Social Networking Etiquette
I have 470 contacts at LinkedIn, 50 friends at Hyves and 114 Friends and 185 Followers in Twitter and 1096 contacts in my AddressBook.
What I need is a set of rules to manage my Social Networking contacts.
Unfortunately most people don’t take the effort to introduce themselves in their requests to get connected. This led me to blindly accept any request I get from any of the networks. It is just too much effort to find out who these people are who invite me. even if I check their profile at LinkedIn I’m still clueless most of the time.
A while ago I met with Reid Hoffman in Paris. He is the CEO of LinkedIn and we spent 30 minutes or so discussing Fleck.com and LinkedIn. I enjoyed the conversation and we exchanged businesscards. Without hesitating I invited him to my network on Linkedin. This was his reply:
I only connect with people that I know well enough to refer to other people that I know.
That was impressive! So his rule is a simple one; if he knows you well enough to refer you he will connect. If he doesn’t know you well enough he won’t connect. Simple, but not too friendly either.
On the other hand, I would like to keep my LinkedIn profile clean and tidy and just accepting all invitations clearly isn’t a good strategy.
I read a complaint on Twitter from someone who tried to connect with someone he had been emailing and Twittering with for months. The person refused to connect because they had never met offline. That was his rule. Being an Internet Entrepreneur I can’t use that one either.
So what rules should I use?
What rules do you use?
Do we need rules or Etiquette?
Who deserves to be in my LinkedIn profile and who should I delete?
Does it matter if you allow people you don’t even know to connect with you?
My temporary strategy will be to only accept people who are real friends, partners and people I have worked or communicated with before.
I am going to refuse other people but ask them why they would like to connect with me so I might be able to add more reasons to connect.
Filed under Business, Innovation, Inspiration, Personal |
13 Responses to “Social Networking Etiquette”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to my Feed!
Powered by
Tja, het is een lastige. Ik krijg ook veel verzoeken van mensen die ik niet ken, vaak met een ‘laten we connecten’ berichtje. Ik wijs die ook altijd af, de waarde van een ‘connectie’ is daarmee namelijk 0.
Ik heb de regel dat ik het gevoel moet hebben dat ik je ken. Goed genoeg om te introduceren? Misschien. Mijn lat ligt denk ik iets lager, maar ik moet wel het gevoel hebben dat ik enige ‘connectie’ met iemand heb. Ik houd het dus lekker subjectief.
Een ander element dat ik trouwens nog wel eens gebruik om te bepalen of iemand een goede connectie van me is, is de vraag: als ik bel en ik zeg: met Bas van de Haterd, weten ze dan wie ik ben? Of beter: als jij belt en je zegt: Bas van de Haterd heeft me aan je doorverwezen, weten ze dan over wie je het hebt? Ja? Dan is het een contact…. voor mij dan.
Well Boris, I guess you’re quite famous ^_^ so I guess you also have your fair share of people who want to connect so it looks better in their friendslist. I’d say if the name doesn’t ring a bell, also not after thinking really hard ;-) why connect?
Just yesterday I got a friendsconnect on facebook which totally didn’t ring a bell, so I wasn’t to eager to connect. Right after it I got a mail where this guy explained he wanted to keep track of me. Wel, even though I haven’t met him, don’t have a clue who he is and won’t recognize the name when he would call, I still think it was a good enough reason. (FYI I wouldn’t have added him if he hadn’t sent me the mail)
So, rules? Do you also use rules in real life? Just do what feels right I guess.
>Simple, but not too friendly either.
Indeed, not too friendly. I don’t understand why he just doesn’t leave those requests pending… that’s what I do (and after a while I remove the requests if I still haven’t got a clue or simply don’t want to connect) ;-) Really, I don’t see any advantage in actively denying requests. I mean, the sender can think “well, maybe he forgot or doesn’t use this network or whatever” which imho is a little friendlier than saying “no, I don’t want to be friends with you because my rule tells me so”.
