The greatest strength and pitfall of social media is its reliance on constant communication, especially with celebrities and business. Users enjoy the ability to Tweet their favorite move star about their week or a company about bad customer service. The question is, what if these celebrities and companies don't want to talk to the normal consumer? This question can be looked at from both viewpoints. For the companies, the idea for making a Twitter is to open another channel of communication to the customer besides the traditional telephone/mail loopholes. Services like Twitter and Facebook are meant to give a public, easily communicable presence. If you are a company on social media, but you don't want to talk to the customer, then you are missing the entire point of the platform.

On the other hand, for celebrities or other public personas, social media doesn't need two-way communication. Most celebrity Twitters are filled with one-way communication, small tweets promoting new projects or what they just ate for lunch. The communication that occurs on social media channels usually focuses either on one-way communication with the target audience, or two-way communication with other famous personas. Unlike companies, celebrities don't have an obligation to address their fans on social media. If anything is serious enough that needs to be announced, it will usually be done more formally than a Facebook post. The corporate and singular uses of social media, no matter how big an influence either has, will always have a divide when it comes to either two-way or one-way communication.

The fifth point in Kaplan's "Five points about being social" mentions that you should "be unprofessional" when it comes to interacting on social media channels. Since the article was targeted towards business professionals, asking people to act unprofessional is pretty counterproductive. I can understand what Kaplan is getting at, how social media is not as serious business communications, but his choice of wording is poor. A better way to address users is to say something along the lines of "be informal" versus unprofessional.

To me, acting unprofessional includes lying, manipulating, and generally going against everything considered as good practices. Telling someone to be informal comes off as saying "remove the barriers seen in normal business communications." At the end of the day, although social media is a new and more relaxed form of communication, it is still a channel used between businesses and customers. Thus, it may be okay to speak in a common fashion, but it is not okay to completely disregard status and position.