Social Media Etiquette

Do you use your real name or a pen name?  When is it OK to ask to connect?  When is it OK to ask for a recommendation?  Do you experience more Social Media Etiquette sanfu’s on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter?  Is swearing OK?  All things to discuss Wednesday night at 8 Eastern, 6 Mountain and 5 Pacific.

To join us:

1- Go to Tweetchat.com

2- Enter the “room” #lion

3 – Start tweeting

How open are you on social media?

What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever said online?  Did it come back to bite you?  Join Peggy, Mari and I every Wed. night on www.tweetchat.com at 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific (which means 6 for all my Colorado followers).  You’ll need to sign in when it asks for a room, type in  #lion.  And then join in the fun.

LION stands for LinkedIn Open Networker in case you were wondering.  Sounded better than TWOG

Re:blogged from Peggy Dolane

Last week on Twitter, @linkedinexpert, @marismith and myself hosted #lion: a tweet-in that asked the question: How open a networker are you on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter?. #lion came from LinkedIn Open Networker — a person who grows their network as broadly as possible.

This week we thought we’d continue the #lion conversation with the question:

Are there limits of what you share about yourself on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn?
To get the conversation started, here’s some food for thought:

• Lisa Nova poked fun at the over-tweeters amoung us in her youtube satire Twitter Whore (viewed by over 730,000 to date.) None of us want to be that person, do we?
• Smart businesses know that a real person tweeting will win you more loyal followers. Just ask Scott Monty at Ford, @Zappos’ CEO, or @TypeAMom, Kelby Carr who wrote a great post about this issue last summer.
• On a more serious note, Canadian child protection authorities were contacted by Twitter recently when a mother made comments about how she might get her children to go to sleep.

There are lots of things I might Tweet about, but choose not to. Does your tweeting have any limits? Do you save more personal information for FaceBook and keep LinkedIn strictly business?

Hope you’ll join me the #lion discussion, Wednesday, January 22, 6:00 p.m. Mountain, 8:00 p.m. Eastern.

Network Size and Recommendations

Recommendations and network size are two completely different things. (Although the bigger your network, the more choice you have in asking for recommendations.)

I like recommendations for several reasons:

• They differentiate you from your competitor.
• They are rich fodder for building business testimonials (to transfer to your website).
• They give your reader a sense of your abilities and diverse talents.
• They can qualify you as an expert.

Now do you need a hundred testimonials all saying the same thing? God no. But enough recommendations from a diverse range of people for each position can’t hurt.

Onto networks. I’m a LION who understand the LaMB (check out my blog to see what I am talking about: http://linkedinexpert.wordpress.com/ ). The simple truth is, the bigger the network, the more access you have. And while not everyone in your network will be a diamond in your business tiara, you’ll have a wider range to pick from. And just because I have 4000 direct connections, doesn’t mean I don’t know 400 of those people well enough (strategically) to pick up the phone. But if I kept my network at 200 people, well – that’s all I’d have access too.

I know LIONs aren’t popular because some people really abuse the system and bulk email their list ad nauseum verging on SPAM. I agree that is an abuse of the LinkedIn system and I immediately block those folks in my Outlook filter. Being a LION, I have to be very careful and honorable with my list – using it strategically. I don’t do bulk mailings. I try not to infringe upon the privacy of a complete stranger.

I’m hoping that one day LinkedIn has a rating system that will allow us to grade our connections as friends or acquaintances – but until then, I’ll continue to be a LION that acts like a LaMB.