When I previously posted about depression and suicidal thoughts, a dear “real world” friend of mine sent me a message saying “But you always seemed so happy!”

That’s incredibly common among people who suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts. We’re often really good at covering our disease. It’s often baffling when someone you know takes their own life, or confesses they struggle with depression.

A lot of people I care about in the social media community are so clearly broken and grieving over a recent loss to suicide. Questions are being asked that are good and healthy, about the nature of healthy, productive relationships and about how relationships become “real.”

But I see a lot of people asking themselves “Did I really know this person? Was the friendship that I thought was real, actually real?” And the big sister/mama in me just wants to give you all a big hug, and tell you that you aren’t asking yourself these questions because of how you met the person, or how often you saw them “in the flesh.” These are the questions that friends, family and associates of suicide victims always ask.

I also want to speak to other people that suffer from depression, and say that it’s so important for you to manage your disease. It’s so important for you to be honest, real and not pretend to be okay when you’re really not okay. It’s important for you to cultivate loving relationships with people who are willing to pursue you, ask the hard questions and not settle for surface-level answers. Use every weapon you have available to fight your disease.

Because otherwise, it will be your friends and family who are left asking themselves unanswerable questions.

img courtesy stickysen on sxc

How about we call out Facebook memes for what they are? Chain letters on steroids.

No, you may not put a social media gun to my head and hijack my Facebook profile with the threat that if I don’t comply, I’ll be labeled an apostate who hates the military, doesn’t care about life-threatening illnesses, and coddles murderers and child abusers.

I supported the military by being a faithful, supportive military wife for the duration of my husband’s tour of duty.

I show concern and support by contributing actual money to impoverished/exploited kids and cancer research.

I show my support for Jesus by earnestly striving to understand and apply the Bible and attempting to love my neighbors.

I don’t say this to pat myself on the back–there’s always more I could do, and probably should do–I say it to illustrate a point.

Can Facebook be a powerful tool for social change? Maybe.  If there is anyone out there who ought to believe in the power of social media to effect social change, it’s me.  My work is sort of contingent on it.

Heck, I work with a few non-profit organizations who are trying to use the tools of social media, including Facebook, to raise donations, recruit volunteers, and promote their causes.

But a meme whose only call to action is to get people to change their status isn’t going to do much of anything.

Brutal honesty time, friends.  Changing your Facebook status is not activism.  It’s a way to pat yourself on the back for doing almost nothing.  And the real danger in that is the temptation to do nothing more than that.

There’s too much actual work that needs to be done to see this world transformed into something better, to waste time patting ourselves on the back for copying and pasting a Facebook status.

To quote Pastor Jon of the Levite Chronicles–it’s the difference between being a Fan and a Disciple.

The problems we face need disciples.  Not fans.

If you want to change the world, change your actions.  Change your mind.  Change your heart.  Not your status.

When you’re learning better ways of doing things, it can be fantastically helpful to have someone who has successfully navigated that territory to show you the way.  Or at least, a way that has worked for them.

"failure" by ilco on sxc

But here’s another thought: you may have even MORE to learn from people who have already boldly gone where you’re headed–and completely faceplanted.

I was thinking about this the other day while shaking my head at myself.  Because I caught myself in a stupid, non-productive pattern of behavior.  Something I should have known wouldn’t work.

I should have known that it wouldn’t work because I’d already seen someone else try the same thing. And because I like this person, I got incredibly angry and frustrated with them for doing it.

So how angry do you think I was at myself for repeating my friend’s mistake?

It got me thinking.  In addition to consciously making note of people I need to watch to learn what to do, I need to consciously note the people who are consistently an example of What Not to Do.

You might wonder why you should make note of what I’d like to call your “anti-mentors.”  After all, if you can see they’re often full of FAIL, won’t you naturally avoid their mistakes?

In theory, sure.  In actual practice, not as much as you’d hope.  At least, that’s been the case in my life.

We are drawn into relationship with people for a variety of reasons.  One of those reasons is because they allow us to see aspects of ourselves that we’d prefer to ignore.  They become sort of a surrogate shadow.  Pay close attention to the people in your life who are driving you nuts.  They may be telling you something important about yourself.

