Etiquette in the Age of Social Media

Hi Chris,
Excellent article. I thought the dilemma about thank yous was a good one – we are all busy, yet shouldn’t we make time for those little courtesies that so often get left behind both offline and online?
Also, if you “friend” someone, take the time to check out their posts. The idea is to build relationships, not just add to your “list” blindly.
I’m bookmarking this page to share with others who are also new to the social media sites.
Barbara

And so say all of us – thank you, etiquette is sorely needed in social.

I would add something about the cheesyness of only using Twitter as a dump for RSS feeds or blasting every site on Earth with Ping.FM services, but don’t know how to fit it in.

Oh! I just did! :)

I passed this one along!

I’m just curious–how do you feel about “de-friending” on Facebook? I find that it tends to hurt my self-esteem a bit–especially when the people who de-friended me were once good friends who I no longer see frequently.

Great post. Thank you.

I want to share this entry with Japanese people, so I translated this to my weblog. If any problem let me know.
http://shotawatanabe.com/2008/08/%E3%80%90%E5%85%A8%E8%A8%B3%E3%80%91%E3%82%BD%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AB%E3%83%A1%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%A2%E6%99%82%E4%BB%A3%E3%81%AE%E3%82%A8%E3%83%81%E3%82%B1%E3%83%83%E3%83%88/

I feel “calling” is very important method in this age, too. If we don’t have reply from someone I sent e-mail, and I’m in hurry, I should call him if I could.
It’s some kind of ways to make it easier to communicate.

Hi Chris! These are really useful tips to keep in mind and to get the ball rolling on considering how we choose to communicate online.

One thing I would add to the e-mail etiquette is if the e-mail sent/received (depending on who the recipient/sender is) warrants a response, then please take the time to add it into your To Do List to respond.

I find that I constantly have to chase people up after 48 hours on the e-mail I sent, and then I have to remind them what the e-mail was about in the first place. I think we need to be more considerate of others and realise that we all can’t be chasing people up as there’s more important work to be done.

We would never leave people “hanging” in a phone conversation so why do we feel okay to do it with e-mail?

If i could I would solve everything over the phone but that isn’t quite possible these days.

Great post, especially on blogging etiquette. It can be so easy to cut and paste, and so important NOT to, if only to keep the Internet healthy, like you mention.

excellent excellent excellent! i don’t think i could have so tersely summarized each of the different spaces as well as you did! I want to add some fodder but I inherently believe you just addressed the major point around calling for urgent matters and more importantly, not using social spaces like facebook for urgent matters either! you’ve done a great deed in allowing me to share your post with my gf in the name of love! :)

fodder if u choose to start a wiki per Anne-Marie’s comment!

http://chinarut.wikispaces.com/Communication

Nice post, and timely (if we think its bad now… look out everyone the masses are coming!!)

In particular, the facebook advice. That is the one that really has its own purpose. The app requests are beyond annoying, but the fact that i is “friends” makes it awkward too. Kind of like someone at work pushing a “would you like to buy X for my kid” in front of you.

Over all trend is to PULL. Everyone wants their information at their time, in their way. Anytime you are too hard on the PUSH…you might be over-stepping a boundary.

I do want to put a twist on the app request conversation…

I just let all the app requests queue up. I must have 400+ requests outstanding at this time of writing.

After awhile, you will see which applications are “bunching” up and those are the ones in *your* network worth considering!

I use the same approach for friend requests, if you allow someone you may have met but don’t know very well to just “queue” (I usually ping them and ask them to introduce themselves if they haven’t already) – eventually more contacts in common will “bunch up” as well. Eventually you’ll have so many friends in common that these contacts may very well be worth carving out some time to get to know.

I don’t know if these 2 approaches are related to etiquette per se but I thought it was worth mentioning as it is a matter of perception!

Great list of email, blogging, and twitter etiquette tips from Chris Brogan.

Great post! Um, wait, oh.

