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If you use social media for business rather than a leisure chat with your social friends you should follow certain unwritten rules of social conduct.

Many of those rules are “unwritten” simply due to the nature of social media marketing as an industry – it’s very young and has a long way to go until it matures. So the rules I am talking about are derived from my daily practice as the director of digital marketing for social media firm where we help businesses to develop social media strategies and grow their presence in various social media networks.

Earlier I wrote about the right mindset that would help you to expand your business through social networks and to avoid some serious mistakes that could be deadly for your online reputation:

Today we’ll look at online reputation from a different angle.

Online Reputation Management

Whether you’re aware or not, your social activity affects not only you and your business, it reflects on your social friends as well. It’s a two-way street. Your social connections play an active role in a growth and perceived value of your social networks and at the same time you influence their online reputation.

Let’s illustrate this statement by a few examples.

When your social friends say something good about you and your business on a social site, this message could be seen by any of their friends, and these friends might want to check you out too and then tell their own social connections about you, and so on.

The same is true when you post positive messages about your friends. Your mentions will help them in their social media campaigns.

More subtle example would be helping your friends by mentioning them in different lists and liking their social profiles, fan pages, etc.

Each time you list a twitterer, her/his profile will be seen by tweeps who follow this particular list, plus any of your friends can click the link to the list anytime, and see who you placed there.

And if you have over 60,000 friends (like I do), placing in one of your lists could result in a substantial exposure.
You can create lists on Twitter manually or you can automate the process based on various criteria using various social media applications such as Formulist.

On Formulist you can list people who mention or retweet you the most, who are the most liked by your fans or followers, lists of tweeps who are similar to you, etc.

I like to reward people who often retweets my messages. So one of my lists automatically add tweeps who retweet me the most often.

With Facebook you can do a similar trick – if you “like” somebody’s profile or fan page, it will be seen by all your friends.

Those are example of positive influence.

Sure, you can use the same tools to create negative lists and mentions (about tweeps who suck, for example), but in most cases you probably wouldn’t want to do this to your social friends, wouldn’t you? Negativity won’t get you too far in a social game.

Unfortunately, you can hurt your social friends unintentionally jeopardizing your social relationships. And I would be glad to show you how to avoid this costly mistake.

Social Media Applications

You’re familiar with social media applications, right? Those little games you play on Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and other social sites. Those mobile apps you use to update status, share pictures and browse social outlets through your smart phones.

All of them require certain privileges to access and update your profile.

The majority of users who like certain social media application just give all required permissions without a second thought.

Whereas it’s up to you whether to grant a permission to retrieve your contact information or publish on your wall, there are other privileges that you have no morale right to grant.

A few days ago I was approached by a marketer who suggested me to download a certain social application. Application looked promising and seemed to provide a valuable functionality. Yet, before it could be used, I was required to grant it certain permissions.

Here are the permissions I was supposed to grant:

• Access my basic information (Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I’ve shared with everyone)
• Send me email (the application may email me directly at my contact email)
• Post to my Wall (the application may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall)
• Access my data any time (the application may access my data when I’m not using it)
• Access my profile information (Birthday, Current City and Website)
• Access my contact information (Online Presence)
• Access my photos and videos (Photos Uploaded by Me)
• Access my friends’ information (Birthdays, Current Cities, Online Presence, Websites and Photos)

Whether you allow an app to retrieve your location and birthday, send you email and post at your wall wherever it wants, this decision is obviously up to you.

Yet you have absolutely no right to share the private information about your friends. Your friends trusted you with this information, it doesn’t mean you can share it with the entire world ((unless you asked them all and they gave you permission to do so, which is unlikely).

Among my social friends there are public figures (politicians, celebrities and business leaders) and I know for sure that they wouldn’t appreciate me sharing the details about their private lives.

So be very careful with social media applications. If you give too many privileges, you violate the privacy of your social friends.

It’s not only unethical, it can very well backfire and hinder your social relationships. Not mentioning your online reputation.

Another potential threat worth mentioning is when users share links to “free prizes” and similar applications thus serving as an unwitting “social virus”.

Facebook implemented WOT reputation ratings to protect users from scams and malware.

Summary: Social media networks can not only help you to grow your social media presence and increase your brand awareness, they can also hurt your social and business relationships if used without proper care.

Opening image from Intersection Consulting on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

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More information on reputation management and social media as a business:

6 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Social business vs. social media

What is social media management?

Image via Wikipedia

The answer depends on which type of social media management you are talking about. There are two types -amateurish management and professional social media management.

Virtually everyone who has account on Twitter, Facebook or other social networks is already involved in this process. People post updates to social networks once in a while or interact with their friends, read inbox/direct messages from friends, post something on the walls, grade pictures, post comments, send friend requests and accept new friends, etc.

Unfortunately, the majority of the users are doing it all wrong. So it would be more appropriate to call what they are doing a ”lousy social media management” or “what-not-to-do-in-social-media-management”.

Don’t get me wrong. If you want to use social media sites to communicate with your family and friends, it’s totally fine, and you don’t have to have any strategy for such type of networking.

You can post an update once-in-a-blue-moon and share what you eat, when you go to sleep, what you are doing at this very moment, etc. And it’s OK.

Just don’t think that this type of social media “activities” will also work for your business. It won’t.

If you want to use social media for business, you will need a drastically different approach.

Here is a bitter truth. 99% of users are doing it wrong. And by “users” I mean not only individual accounts, but also business accounts of big corporations.

It amazes me that these corporations spend millions dollars on branding strategies yet manage to completely neglect their social media accounts. In a best scenario, they post some info to their accounts from time to time. And maybe they respond to aggravated client once in a while. But that’s basically it.

There is no social media strategy whatsoever. They don’t know what to do with their social media accounts, and they certainly have no idea how to make sure their social media presence strengthens their brand, serve as effective customer service and online reputation management tool.

• What are your short term and long term goals in social media?
• What is the most effective way of utilizing social management procedures for your business growth?
• Have you identified the preferred type of conversion for your social media channels?
  Did you create a funnel for your business?
• Did you test all the elements of this funnel?
• Did you find what’s working for your particular business and which elements should be changed?
• Do you know what programs to use to monitor your progress in social media?
• What is your strategy for managing brand reputation in social media?
• Did you find which social media channels produce better results for your industry and for your business?

All those questions and many more should be answered if you want social media to work for your business.

And if you don’t know how to answer these questions, take a look at our social media management and consulting services, and let us help you make social media work for your business.