So apparently, as of today if you’ve imported your blog into your friendfeed timeline, those that subscribe to your feed in friendfeed are now considered to be part of your subcriptions along with Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo and anywhere else people can subscribe to your blog.  Read the post about it here.  This means feedburner and other subscription tools will include those subscriptions in your stats.  The response from the social web? An overwhelming #FAIL.

RSS subcription statistics are a useful tool that allows you to see how many of your readers are committed to reading your publication on a regular basis.  When someone adds your feed to their google reader, or Blogline, or any of these services, they receive all of your new posts whenever you write them.  This is not necessarily the case with Friendfeed.  In fact, this is hardly ever the case.  To name just a few reasons why this new addition sucks:

1. There are a number of reasons why someone might subscribe to your Friendfeed (FF).  The concept of friendfeed is that you can import your updates from a number of different services, including your blog, twitter, facebook, and more.  That means that someone may subscribe to me because they’re interested in my twitter and facebook updates without ever really having interest in my blog.
2. You are forced to either read everything in other reader tools.  I use google reader, and if someone posts a new blog post, I can either read it, or just click “mark as read” but the point is that I’m aware that a new post exists.  On FF, similar to twitter, you can miss a post, and unless you go back to check if it’s there, you’ll have no idea you missed it.
3. Friendfeed isn’t as active as it may claim to be. Not too long ago, friendfeed launched a new feature where you can import all of your twitter contacts and automatically subscribe to them on friendfeed.  I did this.  I never use Friendfeed.  That means I am counted as a subscriber to a lot of peoples’ blogs/publications because I follow them on FF when in actuality, I don’t ever read their blog.  I know that this is the same case for many others in the blogosphere.

See how wrong this addition is now?  A statistic that is supposed to represent readers who are loyal, regular readers, is now including people that never read your blog.  The whole import your twitter contacts thing seemed to be nothing more than a buzz builder to get people talking about Friendfeed.  I’m really hoping that this isn’t the same, because it’s really messing up a valuable service.

Scribnia recently hired David Spinks, a social media guru who will serve as our Community Manager. I wanted to share the process of how we hired David Spinks because it highlights a few important lessons about social media.

We advertised the position by emailing the career service departments at colleges and universities. Scribnia received responses from a number of applicants and narrowed down our list to a few candidates. Each of these applicants was articulate, active on campus, and had a high GPA from a top school (Harvard, Cornell, and Wharton). A few days before we notified the successful candidate, I happened across an interesting article written by guest blogger David Spinks on TheLostJacket.com, a blog by Stuart Foster. I commented on the article and David and I continued the discussion further. I browsed his blog and was impressed by his passion for social media and writing ability. I contacted David asking whether he would be interested in working at Scribnia and within 48 hours David interviewed and accepted the job.

Lessons for employers

• Think outside of the box when hiring employees. In hindsight we should have known better. We assumed we could find intelligent college students with good writing skills and mold them into a social media expert. Instead of emailing colleges, I should have been reading blogs.
• Know about the area you are hiring. When I realized we needed a social media expert, I added about 30 social media blogs to my RSS reader and started reading and contributing to these blogs. I got a better sense of what qualities I wanted in our community manager and it was clear talking with David on the phone that he was right for the job. Paul Graham wrote an article explaining why business people shouldn’t hire developers But there is a misconception that because social media requires “softer skills” anyone can pick out a good social media hire. This simply isn’t true.

Lessons for applicants

• Importance of “personal brand”: Even if you have a job now, start contributing in some way to a field that interests you. For software developers, that might mean contributing to open source software. For those in marketing, consider blogging about trends. David showcased his “personal brand” via his blog. With other candidates, an interview was necessary and we hung up the phone still not sure how well the candidate would work. With David, we were confident before calling him that he would be a good fit and certain when we hung up the phone. We offered him a job within an hour after interviewing him.
• The web allows unbelievable interconnection, take advantage: If you read a blogger consistently, email him asking if you can write a guest post. Follow your favorite authors on Twitter and become part of their conversation. This will broaden your exposure.

Update: Great article by Stuart Foster published today with further advice on pitfalls employers make in hiring social media people.

Stuart Foster, a social media expert and guest blogger for Mashable, recently had an interesting debate on his blog, The Lost Jacket, that I wanted to share with our readers. Stuart recently blogged about The potential dangers of Twitter and other social media sites. He believed that Twitter’s lack of security will limit the service’s uptake and relevance among a teenage and pre-teen audience.

As usual, Stuart’s commentary spawned some interesting debate among his readers (myself included). I argued that Twitter is the safest social networking option for children because the conversations almost always occur in public. In contrast, other sites rely on users messaging each other and also tend to show more personal information (pictures of a user, their friends, even their address). After further discussing with Stuart and re-thinking my position, I realized that the danger is no longer confined to any one site. Today, our networks can no longer be thought of as discrete and instead, we have to see each of our social networks as a component of an online identity. Through the most cursory searches, a person can be tracked across their Linked In, Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, and even Yelp! profile. This can be especially dangerous when dealing with a younger audience engaging in social media for the first time who isn’t quite sure how much information to share or what is safe.

But what do our readers think? Will these issues prevent social media from becoming mainstream, especially among a younger audience? Do you worry about how much of your personal information is spread across various networks and how easy it is for interested parties to connect that all together?

Update: Danny Brown, a great PR blogger, recently illustrated our point with this post