An example of this is my post earlier this week about a friend (who should have known better) making a newbie blogging mistake.  Instead of just getting frustrated with my friend, I stuck with my feelings until I was clear on why that bad post upset me. Eventually, I realized that I’ve either made, or been tempted to make, the same mistake lately.  I’m more tired than usual lately, and when that’s the case, it’s tempting to beg for sympathy in a blog post without actually revealing anything meaningful to my readers.  I apologize if a few of those posts slipped in here before I caught that.

So what about you guys?  Do you have mentors?  Anti-mentors?  Has having a “What not to do” person helped you avoid making some mistakes, or just provided additional fodder for understanding after you’ve made them yourself?

I immediately trucked on over to the site to check it out. There’s a nice video demo available that takes you through the basics, and it’s available for a free 14 day trial. If online reputation monitoring is one of your responsibilities, it’s probably worth your time to test drive Trackur (I know I will be) to see if it’s a good fit for your needs.

Beal makes the rather audacious claim that Trackur “will discover 99% of the web content that matches your entered keywords.” The interface seems to have a nice Ajax-y feel to it, and you can fairly quickly alter how your results are viewed (by date in either direction, alphabetically by title in either direction, just links or expanded descriptions).

There’s apparently also Pro and Enterprise versions, which seem to allow you to check more keywords more frequently, but even the standard version will be a paid subscription service after the two week trial.

Props to Andy for really commanding the online reputation management topic, and for offering what looks like a really usable, useful tool.

I’m not being metaphorical here. I really do believe that addiction theory applies quite well to social media.

To get into greater depth, we have to look at the work of Eric Berne, 20th century psychologist and father of the branch of psychology known as Transactional Analysis. While Berne’s work was controversial at the time, and has been oversimplified ad infinitum in pop psychology books like I’m OK, You’re OK, the foundational principles behind transactional analysis are generally recognized to be a decent working model of how people relate to one another, and many practicing therapists implement transactional analysis principles in their work.

There’s an excellent online tutorial in the basics of Transactional Analysis here, but the quick and dirty version is that human behavior resembles an economic structure. The basic currency of exchange in this “relationship economy” is called a “stroke.” A stroke is any human interaction. Strokes range in value based on intensity. The greeting you exchange with the barista at Starbucks is a relatively low-value Ritual. Rituals are repetitive, predictable exchanges of low intensity strokes. Up at the higher end of the stroke economy, you have Intimacy (which we’re not touching with a ten foot pole for the purposes of this post) and Games, which are closely associated with the idea of Drama.

Anyone who participates in the blogosphere or other social media should immediately get a mental radar ping from that word, because we all know what Drama means in that sense, and that there’s an abundance of it in social media.

Basic Transactional Analysis theory is that we all have a psychological need for strokes. Most people, even though they may have never heard of Transactional Analysis per se, are familiar with the idea that humans crave the attention of others, and will do whatever they need to do to get it. How many times have you heard a disruptive child’s self-destructive behavior explained by the idea that if you can’t get positive attention, you’ll take whatever attention you can get?

So clearly, these are concepts most people are somewhat familiar with to some degree, in some form.

The next idea I want to throw at you is that particularly in the last few decades or so, Western civilization has experienced some significant disruptions in the traditional stroke economy. As many of the cultural mores and traditions have been eliminated which in previous generations provided a reliable stream of Rituals, Pastimes, and Activities (lower value but more plentiful strokes), people have adapted in different ways to compensate.

Am I saying that because we no longer greet the milkman before we leave in the morning, many of us have never seen our mail carrier face to face, and we bank either online or at an ATM, we are now looking online for Tweets, IMs, pingbacks and Digg Shouts to make up the dropping balance in our human interaction balance sheet?

Well, pretty much, yeah.

There’s another level to this, as well. Remember, it’s not just volume that counts in the stroke economy, it’s also intensity. Social media provides a place for people to exchange some relatively high-intensity strokes. The prevalence of flame wars (heated, often personal and pejorative debates that can devolve into Jerry-Springer-like online free-for-alls) on message boards and blogs, “trolling” (the practice of leaving provocative comments on blogs and forums for the specific purpose of creating conflict), and other generally-unpleasant online activities can be at least in part attributed to the fact that they create drama, in the psychological sense.

