That was the nature of the question I posed to my Twitter followers earlier today.

I've captured and included the responses as screenshots below, and most fall in line with my strict approach.

Here are my guiding principles:

1. If I haven't met the requester personally, I ignore the connection invitation.
2. If I otherwise have any reservation about sharing my actual location with the requester, or the person doesn't past my "Beer or Breakfast Test," I also ignore.

By design, my Foursquare network is smaller and more intimate than my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn social graphs. And that's exactly how I want it.

Update: I missed including this response from @simplyv: "@BryanPerson I'm not. None of my rl friends locally use Twitter or foursquare. So I'll add anyone. I'm all freaky like that"

(download)

Click here to download:

How_selective_are_you_in_accep.zip (238 KB)

I can be a photo snob.

While I'm nowhere close to being a pro with the camera--my sister Jill plays that role in the family--and don't even own an SLR camera, I usually have a decent sense of how to frame a shot. So when I see pictures that are wildly out of frame or otherwise poorly composed, it bugs me. And I don't like sharing my own photos of that ilk.

But I'm learning, slowly, to get over myself--especially when there's a story that can come to life from even a crummy photo. (And let's face it, with an iPhone--which I used to snap the shot below--most photos are going to turn out crummy.)

I'm posting this picture below of my son Amani from earlier today not because it's a technical or even an artistic thing of beauty--it certainly isn't--but because it captures a moment that made my day. He is giving me the thumbs-up sign (you can see this even better in the original version on Flickr) as he makes his way through the security line with my wife Stella for a mini-vacation flight to Orlando. Moments later, he also returned a here's-looking-at-you kind of point and then blew me some kisses. It was all at once cute, goofy, touching, and a reminder that he's still a happy-go-lucky 3-year-old. Plus, since he's always asking if he can go on the avión with me as I head out on business trips, I was just excited that his turn to fly the friendly skies had come (even though I couldn't go with him).

When it comes down to it, the photos that I post to Flickr and other social sites are ultimately for giving family and friends a peek into my/our life, for starting "snackable" discussions (such as with my Twitpics or yFrog shots), and for documenting the stories I might want to revisit later. And most of the time, even a mediocre photo will serve just fine in accomplishing any or all three of those aims.

So while countless others will dial it down in December as visions of sugar plums dance in their heads, I'll be cranking up my wordsmith volume.

And in order to hold myself accountable, I'm taking a page from the playbook of the indefatigable Tim Walker and making a public declaration of my writing ambition. By the time the Ball drops to start 2010, I will have published a minimum of 30 blog posts in December--spread across 1) this space, 2) the Social Media Breakfast site, 3) BryanPerson.com, 4) Big Pabelbon, and 5) my LiveWorld blog.

I'm only at 2, so I have some ground to cover yet. But I'll get there.

I should have had more stones this Movember and become a real "Mo Bro" like my Austin pals, Wesley Faulkner, Kyle Flaherty, and Aaron Strout.

As you can see in the photo below, my pencil-neck mustache after a week's worth of growth is pretty pathetic. But isn't that part of the fun? After all, swapping photos of ugly 'staches (or "mos," in Australian parlance) is one of THE ways that Movember draws attention to its campaign to raise awareness and money for "cancers that effect men."

With a mere six day remaining this Movember to give, the SocMed Austin team that I'm supporting needs a big push to overtake the Boston squad (as a former Bostonian, I'd love nothing better than to knock those guys off in a photo finish).

Here's where you can make your donation and support this very worth cause.

And for a marketing take on why the Movember campaign is so successful, check out my post over on Media Bullseye today: How to use social media to galvanize online giving.

For the past two days, I've been going back and forth with customer-service representatives from a well-known brand over a recent transaction (yes, that's vague, but I'm not looking to "call out" the company by name).

While I'm disappointed that the company couldn't resolve my problem (stemming from an honest mistake on my part that I had hoped would be correctable; it apparently isn't), what really gnaws at me is the robotic and lawyer-like nature of their response, with repeated references to "regulations" and other expressions and sentences that are undoubtedly copied and pasted from a master template.

Thing is, this is a brand with brand with plenty of personality--it's one of the main reasons I give them my business--but you'd never know it from reading their e-mail responses.

And while I understand that dry language is sometimes necessary (when lawsuits are going, for example), I generally view this approach as a copout and an attempt to hide behind official-sounding words without having to really address the complaint with any sensitivity.

With this frustration swirling around my head, I posed the following question to my Twitter followers: "When you deal with customer service, do you prefer lawyer-like responses or answers with a personality?"

Here's a screenshot of the answers that followed: