Phil Gerbyshak wrote a brilliant post setting out Ten Commandments For Social Media

1. Thou shalt add value first, and sell LAST
2. Thou shalt listen twice as much as you talk
3. Thou shalt not spam all your contacts
4. Thou shalt not act like a stuck up jerk
5. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s contacts
6. Thou shalt personalize every invitation I make to join any network
7. Thou shalt remember that 10 can be more powerful than 10,000
8. Thou shalt not beg (for anything)
9. Thou shalt be authentic and transparent in all you do
10. Thou shalt take the blog off the blog

As regular readers know I’m not much of a social media user, but these are long overdue.

Click over to the full definitions and you’ll see that even those that seem to refer only to social media have their counterpart in real society.

Sadly, no matter how widely the commandments disperse, I doubt that they’ll make a great difference.

Why? Because the Net is populated by the same folks who inhabit the real world and people don’t follow them there—it would be a much nicer place if they did.

Worse, the Net magnifies and increases incivility because it lacks emotional context, which negates empathy.

Lori Drew is a good example of this.

Obviously, Drew showed an amazing lack of maturity and sense, and although the judge overturned the jury’s guilty verdict it was on a point of law, not on her actions.

One has to wonder if Drew would have acted the same way in the real world where the pain she was causing would have been obvious.

So I have three recommendations for you in addition to Phil’s commandments

1. Pack your manners, ethics, morals and especially your common sense when you travel through social media.
2. Be cautious, because not everyone will pack their bags as carefully as you.
3. Remember that social media makes people more so; those who are good are very, very good and those who are full or borderline jerks will probably be worse.

Image credit: Intersection Consulting on flickr

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: jerks, Phil Gerbyshak, social media
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