So, here’s the thing: customer service is about treating people like people. That means good customer service was possible long before the internet. While our pictures of timely responses, courtesy, and going the extra mile may look different online than they did offline, these things are still the fundamentals of good service.

There is a movement building momentum in the marketing world. It’s not a bad idea, but like all movements there are those pulling the bandwagon, and those who are merely riding along. The idea is that social media will humanize corporations.

Unprecedented possibilities will open before our eyes. Citizens will chat merrily with corporations on Twitter. Brands will integrate seamlessly into our daily lives on Facebook. Best of all, every mistake made by giant hungry monoliths will be made known to the masses, and the sheer power of the people (also known as bad PR, bad luck, a shitstorm, and every CEO’s worst nightmare) will transform companies worldwide into loveable organizations run by real, genuine, and kind human beings instead of the evil prawns running them today.

Good customer service was possible before the internet, and bad customer service will be around long after. As long as companies believe a new medium, instead of a new strategy, is the answer to all their problems things will never change. Good customer service results from being committed to doing right by your customers, no matter the cost incurred. The medium is irrelevant.

A fan, aficionado, or supporter is someone who has an intense, occasionally overwhelming liking and enthusiasm for a sporting club, person (usually a celebrity), group of persons, company, product, activity, work of art, idea, or trend. Fans of a particular thing or person constitute its fanbase or fandom. They often show their enthusiasm by starting a fan club, holding fan conventions, creating fanzines, writing fan mail, or promoting the object of their interest and attention.

As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. Thus, to misuse the medium is to disrespect the fan. A large number of my Facebook fan pages are pushing more content into my news stream than my friends. So I’m giving them the boot. A fan, just like everyone else, has a use for every medium. That being said, these particular brands might not be misusing Facebook, I might just have a different view of the medium than most. (Which I think is closer to the truth judging from past conversations)

A brand’s fan is a normal person with a particularly strong liking for the brand’s product, way of business, or image. Most fans don’t care about their brands all day every day — they care about them in the context of experiences and conversations. I’ve noticed this particularly with musicians who are going crazy with the status updates on Facebook. I’m just not interested in hearing what Coldplay had for breakfast or who Imogen Heap is hanging out with. Just because someone is your fan doesn’t mean they are willing to put up with intrusive or spammy interruptions — social media has given brands an arena to participate in, not a doorway to come barging through.

Destroying is always easier than creating, and losing a fan is much easier than making one. For brands to get the most out of their fans they have to respect them and the contexts within which fans choose to participate with the brand.

I was thinking today about OpenID, Facebook connect, twitter’s connect thing, Google, friend feed, etc…Twitter shows my thought process:

(this in regards to how i use facebook for people that dont care about tech things, and twitter for people that only care about tech things)

One of the problems with the current shift towards one identity is that the big players in social networking are assuming that people want to act the same way everywhere they go online. The reality is that people act differently at home, at work, and with their friends.

If we start spamming close friends on Facebook with messages about marketing, they tune us out. If it’s not a topic I would talk with a friend about in a normal social situation, then why should we discuss it online? In doing so our communications will feel forced and disingenuous. We end up broadcasting instead of communicating.

Our lives are too big to boil our online activity down to one audience, so why should we only have one identity? I have people in my life who don’t care one iota about marketing and others who tweet into the early morning about their latest strategies. So, what should I do? Well, I don’t plan on integrating my life into one big Friend Feed any time soon, that’s for sure. Do you?

Because Disqus makes it easy for bloggers to setup Facebook Connect and other social media login systems on their sites, if Disqus or it’s competitors start to see a large amount of new users, it’s likely that Facebook Connect will also begin to see a very large increase in adoption. Therefore, the adoption of centralized commenting is likely to be one of many cornerstones for what Jeremiah Owyang calls the Era of Social Colonization, the period in which all sites become social.

An interesting problem online advertising faces right now is that the same person might act differently at varying websites as they shift from one identity to the next. The shift to one identity is good for brands for multiple reasons. One identity will mean advertisers will be able to track easier and that users will behave more consistently from one web destination to the next. Demographic data should increase in relevance and prevalence simultaneously as users merge their numerous profiles into one identity and become easier to label and track. As a user interacts with polls, surveys, advertising tracking, registration information, and social media, brands will be able to track a user’s reaction to branding and products across multiple websites and platforms.

This future is still a long ways off, but I hope to be working in this industry for many years to come and I’m looking forward to watching this transition. If you have thoughts on Facebook’s recent implementation of OpenID, which is the event that prompted this post, or anything I’ve said here I’d love to hear from you in the comments or on Twitter.