I'm borrowing a page off the Communicatrix blog to lay out how I participate in social networks.
Why? Because we all have a different strategy to how we spend our time and energy to be social and to achieve our goals and since we have a strategy, in the spirit of social, we should make it transparent. [hat tip to Skip Shuda for suggesting it]
I've been getting more than many requests from several people in many networks lately. Requests to friend, requests to tweet, to forward, to bookmark, to stumble, the list goes on.
Being online for the best part of my day makes me very accessible. That I am, of course. I'm open to engaging with reasonable people who take the time to engage with me and reasonable/respectful requests that match my values.
You cannot be expected to know what my settings are on each network. If I don't give you a reference point, you will likely use your own settings as context. It's not fair to you, nor it is to me.
My overall philosophy about life -- and social network participation is:
- be helpful
- be in conversation
- connect ideas and people
Things are changing all the time, so I suspect that as new networks come online and we transition to different kinds of work, the social network participation policy will keep up with those changes. The page will go up on the sidebar, right by the online outposts.
I covered the main networks. For the others, you can refer to my simple philosophy.
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What about you?
Have you thought of publishing a social network policy to communicate how you participate in different networks? Do you have the same settings everywhere? Why/why not?