A Writer's Guide to Interactivity and Privacy

This week, I performed an exercise in social media interactivity and privacy that I thought might help you.

I took the time to divide better than 750 people who are my “friends” on Facebook into categories of access by creating three lists — gold, silver and bronze. The categories are easy to define:

• Gold — All access. No change. The person sees everything. This meant the person is probably related to me, is a close friend or that I’ve had multiple person-to-person or online interactions that resulted in something positive in my life.
   
• Silver — A friend or an acquaintance. I’ve probably interacted more than one time with the person, but don’t know them quite well enough to put into the gold category. However, they receive almost all the same access as gold people.
• Bronze — An acquaintance. Someone with whom I have had very little or zero interaction. Someone I know through an online forum, a high school friend with whom I rarely interact or someone who I bumped into at conference. You can’t see my posts and you have access to a limited amount of information.

Once I divided the people into the three lists, I went into the “manage account” tab of and set the permissions using the “customize” tab, selecting those lists. It took some time, but I could specifically customize access to a great many things, including posts and photo albums. The entire event took about three total hours, including writing this article.

In all of the above, the keyword is “interaction.” The litmus test question was a simple one: Do you comment on my posts, photos or other items placed on my wall? How often? What sort of quality? In dividing up people into these lists, I discovered that:

• There are 266 people on the gold list, 464 on the silver and 22 on the bronze.
• I exorcised about 20 people from my friends list. I also deleted about 15 pages that I followed.
• I know every single one of the 752 people on my friends list through an online interaction or a face-to-face meeting. Or, we’re related.

My proclivity is to continue to give people access to my Facebook information. Some would argue that the 266 are really the ones I should keep. The others I should purge. I disagree. All of the people here connected with me or I connected with them for a reason. Plus, networking is networking, regardless of the platform. Further, I don’t friend everyone who requests it of me and I friend a sliver of those “recommended” to me by Facebook. Meanwhile, I’ve created a “fan” page (or what is now a “like” page) for a more specific purpose.

And while this was a good exercise to take note of the level of interactivity I have with people (and that they have with me), my level of privacy is unchanged. That is, I take care of my privacy settings before I reach the keyboard, not after. There’s a whole litany of things I will not publish on any platform, even email. I’ll continue to that standard on my Facebook wall, on my Twitter feed and elsewhere.

For better or worse, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media sites are giant marketing channels. You market yourself. Others market themselves to you. In effect, you become a brand; a product or service that is marketed to hundreds, maybe thousands. In turn, your followers and friends are marketing and branding themselves with you. You do that in physical space with the way you dress, talk, walk, smile, stand and interact at work and at home.

Meanwhile, those social media channels are now used by credit houses, employers and anyone else with access to find out more about you. Couple that with the flood of information sold about mortgages, addresses and so on as found on a site like Spokeo, and it becomes that much more important to safeguard privacy before I reach for the bullhorn and begin to talk.

With this exercise complete, I now need to see how it works and fine tune it. And again, I’ll emphasize: the lists are about interactivity, not privacy. Privacy is solved before I reach the keyboard, not after. I’m sure I’ll move some people from one list to another. However, this is probably the right solution for privacy and interactivity.

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