Seriously though, I enjoyed reading it. Brief, to the point, and nothing extra. Fun read.

As to rules about email.
- don’t cold email someone about an ‘opportunity’. if you aren’t already close contacts, it will likely be treated as spam.
- don’t use IM talk when a real word will do.

Facebook
- Consider turning off timeline notifications. Folks want to see something interesting about you, not how many flowers you’re growing.
- much like in Flickr comments, it is not good practice to leave bright, flashing, glowing or noisy things on peoples’ Facebook walls.
- Consider that not everyone is interested in the latest thing, e.g. money making, click getting,chick wooing, scheme. Act accordingly.

I always enjoy posts like this. Reminds me I need to do more.

PS. How’d you get the FF comments here?

After reading all this, I have a simple question:

Everybody’s praising Chris for (in my opinion) saying the obvious (about web 2.0 etiquette). In essence, the basic etiquette rules for social networking are no different than those for everyday life – whether it be for:

- synchronous colocated communication (e.g. F2F meetings and conversations)
- asynchronous colocated communication (e.g. posting on a real bulletin board in a real meeting place like the town square – an example used above)
- synchronous dislocated communication (e.g. phone, mobile, videophone, IRC, ICQ, AOL, MSN, Trillian, Skype, chat conversations)
- asynchronous dislocated communication (e.g. email, SMS, MMS, PMs)
- asynchronous colocated communication revisited (web 2.0 simulated virtual meeting places – e.g. online forums, bulletin boards, SecondLife, FB and all the other social and/or professional online communities).

The technology is different in each case so you have to adapt the details, but all you really need in principle is some common sense and the ability to imagine how you would react if other people did to you what you did to them – a.k.a. the Golden Rule known from most major religions, humanism and other ethical frameworks.

Now, is it really so that most people simply aren’t able to figure this out by themselves?

Is it REALLY that simple?

If so, I think a lot of the problems of the world has just been explained… (he added dryly)

However; I do appreciate that those few people who can combine abstract logical thinking with empathy and social intelligence need to discuss and agree on a consensus since views vary on these technology-specific details. And I guess most of this feedback is part of that process.

But still – if people really need an etiquette course to use these technologies, then there should be a “user license” on par with a driving license.

My point here is that you can drive a car without a license, if you master the basics of the technology, just like you can use email, FB or SecondLife as soon as you know which buttons to press. But you cannot negotiate complex traffic patterns without knowing the arbitrary rule set governing these patterns, and that rule set has evolved from the consensus of logical abstract thinking about the behaviour of drivers, the physics of driving and the mathematics of traffic optimization.

And if the similar arbitrary rule set for social networking is getting so complex (due to the heavy traffic) that common sense (as in abstract thinking and empathy/social intelligence) is insufficient, then I think it is pertinent to consider creating a “social networking license”.

It might even be a popular approach. Compare this with the “Microsoft applications license” or whatever it is called – in some countries this is asked for by employers, as it certifies that the person possesses a minimum knowledge of how to use the most common MS applications like Word and Excel. Or even with the “sowing machine license” that I got when I was 11, as part of the class in domestic technologies (as in washing, cooking, sowing etc) at school. Of course we were exhilarated to get a diploma for our efforts!

And I think that if you need to give a course for etiquette to teenagers, you might as well give them an exam and award them a certificate at the end of it.

Then I will leave it up for discussion whether it is a bad thing or not that there is no “traffic police” that will impound your computer if you are caught socially networking without a license… ;-)

PS: As technology advances, cars are evolving towards the stage where they are no longer cars but automated transport vehicles where everybody inside are passengers, like on a bus or a train, and all you need to do is enter you destination. At that point, the arbitrary rule set (a.k.a. traffic rules) are no longer needed as such – they are rather implemented directly in the algorithm running the vehicles for optimizing the flow of traffic.

Perhaps we can envision a day when social networking sites will work the same way – your actions are guided so that you are not able to break the rules and offend others?

