I have been busy learning how to use different social networks, listening to conversations between experts in the field, connecting with friends and viewing everything in between. Social media is a part of my online life, as soon as I have launched Firefox, the search bar registers all of my favourite sites. Now I must confess there are two reasons for me being online, one is work related and the other is purely for personal benefit. What I am learning more and more is that the two can merge into one with those initial boundary lines being brought down. So an issue has arisen, how do I continue to create a professional profile without alienating my friends who do not really want to know what I am doing work wise? This challenge has led me to write some of my thoughts on what not to do within social media in order to provide some tips that others may find useful.

The first and most important issue is not paying attention to people when they are connecting with you. Now I have to ensure that I have a presence on numerous social networking sites and must log into those sites every day. If I do not respond to just one message of significance, the person sending the message may never want to speak to me again. An example can be taken from Facebook where most of my friends are members. Now one of my friends sent me a message and I looked at it without feeling the need to answer straight away. A few days later, when I saw my friend in person, they were not pleased that I had been avoiding them. The funny thing was I thought that it was just an online conversation and was not as important as if they phoned me. I thought wrong.

The second turn-off is to try to get into bed with everyone, so to speak. There is a fine line between wanting to connect with people for their expertise and connecting with people just to boost popularity numbers. An example of this can be taken from when I joined Linkedin. There is an option to transport email addresses into the site which enables alerts to be sent to those people who are members on the site. The problem that I found was loads of people who I have emailed did not even know me directly as the email provider will even provide people who have been carbon-copied onto another email. This led to me having to agree never to contact people that I do not know without asking first, very embarrassing.

Thirdly, there is a way to express ones personality online without being phony or unreal. People want to see the real you and not some character that you have dreamt up, you can use Secondlife for that. An example that I would use is taken from my time spent on a raving social network site called dontstayin.com. Now I used to love going out on the weekend to listen to some tunes and dance the night away. The site would allow its members to take pictures and post on the site for others to see what the event was like. Now there were people who were my friends on the site who would upload a different photo of themselves in order to attract attention. However when they were met in real life, you realised that they were lying, which kind of put them in my don’t take serious category.

The next point is directed mainly to people who want to use social media as a marketing strategy. The most important thing to remember is that social media is social. I recently received a mention from a member on twitter which essentially was them trying to get me to look at their website. The first part worked, they had a picture of a blond woman who was smiling, so I clicked onto their profile. Then I saw that they had no followers and were not following anyone else. On searching through their tweets, I noticed that they were just sending out a random message to as many people as possible, obviously hoping to attract people to the site. As soon as I saw what was going on, I did not click through to their site. In social media, it is best to be social then people like myself will want to search further.

My last thought of the day is around blogging. Now I’m learning how to blog like everyone else but thought that it would be useful for others to engage in a debate about what not to do when blogging.

• Create long winded titles
• Write huge essays without explanation
• Copying other peoples content elsewhere
• Not being clear and spouting off
• Not experimenting with other tools like video, audio, pics, etc

My journey is really just starting and with the help of a good team, a clear strategy and direction, we will continue our mission of providing thoughtful arguments for your social needs.