Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

Horrors!  Yet another “inappropriate photo alert” for an adult who should have known better.  And this time a college president, no less.  Which, when you think about it, isn’t really surprising, given the insularity of so many educrats.

Janet Dudley-Eshbach, the prez of Maryland’s Salisbury University, posted vacation pix on her Facebook page recently documenting a family trip to Mexico. Problem is that at least one of them shows her in a kind of piñata moment -- swinging a stick at a man hugging her daughter with the caption that she had to "beat off the Mexicans because they were constantly flirting with my daughter." And, yes, that choice of male-vernacular verbs is consistent with her naievete about the Internet.

Like others who’ve been similarly scorched, she assumed that her page could be accessed “only by family and friends”.  In fact, the entire Facebook community in Salisbury got a peek.  The next meeting of the academic senate should be interesting. Not to  mention her official duties at parents’ weekend.

My question: when will people learn that privacy, as we’ve known it, is a quaint memory and why the wild-west nature of social networks will, for the foreseeable future, remain a branding and marketing option only for the stout-hearted.  Yes, as time passes, people will grow to regard brands more on their own merits, and less on the websites they inhabit.  As for the so-called “private” members of Facebook, et. al., in PR, we used to tell clients to say nothing you wouldn’t want to see in tomorrow’s headlines.  Le plus ca change…