I think not. Just like I don’t think we will ever see the day when ALL cars have been reduced to another kind of public transportation. Cars, like social networking sites, are about freedom – even if it is highly theoretical (given the fact that you move faster from A to B using public transportation where you are not the master of your own destiny (as in being the driver) – or in the case of social networking where you end up spending half the day fending off different app requests and so on).

Queues and spam are very similar phenomena – they occur because of the “over-popularity” of a certain communication/information/transportation technology, be it cars, email or social networking sites. The problem with chain letters and spamming your friends with app requests is that they are (half-)deliberate actions by your presumed-logical-thinking-and-empathic cohabitants and so cannot easily be removed by certain rules (as you can do with spam filters or by taking public transportation on dedicated tracks/lanes or at different times to avoid queues). Kind of like when some maniac driver causes an accident with a resulting queue when there shouldn’t be a queue normally.

So you end up back where you started – social networking technologies are about freedom and expression and just like in the rest of the world, you will have the usual percentage of people lacking empathy and/or the ability of abstract thinking, and they will detract from your enjoyment of the site by breaking the etiquette.

The only way out of this is to shut them out, either by some kind of licensing system (which I think will be impossible), or by the system already in use in many places – invitation-only (or closed) communities with strict moderation. These have two problems – one is that social networking needs to be open to everybody in order to work as intended, and the other one is that moderation/monitoring is both limiting the freedom and simply an impossible task given the amount of data.

Ideally there would be some kind of self-censoring among the community. This would work if the group of people appreciating and understanding the value of etiquette manages not only to agree on a basic set of rules but also to outnumber those who don’t and simply use peer pressure to enforce the etiquette rules.

Again, this might be exactly what is going on right here in this blog. In any case, I commend you for stating the obvious, kicking in open doors and fighting windmills.

All my experience tells me it is necessary, as there are way too many people out there who must either lack the ability of abstract thinking and/or empathy, or they simply
break the rules against better knowledge (and then I am always curious about their motivation for doing so – I guess I have never quite understood the pleasure of being an anarchist or nihilist, as I prefer working against the second law of thermodynamics rather than with it – I believe it is in the nature of humans to create and restore order rather than destroy it).

That’s my two cents. Looking forward to your comments.

This is a great post!

The only thing missing is my #1 pet peeve about Facebook: TMI wall posts. Some people just don’t know when to direct message/email you vs. leaving you a wall post.

Any suggestions on how to tell offenders to use the wall appropriately?

Great post, Chris! One of the key etiquettes for Facebook I wanted to add was ‘Add as friend’ one. If you don’t know the person that well to call a ‘friend’, please don’t just add without leaving a polite message. It’s awkward if you don’t want to add that guy who nods once in a while at you, crossing in the hallway, as your “friend”. FB has to find a solution to this one I guess.

@Khyati: I second your recommendation. I, too, am irked by people I know rather casually (and certainly those who I have no idea who they are) who don’t “add a personal message”

what kind of solution do you have in mind?

I often message them asking them if the person in common has introduced us and/or recommended us. I often don’t get a response (surprisingly) and well – I let it be.

If I am very close to the connecting person and frequently in touch with them, I often asks them what’s up with this person and see what they say.

I really detest all the Facebook apps and rarely sign up for them. I would love Facebook much more if it didn’t have all that junk….

Chris,
Two quick thoughts: A) still not sure how to handle the situation of separating personal from professional facebook friends. Right now, Fbook is limited to my personal friends because the professional ones just don’t need to know that much about me. Do you have two profiles, or have to choose one identity over the other
B) the Fbook apps remind me a lot of the jokes and spam email that goes around. Those same people who send around jokes and funny stories via email probably SuperPoke you as well. I usually send a polite “no thank you” not via email. Why can’t we do that on Facebook as well?

Chris, this is now one of my favorite posts. Thanks for the etiquette advice. All of it is practical and mostly ‘duh’ stuff people just don’t understand at times.