While flaming and trolling can be viewed as online versions of transactional analysis Games, all the other levels of time structuring are also available on social media sites, from Rituals on up. I do think that Intimacy occurs online (and no, I’m not talking about “adult” sites), but that’s probably not a subject for this post. I will say that Jonathan Field’s recent post on Awake at the Wheel is relevant to that conversation.

So, in summary,

• By nature, human beings are powerfully compelled to seek interactions with each other. Another word for these human interactions is “strokes“
• We determine our “human interaction balance” (which contributes to our overall feeling of wellbeing) according to both the volume and intensity of the interactions we give and receive.
• As postmodern life and technology decreases the frequency of traditional human interactions, we are compelled to seek alternatives. In other words, most of us are living with at least a mild stroke deficit, much as many of us are living with at least a mild sleep deficit.
• For the postmodern knowledge worker, social media participation provides strokes at all levels of intensity. Depending on how bad our personal stroke deficit is, we may be more powerfully compelled to seek strokes through social media participation. The greater your stroke deficit in the “real world,” the more addictive social media participation will probably be for you.

DISCLAIMER: Bear in mind, I’m just an armchair psychologist and professional storyteller/people-observer. This is just my personal theory, based on what I’ve read and observed. But I think it does explain, at least in part, why social media is so addictive.

The conversation on marketer presence and behavior on social media sites continued with a couple of interesting posts. Tad of SEO2.0 had a direct response, and a post from Matt Bailey at Sitelogic spoke to the tendency of marketers to get a little too “friendly,” too fast on social sites.

I’ll leave it to you to catch up on the conversation and form your own opinions, but I am left with a few interesting questions, and my initial thoughts about those questions.

Do marketing and advertising folks belong on general-use social media sites? To me, this seems to be a no-brainer, rather like asking “Do brain surgeons belong on general-use social media sites?” (Aside: I’d personally love to hear some surgeon blog about fixing some guy’s aneurysm. Maybe that’s just me.) “General-use” pretty much implies that it’s a community that should be open to everyone.

While even “general interest” sites do, over time, develop unique personalities and topical focus popularity trends, excluding marketing and advertising people, who are some smart and interesting people, to “preserve the purity of the community” seems a bit draconian.

Do marketers belong on Mixx specifically? I think that Mixx has tremendous potential for marketers who are also avid social media users. Part of social media is sharing what you personally are passionate about. I can’t imagine that for marketers, that wouldn’t include your work and/or your clients. Not all of your work or clients, certainly, but if you’re not excited about some of them, then you’re possibly in the wrong industry, aren’t you?

While folks can quibble about the current marketing value of Mixx, I still think it does have long-term potential (particularly the Groups and they way they handle topics), and it’s probably my favorite tool of choice as a social media user. Ultimately, I think a sustainable social media presence is going to have to involve figuring out what sites have value to you as a consumer of social media first. Mixx fits that bill for me. Sustainable social media participation has to include figuring out which sites fit into your normal, natural workflow (and many thanks to Maki of DoshDosh for helping me figure out ways to expand that fit in a natural way on Twitter).

How can marketers participate in social media in a way that has professional value, yet doesn’t detract from the user experience for other users?

One reason that marketing and advertising professionals are so …focused, for lack of a better word… on social media sites, is that our workdays are often structured around billable hours. We have to justify and account for our time and activities in a way that people in other industries simply don’t have to worry about. However, we need to relax a little and drop that “billable hour” attitude while participating in social media. I’m not saying that tracking the amount of time you spend participating in social media is a bad thing. In fact, some folks who aren’t in marketing and advertising but care about personal productivity could probably stand to do a little of that.

But overall, professionals who work in the marketing, advertising and public relations fields need to become fluent in the language, attitude and etiquette of social media. Chris Brogan had a great post about the difference between the discipline of marketing and the tools of social media. We need to be humble enough to become immigrants, as Tamar Weinberg so aptly put it, and then work our way into resident status. We need to earn the influence we may so desperately crave.

When that happens, we can be both valued members of the social media community, and effective, positive ambassadors of the businesses and work we care deeply about.