Proper Manners for the Modern Girl or Boy:
Social Networking
It has been a long time since I have posted a “Miss Manners” Post, today just might be a good day since I have not been able to get any work done in the last two days (and I have piles of work to do) but somehow I keep messing up my computer!!! Breaking it in some form or another that makes it impossible for me to get to my images, or photo shop, or something! Don’t ask me how I do it, but I do. Sadly my IT guy (Anthony) works full time as a IT guy so he can’t be here 24/7 for all my computer mishaps that I seem to be having a lot of lately, I fried my laptop, broke my computer a few times and so much more!
I am going to talk about the do’s and don’ts of social networking.
I am sure most of you are familiar with facebook, myspace, linkden, blogs and the latest big one, twitter. I am on facebook and twitter. Personally twitter is a great way to reach out to people in your field or similar interests with out all the mess of facebook. One thing I don’t like about it, it feels like a bragging right sometimes, much like facebook status update, a lot of poeple post that they “did this and I did that”, which really gets sort of annoying after a while. I don’t know if I really need to know what you ate for lunch every day! lol! Once in a while is ok, but every day, really? Ok now I am ranting. What I really wanted to talk about being wise and careful and having proper manners on these sort of sites.
Here are some basic guidelines:
1.Take care with your WORDS
Be careful what you say in your “status updates” or on people’s walls, blog comments, or Twitter updates, you just don’t know who is watching/listening….for example I follow a few professionals on twitter/facebook and some of the things that I have seen written by them have really shocked me, for example, bashing other companies, other people in your business/field is not ok…these types of comments are not appropriate and are going to do more harm to you than anything else….even if you are frustrated about a service you had and you are in the right, facebook and twitter really is not the place to talk badly about others or other companies….
Take care what you say critically about people or things in general, the last thing you want is to voice your overly critical opinion on something and offend others, specially if it will weaken your credibility and make you look extremely unprofessional.
Places like facebook and twitter maybe are not a place for political views if you are a professional, being a professional is tricky because you want to be open to all walks of life, you don’t want to offend any future client/employee, there is a place though if you are passionate about certain things, say politics, animal rights or for me personally organic food and fair trade, than I suggest creating a outlet for that that is not affiliated with your professional self. So if you are a mortgage broker or an artist, whatever you do, you need an outlet for your personal opinions and thoughts, create a blog, or join a group, but try not to plaster it around social networking sites, because again you just don’t know who is listening. But in all cases proper manners apply, we have the wonderful freedom of free speech, but we have to be wise with how we word things, for example profanity is not the wisest way to get your point across.
2. PHOTOS/images
We are artists, and find beauty in all types of images, but on this blog we try very hard to keep the images “work” friendly. Which means that if you are at work and stopping by the blog the images will not get you into trouble with your boss, or look inappropriate. The same goes for the images on facebook. If you are using facebook for networking purposes and you have a wapping 10 galleries of you and your friends getting drunk and doing inappropriate things you might want to think twice about those images, who is looking at them? Possibly future employees, or the person you just interviewed with, take care because every little image, could harm your career or reputation. It shows a lot about your character and who you are, and other people see this. So clean up your facebook account, if you want to use it just for friends, make sure only your true friends can see your info and images, if you want to use it for professional purposes, keep it professional, clean and tidy. Facebook has great settings and security, so make sure to use them. You can also change your settings so that if someone tags you in an image it won’t be published in the news feed. Which gives you time to see the image first, and untag it if you need to.
3. Clean up your account
If you want to use these sites for strictly professional purposes which I recommend, than you will need to do these things…
- untag all inappropriate images, delete all galleries that are inappropriate or unnecessary, such as most personal photos (we don’t really need to see the bedroom you stayed in on your honeymoon, things like that).
- clean up your content, minimal, less is more is best, if you have a website use that, please don’t publish your address unless it is your business/office location, be careful about your number and email you use as well, your political agenda is not really needed, same as your religion (if people want to know more about who you are than they can talk to you about it) One on one contact gives you a change to explain how you see the world rather than giving your self a label that comes with tons of connotations with it.
- use facebook to post new networking info, like new blog post, or website info, or things going on in the community that you are apart of and need support. I try to mainly use my status update and twitter for mostly professional reasons…try also to not post a ton, we don’t really need to know everything every 5 minutes of the day.
- use facebook to keep in touch with friends but don’t let it replace quality time with each other, one thing I hate about social networking is that it has made it more and more easy to not talk to people face to face and to just send them a message (I am guilty of this too, sometimes I am so busy it is easier to just email someone real quick) but really spend less time on facebook and more time with your actual friends, call them instead of posting on the wall, go out with them instead of talking online. Also- as far as business relationships, social networking is great, but the best relationships I have made and the most fruitful ones have been the ones that I have actually met with person, talked to them over tea/coffee and established a professional relationship. So keep that in mind, sometimes a phone call or meeting is much more effective and memorable than any facebook or linkden message.
Well I think that is all for now, this is super long, sorry about that. Check out our facebook page here, and my twitter!
remember…
Be Kind, for you don’t know the hard paths traveled by another,
~ Miss Manners
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