“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
—William S. Burroughs

Facebook’s coming IPO is all the rage in the news at the moment. Some links you might find worth clicking:

The L.A. Times takes a look at the IPO by the numbers.

Forbes calls it a “watershed moment.”

C|NET details the “top 10 surprises” about the IPO.

The Christian Science Monitor explains why this is a good thing for Groupon, Pandora, Zynga and others.

The Wall Street Journal looks at who’ll be getting rich on the deal.

The Week looks at the question we all have: Should we buy? (The answer: probably not.)

The Guardian notes that those pesky Winkelvii will cash in big-time. Maybe this will finally shut them up.

Let’s take a few minutes and remember how great Gilda Radner was. In this instance, as Roseanne Rosannadanna. (Sorry for the preroll ad.)

I received an email this morning from Classmates.com informing me that my high school yearbook had been scanned and placed online.

“Preview this Garden City High School yearbook—for free!” the email exclaimed. “Memory Lane has the world’s largest collection of digitized yearbooks—covering more than 30 million people—with thousands of new books added weekly.”

Pretty cool, I thought. After all, I was the editor of my high school yearbook (don’t even get me started on why the portraits suck so bad; it’s a long story and a sore point to this day), so a stroll down Memory Lane with my morning coffee sounded like a good idea.

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON: The first page I viewed had handwriting on it. So did the second. Not only is Classmates.com scanning yearbooks, they’re scanning yearbooks that have had personal messages inscribed in them.

Not good.

It’s bad enough that people’s high school hair and eyeglasses are being scanned and placed online, but those personal messages are—well, personal. Of course, it would be no problem if Classmates.com received permission from everyone who wrote those messages to scan and post them for the world to see, but obviously they didn’t.

And when 30 million people and thousands of new books added weekly are involved, you can bet there’s some profoundly embarrassing material in those inscriptions.

Oh, and by the way: We’re talking about minors, too.

Prediction: It’s only a matter of time before Classmates.com gets sued for this. If I were in their shoes, I’d seriously rethink this yearbook-scanning strategy. Meanwhile, I’m glad it’s the Garden City High School drama teacher and not my prom date who sold their yearbook to Classmates.com.

Ehhhhh, maybe not so much … at least if you believe some *ahem* “sponsored content” from the folks over at Destination CRM.

Actually, it’s from the folks at intelliresponse (Destination CRM only blasted the info to their mailing list), and while it’s the sort of information that’s hardly coming from someone without any skin in the game, it’s nevertheless tough to ignore. Here’s the salient point:

The number of questions asked via social media channels account for less than 1/100th of a percent of questions asked via customer-facing websites.

In other words: When customers have a customer service question, are they looking for answers in social media or on a company’s website? Overwhelmingly it’s the website.

Which begs the question: With spending on social forms of CRM on the rise big-time, is this really where dollars ought to be spent?

Takeaway for marketers: Sure, explore social customer service channels … but make sure your website is up to snuff first.