Would you talk to your mom this way??? Or how about your boss?
I learned early in my career that perception is reality in many instances of life – especially business. This is a difficult fact for some to embrace, but the good news is you do have some control over how you or your business is perceived. When someone interacts with you, there are many characteristics that play into the culmination of how they perceive you – your appearance, your interactions with others, how your handle adversity and of course how you communicate.
As we become more and more of a “digital society”, how we communicate is changing and so are our communication habits. The Internet and the thousands of communication tools that have evolved with it (Email, Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter & many more) give us the ability to communicate 24/7 and with people all over the world, but are then enabling “bad communication practices”?
Are we using these tools improperly to communicate?
To answer this question, ask yourself these two basic questions:
- Who am I communicating to with this tool – the target audience?
- What information do these people want to receive?
We are seeing a lot of people communicating the same message, via multiple tools, to various audiences. Frankly, that’s just bad communication! Some of the more prevalent tools we see this happening on are Facebook, LinkedIN & Twitter. We commonly see people linking their Twitter accounts to the Facebook and LinkedIN accounts – and vice versa. Each of these tools has a different purposes, different audiences and function differently. As a result, you shouldn’t communicate the same across all of them.
To illustrate the point – would you share the same information to your mother on Facebook as you would with a potential employer on LinkedIN? Or better yet, would you share the same drunken college story with your buddy on Facebook as you would with a business partner in Twitter? Probably not. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook – that’s just the easiest example as it is one of the most common tools.
Below are some real world examples that we’ve seen on Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter.
Facebook Example
Would your Friends on Facebook understand a post like:
“Thanks @SomePersonsName for the @SomeOrganizationsName mention at #QRS! Thanks @ SomePersonsName & @ SomePersonsName for tweeting about it!”
Unless you are an active Twitter user, the above looks like Pig Latin to you and your Facebook Friends.
LinkedIN Example
Would your professional contacts on LinkedIN appreciate a status update like:
“It’s impossible to flirt with the bank tellers because they see how broke I am #tfln (awesome!) 3 days ago from Twitter”
I’m going to go out on a limb and say your business contacts don’t really care about you flirting with anyone and probably have a different perception of you after reading this!
Twitter Example
If you work for a nationally recognized PR firm, would your company, colleagues, peers or fellow citizens appreciate a Tweet like:
“Fine New Orleans. Go back to your stupid flooded sh#t hole of a city with the trophy”
I know for a fact that the person who tweeted this is perceived much differently now!
Should you communicate this way?
These types of bad communication practices are becoming more and more common and are “cluttering” up our lives even more than they already are. If I am connected to you on LinkedIN (a professional networking website) I don’t want to hear about you “flirting” with anyone. And as a result of you telling me that – I probably don’t want to be networked with you anymore.
It is imperative to understand what the purpose of the tool is, whom we are communicating to and what information they want to receive from us.
Why is this important
Why is this important to your business? Because if you don’t understand this point, your customers might not want to be networked with you anymore either! Remember, you do have some control over how you or your business is perceived.
If you want help understanding how to use these tools to better communicate for your business, give us a call. 888.694.0646
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Great discussion and illustrates a point I’ve been trying to make for over a year now – auto posts from Twitter to Faceook or LinkedIn (or anywhere to anywhere for that matter) are, by definition, disingenuous to the community where the autopost happens. If you’re posting you Tweets automatically on Facebook, then you are doing your Facebook audience a disservice since they may like, comment or react there, but you don’t see it since you auto-posted. You weren’t even on Facebook to post the update.
It’s the same reason I disconnected Twitter from Google Buzz … people were reacting on Buzz even though I wasn’t there to converse with them.
Great points and wise advice for businesses to remember.
Other than visiting all of the sites, is there a way to be notified whenever someone has responded to your post at one of these sites, if you auto-posted to the site? Or can replies be forwarded to you?
Hi Scott. There are tools/applications that allow you to monitor many different social media sites. Just to name a few: TweetDeck, HootSuite & Digsby. There are many more and each have their pros and cons. I personally use HootSuite currently.