When trying to determine what to do for your online community, ask yourself what you would do if the same thing happened off-line. Today while speaking at the Boomer Business Summit, we listened to a lot of people ask about managing their online communities. Some were large and others were small but they all had similar questions about how to handle various things happening in their community. One individual asked about highlighting individuals in the community and the rules about reposting their articles on the site.
To the person who asked about highlighting community members and their articles, the solution was simple: ask them for permission. After a series of questions I finally realized that if these people only asked themselves how they would handle a similar issue off of the internet they could easily find a solution. Those that explore online communication as some sort of foreign territory will fail at communicating effectively.
The reality is that the rules for success that apply online are the same ones that exist offline. The only difference is that online, things have become more transparent and your intentions will become more obvious. As Gary Vaynerchuk emphasized yesterday, good people will succeed in this digital world.
So to reiterate my point, when you come across an issue that you need a solution for, first ask yourself how you would handle this issue off line. The same rules apply. That’s the golden rule. Do you agree? Do you think things should be handled differently online?
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I believe that social media is a wonderful lie detector......we must equip this detector with sound.....so we can get a "beep" that confirms what our built-in radar is telling us.....
Human nature makes us want to be on the same page....to be part of the same tribe.....it's how we are wired to survive......
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I've never gotten spam on Facebook or that sort of abuse, which I see daily on MySpace, Vox, and other popular social networking sites, and it really bothered me. I decided to repost the material with the originator's profile link on a number of relevant Facebook community pages to see if the community would mobilize to quash this sort of thing.
If you click the Website link above, you can read about what happened next - I lost my account, I got my account back, and assuming the profile information on this person is not a complete fabrication, I'd like to pursue criminal and/or civil action against her.
However, what's most relevant out of the entire situation to this post is what happened afterwards: my experience got blogged about by a young lady who really picked-up on the political context of my being harassed (the person sending the hate mail was a self-identified Clinton supporter; I am a self-identified Obama supporter, but to my knowledge we've never met or interacted online or offline).
In her summation of my experience, it was all about my pointing the finger at the Clinton campaign and making broad accusations about it and its members engaging in dirty politics; in my mind, the political context was more of a footnote and being a Clinton supporter was just one means of identifying the person who had harassed me.
Because of all this, I have to agree with Baratunde: motivation isn't always easy to discern online - at least not in the current, primarily text paradigm of blogs and conversation threads.
In my situation, I tried to make a point of applying offline social norms to online interaction, along with all the privileges and penalties that naturally follow. Yet the first person to "pick up and run" with my story missed that point completely.
I don't think that makes me "good" and her "bad;" I think it means that all the things that color our perceptions offline are amplified online (because even collaborate Web experiences usually involve people sitting by themselves in front of a keyboard), and most of the context cues that reign these assumptions in so that two people can "be on the same page" rarely get to come into play.
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i disagree that your intentions are more obvious online. if anything, i've found that true intent is more difficult to ascertain through text. email, online forums/blogs, SMS. all these tools strip the emotion and true "intent" out of communication, often amplifying misunderstanding
word choice is critical and tone is absent.
as for social media making us good or good people necessarily being rewarded via social media. absolutely not.
there is great potential in this emerging medium, but so was there in written language and books and public education and libraries and television/radio. none of these things, i believe, change the essential nature of our humanity.
some good people will succeed. others will not.
some bad people will fail. others will succeed.
i don't think there's anything inherent in social media that makes us good. we can deceive and manipulate and exploit one another regardless of the tools. "badness" is wired into us as much as goodness.
you can see it in the 419 email scams and false katrina donation campaigns. think it's somehow harder to commit crimes via social media. not at all. many of these tools make it EASIER to be "bad"
the same connectivity that strengthens friend/family relationships and makes the world smaller, makes it an enticing target. fraud flies quickly through the network (look at the international financial system now. distress in asia is felt immediately in NYC and London).
i believe that the emergence of a more distributed, bottom up "social media" holds great potential for empowerment, knowledge-sharing and learning. but the benefits of such a shift accrue to "good" as well as "bad," and I think we make a mistake to expect anything different
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