are in direct conflict with tips 7 and 8. Yes, companies and employees want to respond to each comment and complaint, but in the context of a genuine crisis where every comments page is a minefield of legal issues, every comment is an official statement — and getting all the facts before making an official statement can sometimes be a long and arduous process … which makes that tip 11 pretty difficult to stick to.

Tip 19 raises another interesting issue. It says, “Give your advocates the opportunity to come to your defense.” Which makes sense, of course, but do those advocates understand tip 20, “Know which negative comments are not worth engaging with”? Maybe not, so when those advocates come to your defense, the result might be a pissing contest that does more harm than good. Or consider this: Maybe the very process of giving your advocates the opportunity to come to your defense raises a whole new crisis: “Why does Company X need to have their advocates doing their dirty work for them?!”

I guess my bottom line here is that these sorts of tips and case studies make for interesting reading, but every crisis is completely and utterly unique, and therefore requires a completely and utterly unique set of social media responses on the part of the company. Are there lessons we can learn from Boingo and The Red Cross and others? Sure. But when crisis comes knocking at our own doors, we need to take the unique nature of our business into account while responding in ways that are both appropriate to the dynamics of social media generally, and protective of the unique nature of the business specifically.

Takeaway for marketers: In crisis communications, perhaps more so than any other communications discipline, one size definitely does not fit all.

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.

Fast Company recently came up with 10 ways to fix the agency pitch process. They probably could have made it 20 or 25 without too much additional effort.

My biggest problem over the years with the whole process has been a lack of respect on both sides of the table. Agencies feel they’re being part of a cattle call, so they often don’t respect the company enough to do anything other than call it in, or they take an approach that begins with the assumption that they know far more about the company’s business than the company.

Meanwhile, companies don’t respect the agencies enough to thank them for putting in an RFP response effort that requires many thousands of dollars in billable time, and they take the ideas of the agencies they don’t hire and implement them internally or with the agency they do hire.

Either way you cut it, pitching sucks.

Which is why, in my humble opinion, there’s only one way to respond to an RFP: with your best effort, or not at all. If the agency doesn’t respond to your best work, well, you don’t really want to work for them, do you? If the agency receives your RFP response and you never hear from them again, well, you don’t really want to work for them, do you? If the agency steals your ideas, well, that’s the risk you take … and you don’t really want to work for thieves, do you?

Yeah, pitching sucks. That’s why it’s called work.

And by the way, if you’re one of those companies that calls in agencies and puts them through hours and hours of presentation work, makes them travel, listens to their presentation, then ignores them ever after? You suck, too, and it’s no wonder decent agencies don’t really want to work for you.

(Hat tip to Erik Hauser for the heads up on the FC piece.)