Just a hair’s breadth away from breaching New York State Penal Code § 120.60.

There are two kinds of “Social Media Strategists.” The first, of course, is the kind we have at Razorfish and other agencies: people who tell you how to use Facebook to increase site traffic and to promote your brand. The second is much more common, but much less publicized: people like my best friend Maggie and me. We use Facebook, etc., for real strategy. And by “real strategy,” I mean “online stalking.”

Maggie, who is actually an accountant, is an extraordinary Social Media Strategist. Because she is socially and emotionally obsessed with several people – and because she has a lot of free time and is willing to overlook certain Terms of Agreement – she knows how to access, manipulate, and aggregate social content more than anyone I know. She knows each and every interaction on Facebook, including all of the limitations and loopholes.

Like Maggie, I have been known to do my fair share of stalking – I do tend to joke about it. But it was Maggie who came up with the idea of creating separate identities in other networks to access people in other cities; she realized that there were all kinds of permission levels that could be accessed through friend-of-friend connections and network permissions through these less-than-legit friends. I was impressed with her ability to access content that seemed to be off-limits.

(She has, since then, been called out by Facebook for violating their Terms; at the time she did it, she didn’t know it was against the rules (neither did I, for that matter). Her mistake though, was in the name choice: naming her identities things like “Sarah New York” was a dead giveaway. A CSer would have known better.)

As for me, I haven’t created any fake identities (I swear!), but stalking has turned me into a conflicted Social Media Specialist. For example, as a CSer, I think that it is a violation of privacy that you can access a stranger’s entire photo album just because one of your friends is in that album. But as someone who frequently looks for photos of people who are untagged and in obscure albums, I love it.  And I feel the reverse regarding the fact that businesses can’t see the profiles of their fans: as a CSer/UXer I don’t really care, but socially, I really want to be able to see those profiles.

Honestly, I wonder if I would have noticed any of these things had I just been using Facebook as a regular interactive CSer – or even a real Social Media Specialist! – and not some nosey, obsessive stalker. But either way, if you have any questions about Facebook or want to know anything about anyone, feel free to ask Maggie or me…