The context in which I know people is different from one person, one situation to the next. By and large, this is a good thing. I wouldn’t want my co-workers to know all that my wife knows and my wife wouldn’t be interested in all that my co-workers know.

Not surprisingly, online these relationships play out differently through different social networks. As a fairly engaged social networker (and dork), I recently tested my own social networks for what I’m calling, "social overlap" – the percent of overlapping "friends and followers" I have between the three social networks I am engaged in most: Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. (I highly recommend doing this exercise yourself, it shows a number of revealing insights about yourself. Here are some of mine. I’d love to hear your findings in the comments.

This analysis shows how few of my contacts overlap between different social networking platforms. This online fact echoes my offline reality of having different kinds of relationships with different people depending on the context of how we know one another.

My own lack of "social overlap" is complemented by a recent report from Forrester. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang (who recently left the company) suggests, "Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit." Owyang goes on to say, "This creates friction for consumers who must now manage multiplying personal information and username/password combinations."

As a solution to this "friction" Owyang predicts that people will bring a single online identity from one social network to the next. Early examples of this prediction coming to light are "Facebook Connect," which allows users to "connect" their Facebook identity to any site, and "Open ID," a potential social network standard for a shared identity system.

However, a single online ID seems out of synch with how we (or at least I) naturally relate to others in our offline/real world lives. Maybe I like having different platforms on which to interact with co-workers vs. family members. Maybe I’m not comfortable showing the same side of me to everyone I know, regardless of how I know them. Maybe my lack of "social overlap" online is a good thing…much as it is offline.

The point here is not to knock a single online ID, it’s to ask bigger questions about who we are on the social web. How are we different consumers in different contexts? What permission do we give different brands on different sites? How does your brand fit in with your customers on Facebook differently than it does on Twitter? Because it’s not just a different tool, it may be a "different person" with whom you’re connecting.

These questions point to the critical need to listen first before coming to market with a social media strategy. To understand how your customers think of your brand, product or service as relevant and meaningful in different social media contexts. Because maybe your customers are not the same people in one context that they are in another.

This is what I jokingly, err, awkwardly refer to as "Janitor 2.0"

Like it or not, the creation and adoption of social tools for business, be they blogs, forums, wikis, or otherwise, each comes with their own unique maintenance needs — and yeah, those needs must be tended to; often by a quiet, nameless pool of marketing, PR and web folk who work pretty damn hard to ensure everything else works as it should.

Broken links. Comment spam. Trackback spam. Invite scrubs. Inconsistent tags. Email filtering. Page overloads. Server balancing. Browser incompatibilities. And the list goes on, you get the gist.

It’s all the unspoken, unexpected and undervalued stuff that must happen every day to keep a healthy "conversation" going.

For this reason, it’s a huge defining factor between the success or failure of a social media program. Fittingly, it’s also an important defining factor between those "new media experts" that know what they’re talking about and, well, those that use the word "easy" a lot.

My advice?

Using social media is a powerfully messy business. Anticipate and over plan for the maintenance, upkeep and clean up of every social tool you use, and generally speaking, accept the fact that you have yet another hat to wear, a blue one this time, in this messy middle. Good luck.

Comments

Resource Shelf noted a recent report from researchers at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, where they consider methods of combatting spam on places like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Delicious. A threat exists from spammers who wish to deceive or otherwise annoy users of these sites.

Social sites have minimal requirements to register as a user. In some cases an email address and a password choice provide all a spammer needs to join. Once they are in and engaged in spamming, the question revolves around how to mitigate the spammer as a pest.

The researchers summarized how much of a pest such spammers can be to operators of social sites:

Malicious users can mount several different attacks on a social system. If they know that there’s a limit on how much content they can submit, for instance, they can sign up using different identities. If they know that moderators will block users who post spam, they might try to disguise their attacks by contributing a fraction of “good” content. What malicious users do depends on their sophistication, their goals, and on whether they collude. Because malicious users are a moving target, it’s hard to know what they’ll do next.

The easiest method in controlling spammers relies on the manual approach, where other users identify something as spam. Once a certain threshold has been passed, like downvotes on Digg or Reddit, the spam content simply goes away.

Automated prevention, like the ubiquitous captchas seen on forms all over the Internet, help stop robotic spamming. Social websites could also use rank-based methods, similar to how search engines work, to drop spam deep within the bowels of social search results where it is unlikely to be viewed often.

The researchers also looked at tagging and its challenges. Since tagging can be a subjective medium, a spammer could place an inappropriate tag on an item, and when it is clicked, the tag brings up the spammer’s content.

Beating that means developing a spam model, which can be used to quickly identify unwanted spam content. This entails defining "good" tags for a given piece of content, and assessing other tags for their suitability.

The report’s creators noted how pre-existing solutions to spam, coupled with the detailed logs of user interaction maintained by social websites, make those solutions work even better on the social Web. As with anything in security, implementing them means finding a balance between user convenience and adequate spam protections.

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