Here’s a guest blog post from Thaddeus Van Haltren, who founded The Hired Pens in 1931 and now serves as our senior copywriter emeritus. His current accounts include Lux Detergent and Aunt Mildred’s Clam Juice Cocktail.

Back in my pre-copywriting days, I played the wash-board in a musical outfit known as Peanut McGee & the Pale Haberdashers. We toured extensively throughout southwest Indiana, sometimes taking home no more than a loaf of bread and pint of moonshine for our efforts. Not much to split among 16 band members.

We had several regional hits (you may remember “Ring Me Up, Soda Jerk,” “So’s Your Old Man!” and “Golly, That’s a Nifty Bonnet”). But after an angry crowd at a Terra Haute speakeasy booed us off the stage in 1928, we lost our confidence and decided to call it quits.

Why do I regale you with tales of my misspent youth? Because I recently received a Facebook invitation from Barnaby Finswipe, who played second kazoo in the Pale Haberdashers. Apparently, he wants to be my “Friend.”

Well, Barnaby and I haven’t spoken in 78 years on account of a dispute over ownership of a raccoon coat. Now he expects me to act like nothing ever happened? That makes me madder than a wet hen!

My point is this, dear reader: Be selective when using Facebook or similar social net-working sites to contact people. If you lost touch after your sophomore year in college or your World War I infantry went home, they’re probably not too anxious to hear from you now.

Social media is supposed to be red-hot, right? Not so fast. According to a pair of recent articles, two of the giants of social media may have trouble ahead.

Although Anna tweets (as do dozens of other people I like or admire), I’ve never been a big fan of Twitter. In certain cases, it can be quite effective. The post-election Iranian protests are perhaps the most potent example, and some businesses have also put it to good use.

But personally, I just can’t get into Twitter. There are enough distractions in my life – I don’t need a constant stream of tweets to make things even worse.

Over on Slate.com’s The Big Money, I have an ally in Mark Gimein. He posits that Twitter is “in danger of collapsing under its own weight.” Why?

“The volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users’ time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.”

Gimein goes on to cite his personal experience. Each of his followers on Twitter typically follows 200 feeds; one ambitious soul follows over 3,000. How can marketers expect to break through all that noise, a situation that will only worsen in the years ahead? You got me.

Meanwhile, Virginia Heffernan on nytimes.com notes that “while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing – some of them ostentatiously.”

Heffernan identifies a number of reasons for the departures. Some users are disgusted with Facebook’s growing commercialization. Others are unnerved by the privacy concerns. Still others have decided to stop wasting so much time posting and checking status updates.

Is Facebook about to face a mass exodus? I’d hate to think so. However, Heffernan’s article is enough to make you wonder whether Facebook is late 1990s-era Whitney Houston – on top, but about to enter a long, slow decline into irrelevance.

Do you think Twitter and Facebook have become a bore? Have other forms of social media sparked your interest? Let us know.

If you were a brand, what brand would you be? Apple? Harley? Um … Tide? (This Tide commercial is great.) I know: This sounds like an exercise just made for a corporate retreat … right before the “trust falls.” But in our 2.0 world, where the professional and personal are colliding like never before, it’s not a bad idea to check in with yourself. Or, your many selves … your work self, your Facebook self, your Twitter self, your too-many-drinks-at-the company-holiday-party self. 

Dr. Judith Sills wrote an interesting article about how to become your own brand. See what you think — do you need a little brand management?