Social Netiquette: Oh Behave!
dan tynan on Oct 01 2008 at 4:49 am | Filed under: (anti) social media, Geekishness, Web 2.0
Think you know how to mind your manners in the brave new world of social networks? You may be in for a rude awakening.
[Note: A severely neutered version of this story appears on Macworld.com. Call that version “Copyeditors Gone Wild.” Here's what this story was supposed to look like.]
Etiquette used to be easy. As long as you said “please” and “thank you,” skirted treacherous topics like sex or politics, and avoided running over the family pet, you were golden.
But social networks like Facebook and MySpace have turned many social norms inside out. Your online “friends” may not really be your friends – and you may not be exactly whom you claim to be, either. How to approach strangers online, handle unwelcome solicitations, or make real friends out of virtual ones is stuff Momma probably never taught you.
That’s why I’m here. Though I may not be Miss Manners, I befriended, poked, and tweeted a wide range of experts with questions on proper deportment in the online department. Here’s what they had to tell me.
I’ve got a strict policy about ‘friending.’ I only invite people I know well, people I’d like to meet, people I’ve known in past lives, and attractive members of the opposite sex. Is there anything wrong with that?
Overly aggressive friending (and its close cousin, indiscriminate poking) is probably the biggest social network faux pas, though also the hardest to resist. That’s partly because these networks were designed to facilitate new connections, and the rules vary from one to the next.
Social media consultant Ariel Waldman says it’s usually fine to friend people you don’t know just to make their acquaintance. “Otherwise you wouldn’t really be ‘networking,’” she says. “However, it does vary depending on the service. For instance, friending someone you don’t know on Dodgeball (a location-based service) isn’t as appropriate as following someone you don’t know on Twitter.” In other words, following a stranger’s tweets is harmless; stalking them via their cellphone is just creepy.
In fact, Facebook and LinkedIn automatically suggest people you might know, based on whoever’s already in your network. In general, you should already have some kind of link to the person you want to meet – even if they’re merely a friend of a friend – and a good excuse besides the desire to hook up (there are other kinds of services for that).
“You need a reason to ask them to be your friend,” says Kim Gregson, an assistant professor of communications at Ithaca College who recently completed a study of Facebook etiquette. “You read their blog, saw something they posted online, or met them at a party. You’ve got to have some connection or it’s like cyberstalking.”
I’m scrupulously honest in most things, but my online profile, well, let’s just say it’s a best-case scenario. Am I required to be totally honest when describing myself?
It depends on what you mean by “totally.” Researchers at Cornell, MIT, and the University of Michigan brought subscribers to Web dating services into their labs, measured them, and compared the results to their online profiles. Turns out nearly everyone tweaks the truth: Men grow taller and richer online; women get thinner and younger.
Profiles on social networks aren’t much different. But stretch the truth too far and you’ll put your reputation at risk, warns Samantha Von Sperling, director of Polished Social Image Consultants. The solution is to be honest – no photoshopping your picture until you look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie — but selective about the information you share. For example, Facebook requires you to supply your birthday at signup. But you can choose to hide it by selecting “Don’t show my birthday in my profile” on the Basic tab of your Edit Profile page.
“Saying I’m in my 30s when I’m 37 is fine,” Von Sperling says. “But it’s not OK to say I’m in my 20s. If I start lying about how old I am, how much money I make, or how much I weigh, sooner or later you will find out and I will look like an idiot. Once we decide that fabulousness comes in different shapes and ages and get more comfortable with each other, the world becomes a more interesting place.”
I’m getting friend requests from people I moved 3000 miles to get away from. How do I tactfully decline their invitations?
The first rule of social networks is you’re never required to say yes.
“You can say no thank you or simply not respond,” notes Claudia Caporal, an urban etiquette and lifestyle consultant in Miami. “Behavior that might be considered rude in person isn’t necessarily rude online.”
Of course, if you run into that person on the street or at your college reunion, you may have some ’splainin’ to do. “If they ask you whether you got their invitation, tell them that you don’t really spend that much time on Facebook anymore,” she says. “You can find a compromise answer that doesn’t hurt their feelings.”
A sneakier way to avoid unwelcome invitations is to accept their offer of friendship, then quietly unfriend them a few days later, says Kim Gregson. On Facebook, it’s as simple as going to your Friends list and clicking the little x near their names. No notification will be sent; you simply disappear from their network. If they notice and ask about it, plead ignorance. “If someone is following their list of friends that closely, they need to get a life,” she says. “You don’t want to be their friend anyway.”
I’ve been using Facebook since college, so I have lots of friends and posted lots of personal photos. Now I’ve got a job and my office colleagues want to join my network. How do I keep my boss from seeing pictures of me in cowboy boots and a thong?
One way to handle the work/friend conundrum is to use a professionally oriented network for your work colleagues and a more casual one for everyone else. Lena West, CEO of social media strategy firm xynoMedia, uses LinkedIn strictly for professional contacts. But as she gets to know these people more socially, they may graduate to her Facebook posse.
Facebook apps like Professional Profile let you import your LinkedIn resume and recommendations to your Facebook profile, while LinkedIn Contacts does the same for your network of business colleagues. You can then search for those who also have a Facebook profile and add them to your FB posse.
The other option is to segregate friends within the same service. Facebook’s privacy settings make this fairly easy. Start by selecting the ‘Privacy’ link in the upper right corner of your Facebook home page, then select Profile. On the Basic tab select “Edit Photo Albums Privacy Settings.” Select a photo album, and under “Who can see this?” select “Customize.” You can then pick the contacts you want to see this (or those you want to exclude). You can do the same for videos and other personal info in your profile. So when the boss comes a-knocking, let her in — but save the drunken Spring break pix for your BFFs.
My Twitter tweets are like haiku – poetic and dense with meaning. But other people’s tweets are pointless and annoying. How can I tell my fans to stop being twits on Twitter without alienating them?
One of the great things about Twitter is you can stop following people who annoy you and they may never be the wiser. It’s brain-dead simple: Go to your list of Followers and click “Block” next to their names. (You may have to remove them from your list of Followers first.) But if you want people to keep following you, sharing every inane detail of your waking life is not the way to go about it.
“If someone tweets ‘eating yogurt,’ that offers me nothing of value,” says Peter Shankman, a social media maven who, not coincidentally, owns the domain baduseoftwitter.com. “If they say ‘I’m eating a frozen yogurt at that new place on 51st and Lex and they’re offering 50-cent-off coupons,’ that’s valuable. If you can’t tell me something worthwhile in 140 characters, you need to try harder.”
I’ve got accounts on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Flickr, and Twitter, and I’ve recently started Plurking and Powncing. I only sleep three hours a night, yet my virtual buddies think I’m being rude because I’m not keeping up with them. Help!
While services like Friendfeed, Chirp, and OneSwirl help you keep track of multiple social networks in one place, you may just need to step away from the keyboard and spend more time in meatspace with your actual friends. The problem with social networks is they can cause you to short change people in your nonvirtual life, says Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of The Broken American Male and host of the TLC series, “Shalom in the Home.”
“Should you be spending hours each day corresponding with some person you never met?” asks Boteach (whose Facebook profile boasts more than 1700 friends, incidentally). “Maybe you should be cultivating more important relationships. When’s the last time you visited your grandmother or went on a date with your spouse? All this time you spend on social networks, who are you neglecting as a result?”
When not indiscriminately poking people on Facebook (or bitching about extreme edits), Dan Tynan tends this blog, Tynan on Technology.
