Social media is the place where you always get a live, personal experience of what’s the right and wrong way to do things. Each new site has its tools and services which are misused more often that not. Take Facebook for example! There is a right way to fill in a profile, a right way to post on your wall, a right way to post on someone else’s wall, a way to friend people and a right way to interact with your social connections. There’s of course the less rare to spot wrong way of doing all that. But the thing that kept ticking me off recently is photo tagging.

There is this not so new habit of uploading an irrelevant photo that some might find funny or endearing or just different. But then comes the ugly part – in an attempt to get attention from your contacts, you start tagging everyone you are “friends” with to get them to visit your profile. They are not in the picture, most are not even interested in the photo topic. Part of the people you tag will come by and comment. Which results in a notification flood to the inbox of those who couldn’t care less about your photo. 

First you waste their time, as the normal attempt is for them to check the tag, unless you did that before. Then they have to delete all comment notifications from their inbox, which mind you might not be the quietest place on earth anyway.

Is this acceptable in any way? I am inclined to let it slide when someone wants to send best wishes and a card to a larger group. I still find the practice annoying, but I am sort of OK with it. But it has to be some sort of national holiday, preferably one that I celebrate. Other than that, that’s just abuse and plain spamming. See, just posting the photo to your profile and sharing it on your wall would already mean I’d see it in my Facebook stream. Tagging me when I have no real connection with the photo is just pushing something down my throat. I don’t like it and I’ve recently started unfriending people who do it.

So what’s the proper way to tag people? Tag only those who are in the said photo. If you think someone else might be interested, although they are not in the actual picture, you can always send them a message and the link to the photo. If they want to join the conversation around it, they will. If not, they will remain in the anonymity social networks still manage to provide us with from time to time.

From an online brand management perspective, this practice of tagging people in irrelevant photos to remind them you exists should disappear from the face of Facebook. It portrays you as abusive, spamming and disrespectful of people’s limited time and generally overflowing email accounts. From a purely casual social networking usage perspective, it portrays you in the same way, only you lose friends not business opportunities.

Over to you: do you think tagging people who have nothing to do with the photo is acceptable or downright annoying? What would you do in such a case?

Google’s long awaited social network project, Google+, has been recently released to lucky few, while the rest of the world willing to try the “not Facebook but like Facebook” new kid on the social front are bound to wait. While in most cases restricting your beta release to a restricted group might be a bad idea, in Google’s case it seems to be working great.

Browsing my Google Reader today (yes, my online life is completely dependant on Google), I saw a quite a lot of stories on how to get invites faster, news roundups including the Google announcement, reviews, good or bad, and everything in between. While some proclaim Google+ another failure at getting the social concepts right from the search giant, others are already focusing on the features and how to leverage this new networking channel. Bottom line, the Google+ project keeps getting lots of coverage. 

Even if some were not that interested in trying a new social site after finally getting the hang of Facebook and Twitter, the fact that they can’t just access it at will does spike their curiosity. If you’re like me and want to try something before deciding if it works for you or not, then you’re probably also looking forward to getting  to play with Google+.

One secret of social media sites is that while some fail and other succeed, they all attract Internet users who want to test them. People are looking for a shiny new toy or a new way to promote their business, but regardless of their reasons, they will try a lot of new comers. I know I tried FriendFeed, Plurk, Reddit, Mixx and other such websites when they showed up and never used them or stopped using them along the way. And there were hundreds of thousands like me.

Google is Google. We love to hate them and keep a close eye on everything they do. So launching something new that a lot of people do want to try (just for kicks or because they secretly love to hate Facebook just as much) and then restricting access is a plan bound to make people anxious and eager to get access even more. Sure, some will be alienated, but when the secret society turns into public access for everyone and anyone, there will be hordes rushing in to try it. Maybe more than half will call it quits after a few days, maybe they’ll stay. The initial strategy still works!

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Welcome to the 14th editon of WOBM’s reading roundup! Hope you enjoy it and find something useful to help 2009 will be the year of increased interaction between brands and their targets. This is what Shannon Nelson of Pierce Mattie Public Relations believes will happen in next year’s business world.

Marketing and Sales, two deparments for which lots of virtual ink has flown, especially when it comes to them collaborating more effectively. Kyle Flaherty of EngageInPR has published an interesting article on what marketing should learn from sales.

There’s been quite a lot said on bad blogger pitches and they still happen. Here’s a nice list of the biggest 5 mistakes ever made when approaching a blogger, from the other side of the email – PR Meets Marketing. I’m guilty for more than half, not necessarily with bloggers.

Chris Brogan, just like yours truly, is not a big fan of Facebook. Yet he wrote an amazing guide on how not to be a jerk over there.

Our education is something we need to keep improving. Here are 5 free ways to do just that spotted by Women on Business.

What do do if your clients don’t read blogs? And a lot of people don’t or don’t know what they’re reading is a blog. Telling them won’t help, as they might get irritated. So here are five ways to approach those who are not blog lovers from Michael Martine of Remarkablogger.

If you’re wondering which are the do’s and don’ts of video, Benjamin Wayne has published a extremely insightful guest post on this topic on Drew’s Marketing Minute.

And to end this week’s edition in a cheerful way, here’s a funny and easy html guide for copywriters from Conversational Marketing.

Did I miss something really important? Please share it in the comment box!

It’s today! And while not all languages have a dedicated pirate vocabulary, we’re all fascinated by these seamen. It’s a fun day and everyone seems to be talking about it. I first found out of it from John Cass of PR Communications. Through his post, I found out everything about this day.

What then caught my eye was Barbara Rozgonyi’s article on how the buzz around this day evolved in the last two years. I wonder how it will all evolve now that Google is joining in and Facebook is teaching us how to talk “pirate”. I’m sure Barbara’s search results will double in a few days!

Now, if you’re like me and can’t talk like a pirate with your friends, here are some other ideas to celebrate: invite your friends over and have a pirate themed party (this will require great event planning efforts ), watch some pirate themed movies or read something pirate related. Have fun!