A girl in Europe invites a few friends over via Facebook.
The invite is public instead of private.
Of all the 1,000′s of invites that go out every day… of all the personal information that gets shared publicly by accident… her invite goes viral.
1,000′s of people show up.
Lessons:
- Crank up your default privacy settings. If you don’t already know how to do this on Facebook, what are you doing on Facebook?! This could have been you!
- To make sure it’s not you, log in to Facebook and click on the small, white triangle in the top right corner of the screen—the one on the blue bar across the top. Click “Privacy Settings” from the dropdown menu and right in the middle of the page, where you can “Control Your Default Privacy,” select Friends.
- Mitigate the inevitable. Sure as God put little green apples on this earth, you will one day mess up, and send a private message to all your contacts. Mitigate the potential for disaster by eliminating “friends” who are actually strangers. Have your online world more closely match your “in real life” world.
- Mitigate further. In the event that your real world network includes people you don’t actuallBr like, trust, or want to spend time with, cut them out of your online world. If possible, cut them out of your life altogether.
- Brace for the sh•tstorm. Sometimes, the thing you’re dealing with is just so much bigger than you that there’s nothing to do but ride it out.
Technology has the power to bring people together quicker than ever before. This is often a good thing… but right now our ability to bring people together exceeds our understanding of how to control crowds,and that means that there is a danger here, too.
Don’t be afraid, don’t try to go backward, but be aware and tread carefully. What happened here is no joke.
Jason Seiden is CEO of Ajax Workforce Marketing. Ajax amplifies brands by aligning employees' online messaging.
I'm Jason. I run a brand agency with a specialization in workforce marketing.