A great system would be to link to users but determine if you want to give them access to your network or not, show them in your contact list or not and being able to delete them.
LinkedIn is serieus business to me. Hyves is more like a network game. Which player has the most friends? Someone with a high amount of friends will refuse no one, with one reason only, getting more “friends”.
LinkedIn should be a reliable platform with only people connected to eachother that really know eachother.
Oh, how about an emoticon for the relation with each of your contacts? (this is an openidea btw, or does it already exist?) ^_^
Something else, on flickr for instance I still think of it as a feature that I don’t have to do anything with the fact someone added me as a contact or even as a friend. They got what they want and I still have the freedom to decide for myself.
Oh, and again something else, about the situation I just described on facebook, even though I added this person as a friend, I could also give a value to the relationship and choose ‘I don’t even know this person’ :D
Fully agree with Matthijs. I depends on the networking tool.
LI, in my book, should be a clean representation of my professional network.
Twitter on the other hand is much more about finding likeminded people, also on a social/shared interests level. In this case, the barrier to connect is much lower. This is, for me, is also the reason why Twitter is cool. You meet interesting people as if you are standing in a bar.
I share Mathijs Rouwmen’s advice. I would like to respond with my experiance that I had while playing around with Facebook over the weekend. Because some voices are saying that Facebook is a competitor for both Hyves and Linkedin.
“Facebook will soon overtake Linked In, at least in my world. Since I joined, a month ago, I’ve had 38 invitations to connect on Facebook, compared with 17 approaches from Linked In users.” http://valleywag.com/tech/the-.....258429.php
So what to do with you friends? IRL there is a distinction between “FRIENDS” and “PEOPLE” that you know. I want to add everyone that invites me, because I want to have friends. But what they need to do is telling me how we met! (context)
online people can give the URL, offline can give location and time.
Like this: http://www.facebook.com/friend.....k=67109316
Boris, maybe it is time to reorder your address book. Put all sources on one big pile and rank them!
I just love the Happy People photograph.
Perhaps on a certain level we feel we need social rules to defend ourselves when we reject another person’s request for “friendship”?
It is not that we do not wish to be friends, or add such a person to our address book, it is that we cannot.
And perhaps to say “we want to but cannot” (even if only to ourselves) is easier than to say “we can but do not want to”?
Thanks Joran, I like that picture too. Did you click on the photo? It is a lot bigger originally.
It would be nice to add more information/status to the relationship than only ‘We are friends’. Something like ‘We communicate (Offline or Online) once a day/week/month/year/less” would be very helpful.
Yes, I did. How did you get hold of it? It looks like an old photograph scanned in? Any context?
Yes, on the social discussion, more context would be a good idea. Perhaps also 3 levels of friendship e.g. distant friend, close friend, very close friend.
On a similar note, some of my friends have said it would be nice to be able to share photo’s on social networks only to certain selected friends and not to one’s whole social network.
So it seems the social network still has a way to go. And that perhaps… is a good thing.
Why provide levels to one platform? I think it’s okay to handle several platforms.
LinkedIn for businesscontacts, Hyves for friends.
There’s a huge differents between the two contacts on each platform. Merging both platforms will make a huge mess.
For LinkedIn, you know a person or you don’t. You eather want to be linked to another, or you don’t. If you’ve marked a person as a connexion, other people will know that you’ve had contact with the person you’re connected with. The whole idea behind LinkedIn (at least, that’s my theory) is that you can ask your contacts whether a person (that is linked to your contact) is trustable or not.
I think I will go with OpenDictator on this one and also with Matthijs Roumen, twitter is a thing for likeminded people and to find out what their busy with at the moment and is inspiring also in a certain sense. (that’s why I connect with you at twitter, I read your blog and find it interesting to know what your up to next ;) ).
Linkedin is a pure professional social network, with people recomanding you about past work etc. How can somebody do that if you don’t even know the person in real life?
Hyves on the other hand is also just plain fun and not to be taking seriously in any way. So I think you can have different standards for different sorts of networks, and applying them just as you see fit.